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16,739,410	Stadium station (Sound Transit)	1,170,757,042	Light rail station in Seattle, Washington	[ "2009 establishments in Washington (state)", "Link light rail stations in Seattle", "Railway stations in the United States opened in 2009", "SoDo, Seattle" ]	Stadium station is a light rail station located in Seattle, Washington. It is situated between the SODO and International District/Chinatown stations on the 1 Line, part of Sound Transit's Link light rail system. The station consists of an at-grade island platform at the intersection of the SODO Busway and South Royal Brougham Way in the SODO neighborhood of Seattle, adjacent to Lumen Field and T-Mobile Park. Stadium station was proposed in 1998 as part of the segment between the Downtown Seattle and Beacon Hill tunnels and subsequently deferred months later. It was reinstated in 2005 and construction of the station was completed in May 2006, several years before Link light rail service began on July 18, 2009. Trains serve the station twenty hours a day on most days; the headway between trains is six minutes during peak periods, with less frequent service at other times. Stadium station is also served by several Sound Transit Express and King County Metro buses that stop on the SODO Busway west of the platform, as well as the Seattle Greyhound station east of the platform. ## Location Stadium station is situated at the intersection of the SODO Busway and Royal Brougham Way, under the ramps of Interstate 90, in the SODO neighborhood of Seattle. The station is adjacent to a King County Metro employee parking garage, which includes a pedestrian bridge over the platform to the Metro Ryerson Base, and the Seattle Greyhound bus station. The area surrounding Stadium station contains a mixture of light industrial zoning, primarily home to the manufacturing and warehousing industry employing over 13,000 workers, with some retail uses. Lumen Field and T-Mobile Park are located one block west of the station on the north and south sides of Royal Brougham Way, respectively. The light rail line is paralleled to the east by a mixed-use bicycle trail called the SODO Trail, which connects Stadium station to SODO station at South Lander Street. The Seattle Department of Transportation plans to extend the trail further south to Spokane Street, connecting it to a bike trail on the Spokane Street Viaduct, serving West Seattle. ## History Stadium station was not part of the initial Link light rail route approved in 1996, but was created as part of "Route C1" added to Central Link (now the 1 Line) by the Sound Transit Board in 1998. The routing included an at-grade section parallel to the SODO Busway and a tunnel under Beacon Hill, with stations at South Royal Brougham Way, South Lander Street and under Beacon Hill. While "Route C1" was selected as the final Central Link route in 1999, the station at South Royal Brougham Way was deferred, except for the construction of the platform and supports required for an infill station. The Sound Transit Board began studying the re-addition of a station at Royal Brougham Way in late 2004 and approved construction of the newly renamed Stadium station on January 13, 2005, using \$3.7 million in surplus funds after bids for the construction of Link Light Rail were lower than budgeted. Construction of Stadium station began with the laying of the first rails for Central Link, between Holgate and Lander streets, in August 2005. The station itself was built by Kiewit Pacific in less than a year, with opening ceremonies for Stadium and SODO stations held on May 30, 2006, celebrating the completion of the first two Central Link stations. Light rail testing on the 1.3-mile-long (2.1 km), at-grade SoDo segment began in March 2007, and ended in February 2008. Regular Link service from Seattle to Tukwila began on July 18, 2009, including the use of its pocket track to store extra trains serving a sellout friendly match between the Seattle Sounders and Chelsea at Qwest Field. The tracks crossing Royal Brougham Way sank by 3 inches (7.6 cm) due to ground settling and caused Link trains to be limited to 5 to 10 miles per hour (8.0 to 16.1 km/h). A track replacement began in August 2023 with trains on the 1 Line suspended for one weekend and single-tracking for several days afterward. ## Station layout Stadium station consists of a single 400-foot-long (120 m), at-grade island platform accessible via an entrance at its north end, 130 feet (40 m) from South Royal Brougham Way. The platform itself has a width of 30 feet (9.1 m) to accommodate event crowds at Lumen Field (formerly CenturyLink Field) and T-Mobile Park (formerly Safeco Field). A pocket track located south of the station was built to store extra trains that are deployed after major sporting events. The station's pictogram is a depiction of the Olympic Torch, a representation of sporting culture. It was created by Christian French as part of the Stellar Connections series and its points represent nearby destinations, including the two stadiums. ## Services Stadium station is part of Sound Transit's 1 Line, which runs from Seattle–Tacoma International Airport through the Rainier Valley, Downtown Seattle, and the University of Washington campus to Northgate. It is the tenth northbound station from Angle Lake and ninth southbound station from Northgate; it is situated between SODO and International District/Chinatown stations. Trains serve Stadium station twenty hours a day on weekdays and Saturdays, from 5:00 am to 1:00 am, and eighteen hours on Sundays, from 6:00 am to 12:00 am; during regular weekday service, trains operate roughly every eight to ten minutes during rush hour and midday operation, respectively, with longer headways of fifteen minutes in the early morning and twenty minutes at night. During weekends, trains arrive at Stadium station every ten minutes during midday hours and every fifteen minutes during mornings and evenings. The station is approximately 29 minutes from SeaTac/Airport station and nine minutes from Westlake station in Downtown Seattle. In 2019, an average of 1,613 passengers boarded Link trains at Stadium station on weekdays. Stadium station is also served by several bus routes on the SODO Busway, which runs parallel to the 1 Line, at a pair of bus stops west of the station platform at Royal Brougham Way. Three Sound Transit Express routes stop at the station on their way to Tacoma, Lakewood, and Gig Harbor. King County Metro operates two all-day routes through the SODO Busway that serve Renton, Tukwila, and Kent. Metro also runs four peak-direction routes through the SODO Busway towards Renton, Fairwood, Federal Way, and Redondo Heights. Several "night owl" buses also stop the station and connect with the first southbound light rail departure of the service day. In addition to regular bus service, Metro also runs the Route 97 Link Shuttle, a shuttle service serving Link stations along surface streets during Link service disruptions.
55,213,787	Survivalcraft	1,167,198,233	Sandbox video game	[ "2011 video games", "Android (operating system) games", "Construction and management simulation games", "IOS games", "Indie games", "Multiplayer and single-player video games", "Open-world video games", "Split-screen multiplayer games", "Survival video games", "Video games using procedural generation", "Video games with cross-platform play", "Windows Phone games", "Windows games" ]	Survivalcraft is a 2011 open sandbox video game developed by Marcin Igor Kalicinski under the brand Candy Rufus Games. Following early test versions, it was released on 16 November 2011 for the Windows Phone, and is also available for Android, iOS, and Microsoft Windows. The game is set on a deserted island in an open world, where the player collects resources and items that can be made into survival tools. The game has six different game modes: Survival, Challenging, Cruel, Harmless, Adventure, and Creative. of which the first four involve the player gathering necessary resources to stay alive. The Creative mode gives the player unlimited items and health. And the Adventure mode is used for quest maps and parkours. Kalicinski was inspired by Minecraft, and originally only worked on the game for fun, with his son as the sole pre-release tester. The game was compared to Minecraft by various reviews, with most reviews stating that the game is either better than or supplements its source of inspiration. The game became one of the most downloaded games for Windows Phone and iPad in 2013 and 2014. The sequel Survivalcraft 2 followed in December 2016, and allows players to create their own blocks. ## Gameplay Survivalcraft is a three-dimensional (3D) sandbox game that is set on a deserted island. The game begins with the player generating an open world, based on parameters such as the average temperature and humidity. After setting up the world, the player character is shown marooned on an island, as the crew on a nearby ship announces they will not return for them. After the dialogue ends, the player is pushed by the necessity to collect resources and items to survive. The player may start by cutting down a tree to obtain timber and, in turn, creating a workbench, which can then be used to create more items and blocks. The items that could be crafted in the workbench, as well as the prerequired items and the methods to craft them, could be seen in the Recipaedia. The player may then use the tools to increase the hunger bar by eating food from hunting down animals, constructing a shelter for a place to sleep and spend the night, or mining to obtain underground resources. If the character does not eat food for a prolonged time, the hunger bar will drop to zero, and the character's health bar would decrease to zero. If the health bar also drops to zero, the character would die. The player also needs to craft clothes to prevent the character from freezing and depleting health bar points. There are six different game modes in the game: Survival, Challenging, Cruel, Harmless, and Creative. In the first four, the game character starts empty-handed, and the player is challenged to stay alive on the island alone and gather necessary resources to craft items and blocks for their survival. The Harmless mode makes surviving easier, with neutral animals that do not attack unless provoked and faster healing time. Challenging is the normal survival mode, with animals attacking once the character gets to a certain distance and a longer and conditional healing time. Cruel's only difference compared to Challenging is that the world is deleted if the player dies. On the other hand, Creative mode equips the player with an infinite amount of every block and items on the game. The character could fly and could not die or experience an injury while playing in this mode. In Survival mode, the player begins with fish in their inventory. The player is also able to go back to where they slept, as well. In Adventure mode, the player is unable to break blocks without using appropriate tools, being usually used for quest maps. ## Development and release The game was singlehandedly developed by programmer Marcin Igor "Kaalus" Kalicinski, who sold his game under the brand Candy Rufus Games. The sole pre-release tester of the game was Kalicinski's son. Kalicinski stated that he made the game after playing and remixing Minecraft's source code. He bought a copy of the game in July 2011 after hearing rumours about it for a long period. After playing the game and modifying the game's source code, he wrote his test code a few days later. Kalicinski stated that his code was initially intended as a "toy project"; he never thought of publishing or selling it due to the sheer amount of Minecraft duplicates that already circulated at that time. Kalicinski created the code in the C# programming language. Kalicinski chose Windows Phone as its starting platform due to the absence of Minecraft and its clones in the platform. He had difficulties overcoming limitations for apps in the Windows Phone, such as the lack of support for shaders and the prohibition of native code. These problems made him almost abandon Survivalcraft, but he tried to run the game on the phone and it reached a rate of 4.5 frames per second on its first try. He tried to improve the game's code and managed to make the game playable. The game was submitted to the Windows Phone Store in mid-November 2011 and was released on 16 November 2011. After its first release, Kalicinski received feedback from players regarding Survivalcraft's features. There was a huge demand by the players to make the game more similar to Minecraft. However, Kalicinski already planned the game to be more focused on the survival aspect. He wanted to make a long-term game with more features that would make the character more susceptible to death, such as cold, hunger, thirst, natural disasters, and increasingly dangerous enemies. Nevertheless, the feedback refocused him on improving the game's basic features instead of implementing his planned new features. Following several updates, the game was released for Android devices in October 2012, and later for Microsoft Windows. An update for the game was released shortly afterwards in July 2013, with the addition of boats, farming, and new animals. The update also changed the terrain generation method, allowing islands to be found in the middle of the ocean. Another update in November 2013 added electronic functionalities in the game, allowing player to create complex visual displays. A month after the November 2013 update, the game was released for iOS devices. Kalicinski introduced a Christmas-themed update immediately after the iOS release, which added Christmas trees and reindeer into the game. Other major changes for this update were the ability of players to alter the temperature and humidity of worlds, a new set of bows and arrows, electric shooting target, iron fences, and tigers. Kalicinski supplemented the game with another update in May 2014, which added various new weapons into the game and custom skins for players. Kalicinski implemented several alterations regarding the audio, user interface, and explosives in this update. The 30th and last update of Survivalcraft were released in March 2016. The update added many new items and blocks into the game, such as copper items, stairs, and coloured LEDs. Several tweaks on the area of forest and caves were also conducted in its final update. ### Survivalcraft 2 Survivalcraft 2 is a sequel to the original game which was released in December 2016. The main feature that separates Survivalcraft 2 from its predecessor is the existence of "furnitures", a system that allows players to make their own block by using an in-game tool called an iron hammer. An update for Survivalcraft 2 added multiplayer—a long-awaited feature—into the game. The multiplayer system works by splitting the screen for 2-4 players, allowing up to 4 players to use the same device to play in the same world. ## Reception ### Sales and accolades Survivalcraft fared well on Windows Phone and iPad, with the game becoming the 15th most popular game and the 7th most popular game in the Action & Adventure section a week following its first release. After the game was released on iPad, the game became one of the two top 50 grossing games in 2013 that has no in-game purchases. The next year, the game became the 5th most downloaded paid app on iPad. The game was later named by Touch Arcade as one of the best iPhone and iPad games of 2013 and the 100 Best Mobile Games of 2016. ### Critical response The game received "mixed or average reviews" based on four critic reviews, according to review aggregator Metacritic. The game received polarized reviews by video game critics, though most opined that the game is either better than or supplements its source of inspiration. Jared Nelson of mobile game news site Touch Arcade argued that the game is superior to its source of inspiration, Minecraft, in every aspect. He describes the game as giving him a "sense of adventure". He stated that the game's infinite world area, cave generation system, and world sharing—which did not exist in Minecraft at that time—made the game better than its source of inspiration. Nelson also praised the fact that that game is made by a single person, as opposed to the "unlimited money and resources" that the developers of Minecraft had. A similar review was delivered by Slide to Play reviewer Nadia Oxford, who claimed that those who considered Survivalcraft "as a mere Minecraft clone" were shallow. However, Oxford pointed out that the game's block placement is difficult for those who have not mastered Minecraft. She described the game as a reminder of how human ancestors survived in the past and considered that the game is better suited for "Minecraft veterans". 148Apps reviewer Rob Rich compares features in Survivalcraft that were or were not available in Minecraft. Rich praised the game's variety of animals and the in-game panorama. Nonetheless, he pointed the absence of things that already existed in Minecraft, such as armour, farming, and multiplayer. Rich also complained about the minuscule size of the movement stick. Deanu Haratinu from Urban Digital also commented on the movement stick, stating that it might cause some complications to users who never played a 3D game using this feature. Bewi from iPhone Soft reviewed the game's audio and described it as "very fair", noting the lack of melody and an emphasis on classic and realistic sound effects. He expressed the game as having a beneficial in-game guide with the existence of Recipaedia that allows players to search every item or block that existed in the game as well as how to make it. A less favourable review was delivered by Mike Rose from Gamezebo. He described the game as a carbon copy of Minecraft and as an insult to the players and developers of Minecraft. Although he stated that Survivalcraft differs from Minecraft due to the wildlife as its focus and the community tab that allows players to see each other's world and texture, he argued that Survivalcraft is missing many features that Minecraft already had. He then recommended readers not to bother with Survivalcraft and concluded that the game's only advantage was as "a perfectly playable Minecraft clone". ## Translations
51,328,204	Gebeachan	1,134,524,537	Tenth-century King of the Isles	[ "10th-century rulers of the Kingdom of the Isles", "937 deaths", "Monarchs killed in action", "Norse-Gaels", "Rulers of the Kingdom of the Isles", "Vikings killed in battle" ]	Gebeachan (died 937), also known as Gébennach, and Gebechán, was a tenth-century King of the Isles. He seems to have been a subordinate to Amlaíb mac Gofraid, King of Dublin, and is recorded to have fought and died at the Battle of Brunanburh in 937. ## Career Gebeachan was slain in 937 at the Battle of Brunanburh, a remarkably bloody affair fought by Æðelstan, King of the English on one side, and Amlaíb mac Gofraid, King of Dublin, Custantín mac Áeda, King of Alba, and Owain ap Dyfnwal, King of Strathclyde on the other. According to a poem preserved by the ninth to twelfth-century Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Æðelstan's opponents suffered greatly, with five kings, seven earls, and "countless of the raiding-army of Seamen and Scots" amongst their dead. As for Gebeachan, his fall in this conflict is attested by a single source, a seventeenth-century translation of the now lost Annals of Clonmacnoise. The original translator of this source, Conall Mac Eochagáin, is known to have incorporated his own comments and material into his translation. Since the original version no longer exists, it is uncertain what information is accurately interpreted and what originates from Mac Eochagáin himself. Nevertheless, this source styles Gebeachan "king of the Islands", a royal title that appears to be a translated form of the Gaelic rí Innse Gall, and is otherwise first recorded in 989. "Gebeachan", the name that the Annals of Clonmacnoise ascribes to him, seems to represent either the Gaelic Gebechán, Giblechán, or Gébennach (the latter two attested by the fifteenth- to sixteenth-century Annals of Ulster in 890 and 973 respectively). Another possibility is that the name is derived from gebech, a word for a type of craftsman. Alternately, Gebeachan's name could be derived from a nickname referring to fetters or bondages. Whatever the case, the name is clearly Gaelic, which indicates that Gebeachan was unlikely to have been from Orkney, and more probably centred in the southern Hebrides. There is reason to suspect that Gebeachan may have been a subordinate of Amlaíb, a monarch styled "king of the Irish and the many islands" by the twelfth-century Chronicon ex chronicis. If so, Gebeachan's obituary would be evidence of Uí Ímair authority in the Isles in the 930s and 940s. In fact, Gebeachan's attested title suggests that he was one of the five reguli, noted by the Chronicon ex chronicis, who are stated to have fallen supporting Amlaíb at Brunanburh. Amlaíb himself died in 941. In an entry following his death, the twelfth-century Chronicon Scotorum records that Muirchertach mac Néill, King of Ailech raided "the Isles of Alba" in an annal-entry that seems to refer to the southern Hebrides. This notice may have bearing on Gebeachan's apparent cooperation with Amlaíb, and appears to show that opponents of the Uí Ímair seized the initiative on his death. Also in 941, the seventeenth-century Annals of the Four Masters reports that a chieftain named Áed Albanach was slain amongst a vast host of Dublin Vikings by the invading forces of Amargein mac Cináeda, overking of Uí Failge. The fact that Áed bore a Gaelic personal name, died with the Dubliners, and bore an epithet referring to a Scotsman, could be evidence that he was a successor of Gebeachan. Further evidence of this may be the record of Mór, a woman attested by the twelfth-century pseudo-historical Caithréim Chellacháin Chaisil, which identifies her as a daughter of a certain Áed mac Echach, and describes her as the daughter of a King of the Hebrides.
19,491,752	2008 attacks on Christians in southern Karnataka	1,171,534,246	Attacks directed against Christian churches	[ "2000s in Karnataka", "2008 crimes in India", "2008 in Christianity", "Anti-Christian sentiment in India", "Articles containing video clips", "Attacks on churches in Asia", "Crime in Karnataka", "Hate crimes", "Hinduism-motivated violence in India", "History of Mangalore", "October 2008 events in India", "Persecution by Hindus", "Persecution of Christians", "Religiously motivated violence in India", "Sectarian violence", "September 2008 events in India", "Violence against Christians in India" ]	The 2008 attacks on Christians in southern Karnataka refer to the wave of attacks directed against Christian churches and prayer halls in the Indian city of Mangalore and the surrounding area of southern Karnataka in September and October 2008 by Hindu nationalist organisations, Bajrang Dal and the Sri Ram Sena. The attacks were widely perceived by Christians in southern Karnataka to be punishment from right-wing Hindu nationalist organisations because they had been outspoken about 2008 anti-Christian attacks in Orissa, and also because the New Life Fellowship Trust (NLFT), a non-denominational Christian Church, was alleged by Bajrang Dal to be responsible for forced conversions of Hindus to Christianity. Several isolated incidents against Christians were reported from 17 August onwards, and on 29 August some 45,000 institutions across India participated in a "prayer for peace and communal harmony" in response to the ongoing anti-Christian violence in Orissa. St Aloysius College (Mangalore) and some other 2000 Christian schools in Karnataka went on strike for varying periods between 29 August and the 5 September prior to the attacks, protesting against the attacks in Orissa, in defiance of the orders of the government who stated that it was to be a regular work day. This led to government denouncement of the Christian institutions in the state for disobeying orders and led to a Bajrang Dal demonstration outside the St Aloysius College, two weeks prior to the main attacks. The attacks began on 14 September, when a group of youths from the Bajrang Dal went inside the chapel of Adoration Monastery of the Sisters of St-Clare near the Milagres Church in Hampankatta and desecrated it. Some 20 churches or prayer halls, including Catholic and Protestant churches and temples belonging to the Jehovah’s Witnesses and other evangelical sects, and colleges were damaged in towns and villages in the Mangalore taluk and other parts of Dakshina Kannada district, Udupi district and Chikkamagaluru district. A few Christian institutions were later attacked in Bangalore and Kasaragod district. Out of frustration and anger, the Christian community responded to the attacks within hours and began protesting. In Karkala, the Catholics of Karkala deanery staged a protest on 15 September and organised a 3 kilometre silent protest march. The protestors blocked arterial city roads in their masses, especially in places such as Hampankatta, Kulshekar, Bejai, Derebail and Thokottu and rang bells in almost all the churches of Mangalore, calling parishioners to their churches. The protests led to strong police suppression with lathi charges and tear gas, making around 150 arrests and injuring 30 to 40 people. Violence broke out at the Adoration monastery as police began caning the protestors with sticks and bursting teargas shells, in return the protesters pelted stones at police, and the police pelted the stones back at them. In another place the police were pelted with stones for their failure to arrest the perpetrators of the attacks. Between 15 September and 10 October, a new wave of anti-minority attacks began against Christian communities in the Indian states of Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, New Delhi, Punjab, Tamil Nadu and Uttarakhand, as well as Muslim communities in Gujarat and Maharashtra. The September 2008 attacks had political significance, given that the ruling BJP Karnataka state government, led by BS Yeddyurappa, were also accused of involvement and backing the anti-Christian campaigns and that the police were reported to have had knowledge of the imminent attacks but failed to prevent them. The police were criticised for their reaction to the protests and a report by a committee of human rights activists set up in the aftermath to examine the causes of the attacks claimed that they had used the event as a pretext to assault the community, rather than defend it. Justice B. K. Somasekhara of Karnataka, however, concluded that the police and government helped maintain order and were not responsible for the attacks. In response to the alleged forcible conversions of involvement, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) gave a three-month deadline for New Life Fellowship Trust (NLFT) to stop all conversion activities in Mangalore. The Roman Catholic Diocese of Mangalore declared that it would distance itself from the New Life Fellowship Trust. In February 2011, retired Justice MF Saldanha of the Bombay High Court, was outspoken and published a report in which he described the attacks as "state-sponsored terrorism", and that the attacks were part of "communal forces" at work attacking Christian institutions on the coastal belt of India. The report and continued denial by the state government of being implicated in the attacks led to more than 100,000 Christians representing some 45 Christian denominations and secular organisations leading a silent march in Mangalore on 21 February. Following the publications of the reports and subsequent protests, the government of Karnataka announced that it would drop 338 cases against Christians who had protested in the attack, and in December 2011 a further 23 cases against Christians were dropped. ## Background and cause Mangalore has long been a major Christian centre in India. In 1526, under the viceroyship of Lopo Vaz de Sampaio, the Portuguese took possession of Mangalore and Christianity began to spread via their missionaries. Many Christians migrated to South Canara from Goa. The Mangalorean Catholics were persecuted by Tipu Sultan during his reign between 1782 and 1799 and many were forcibly converted to Sunni Islam. On 24 February 1784, Tipu rounded up 60,000 to 80,000 Mangalorean Catholics and transported them to Seringapatam. They were held there in captivity for 15 years, until the British defeated the Mysoreans at the Battle of Seringapatam on 4 May 1799, with Tipu being killed in action during the battle. Only 15,000–20,000 of those Catholics taken captive in 1784 survived. In the latter half of the 19th century, Protestant missionaries began working in Mangalore and surrounding communities, and the Vicariate of Mangalore was established in 1853. Mangalore, noted for its many churches and the strong representation of Catholics, was at one time known as the "Rome of the East". However it is also noted as a pilgrimage centre for Hindus, given its numerous Hindu temples and shrines. Between 1991 and 2011, the percentage of Christians living in India reportedly dropped from 2.7 per cent to 2.2 per cent, a declining figure which has been linked to ongoing difficulties facing Christians in a predominantly Hindu nation. In 2008, an estimated 320,300 Christians were living in the Dakshina Kannada district. Several explanations of the cause of the September 2008 attacks have been postulated. Many Christians believe that the attacks were a direct response from right-wing Hindu organisations who were targeting the people of Mangalore and the surrounding area because they had been outspoken about persecution of Christians in Orissa. St. Aloysius College, a Jesuit institution in Mangalore, and some other 2000 Christian schools in Karnataka, went on strike for varying periods between 29 August and 5 September prior to the attacks, protesting against anti-Christian persecution in Orissa, contrary to the orders of the government who stated that they were to be regular work days. Primary and secondary education minister Vishweshwar Hegde Kageri, responding to the shutting down of the Christian educational institutions in Karnataka, had directed the public education department to issue show-cause notices to schools that had objected to the violence against Christians in Orissa. A Christian institution in Shimoga had reportedly received a notice from the education ministry of Karnataka during the strike saying, "The VHP and Bajrang Dal have conducted a protest against the closure of schools and criticised your action. They have submitted letters requesting action against you for this. In this context, you are asked to show cause as to why action should not be initiated against you for using religion as an excuse to announce a holiday and as to why permission to run your institution should not be withdrawn." State Home Minister V. S. Acharya explained the reason for the notices, "All Christian institutions are grant-in-aid institutions of the government and they should have had the courtesy to inform us before declaring a holiday. Their decision to act unilaterally cannot be tolerated." The education minister was backed by the State President D. V. Sadananda Gowda, who issued a statement in which he stated that Christian education institutions had committed a crime by declaring holiday without obtaining the state government's permission. However, the Indian National Congress (INC) condemned Hegde's statement to take action against Christian education institutions and the leader of the Opposition in the Legislative Assembly, Mallikarjun Kharge, stated that "The minister's statement is not proper. It may lead to law and order problem in the State." Bajrang Dal proponents protested with banners outside the St. Aloysius College gates and across Mangalore on Saturday 31 August, the day after the college had closed for a holiday, chanting slogans such as, "Jai Mata Di" (Hail to the Mother) and "Bharat Mata ki jai" (Hail Mother India). The closure of the schools in Mangalore were not alone; some 45,000 institutions across India had participated on 29 August in a "prayer for peace and communal harmony" in response to the events in Orissa. Another explanation is that the attacks were an angry response by Bajrang Dal over the allegations that the New Life Fellowship Trust were indulging in forceful religious conversion of Hindus and distribution of vulgar literature slandering Hindu gods and goddesses. Bajrang Dal claimed that nearly 15,000 people had been forced to adopt Christianity as their religion in Mangalore alone in the past year after monitoring the situation. In the book Satyadarshini, written by Andhra Pradesh Pastor Paravastu Suryanarayana Rao, it was also reported that the New Life Fellowship Trust had denigrated and defamed Hindu gods, causing anger amongst the Bajrang Dal. Hindu activists also alleged that excerpts from Rao's book had been published in pamphlets to spread its influence. Mahila Parishat leader Asha Jagadish believed that the attacks were solely motivated by religious conversion by New Life and claimed that her neighbour was forcefully converted into Christianity to marry a Christian girl, further stating, "The Holy Saint School in Bangalore, where I studied up to fifth standard, did not allow me to wear kumkum or bangles according to Hindu tradition." Fr. Francis Serrao, rector of St. Aloysius College, stated that he believed the attacks were not due to conversion, but was rather a reflection of the struggle between Christianity and Brahmanism and theorised that Christian ideology and Brahmin ideology can never coexist as "Christianity propagates love and Brahmanism propagates hate." ## Attacks Incidences of violence against Christians had been reported during the month prior to the main attacks. On 17 August 2008, demonstrators performed a dharna (hunger strike) outside the DHM church in Jayanagar, Davangere and again on 24 August at Nitya Jeeva Devalaya church, burning Christian literature in both events. No complaints or arrests were made in either of the events. Three days later, on 27 August, a Christian prayer hall and its pastor in Uchangidurga, Harpanahalli taluk of the Davanagere district, were attacked, leading to eight arrests. Then on 7 September, a group of about 300 individuals attacked the Yesu Kripalaya Church in Bada, Davangere district, vandalising it and burning the Bibles. Ten people were arrested at the scene in Bada. The multiple premeditated attacks started on 14 September 2008, with some 20 churches attacked in Karnataka; of which 14 were attacked within one hour. These included Catholic and Protestant churches as well as temples belonging to the Jehovah's Witnesses and the New Life Fellowship Trust. The attacks began when a group of some 15 youths on motorbikes from the Bajrang Dal, a Hindu nationalist organisation which aims to achieve the "reversing of the invasions by Muslim conquerors and British imperialism", arrived at the chapel of Adoration Monastery of the Sisters of St-Clare in Hampankatta around 10.15 am, shouting a pro-Bajrang Dal slogan. They entered the monastery and attacked it with lathis, desecrating the tabernacle and the Eucharist, the 15 feet (5 m) high golden coloured monstrance (regarded by the nuns as the most sacred object in the church), a crucifix, the oil lamps, the vases on the altar, and a few statues of saints. A couple praying in the chapel at the time were also beaten by the intruders. Two nuns were also reportedly injured. Around the same time, a group of 30 to 35 people on motorbikes wearing masks attacked the empty Church of South India building at Kodaikal, armed with iron pipes, cricket stumps and sticks, shouting pro-Bajrang Dal slogans. Aside from damage to the buildings, windows and religious iconography, furniture, Bibles, and other Christian literature were damaged in various churches. A gang of about 30 youths had made an attempt to ransack a prayer hall of the New Life Fellowship Trust, but their efforts were thwarted by the police. Around 8.30 pm on 14 September, miscreants pelted stones at the chapel of Padua Pre-university College, a Christian college located at Nanthoor, badly damaging its windows. Around 9.30 pm, miscreants badly damaged a statue located in front of Carmelites' house in Katkere, near Koteshwar. The Church of St. Sebastian in Permannur was badly damaged, including its windows and furniture. The Holy Cross Church at Kulshekar and St. Joseph, The Worker Church at Vamanjoor were also damaged. Police reports confirmed that Our Lady's Grotto at Vijayamarie Technical Institute and properties at the Infant Jesus Higher Primary School and Mary Hill Convent were also damaged by the miscreants on the night of 14 September. K. A. Abraham, pastor of Divine Deliverance Prayer Centre at Neerugadde in Shiroor, claimed that over 25 miscreants had attacked his prayer hall, and they were reported to have smashed the window panes, ransacked equipment and set a motorcycle and car on fire. Later, in the early hours of 15 September, individuals broke into the St. George Church belonging to the Syro Malabar Catholic Rite of the Belthangady Diocese in Ujire, Dakshina Kannada district, 70 km from Mangalore and burned the Bible, the carpet, prayer books and desecrated holy icons. Miscreants also ransacked the St. Thomas Church in Gorigandi in Chikkamagaluru district. Seven or eight masked men arriving on scooters were reported to have desecrated the large statue of St. Antony at St. Ann's Friary on Jail Road in Bejai, throwing flower pots to smash its glass covering. The official report into the attacks later claimed that the Bajrang Dal were the likely suspects for the attacks on churches in Chikkamagaluru district, including the Christian Believers' Prayer Hall, Jagadeshwara Church in Mudigere and Carmel Mathe Devalaya in Kudremukh, and had also harassed people gathered at Kapitanio High School in Mangalore. Several people also reportedly invaded the house and prayer meeting of a neo-convert in Singatagere of Kadur taluk. Other areas affected by the attacks include Kalkanady, Falnir, Madyanthar, Makodu, Singatagere, Jayapura, Shaktinagar, Thokottu, Bantwal, Belthangady, Udupi, Kulur, Kundapura, Karkala, Koppa, Balehanoor and Moodbidri. Individuals were also targeted during the event; in Kulur, two men and two children were attacked by a Hindu mob near Gurupur Bridge while on their way to their hometown in a private car, and in Kalladka, the Souza Textile owner and his wife were attacked by unidentified people. Two separate stabbing incidents were also reported in Kalladka, and the two men affected were admitted to hospital with serious injuries. On 16 September, a 100-year-old statue of Mary at the St. Mary's Church in Kolar was damaged by vandals, St. George Church in Ernody was desecrated and attempted to be burned by vandals, and over 20 vandals desecrated the Rima Worship Centre at Adyar. On 18 September, vandals shattered the glass encasing of the Mother Mary statue of the Presentation Girls School in Dharwad and on 19 September, a gang of vandals on motorbikes pelted stones at the St. Xavier's Church in Padu Kody in Mangalore taluk and destroyed the statues. On 21 September, a further four attacks were reported, including Brethren Christa Aaradhanalaya prayer hall near Nellihudikeri in Kodagu district, the Believers' Church in Yedapadavu, Mangalore taluk, and two churches in Bangalore; St. James Church in Mariyannapalya near Hebbal and Lumbini Gardens, which had two gold plated crowns and cash from the offering box stolen and the main sacrament vandalised; and the Holy Church in the Name of Jesus at Rajarajeshwarinagar had the casing around the Infant Jesus smashed and the statue damaged. In Banaswadi, a group were reported to have pelted stones at a church and fled. A Catholic school was also attacked in Kasaragod district in Kerala. Between 15 September and 10 October, Hindu nationalists directed a wave of attacks targeting Christian communities in Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, New Delhi, Punjab, Tamil Nadu and Uttarakhand, and Muslim communities in Gujarat and Maharashtra. ### Christian protests In response to the attacks in areas such as Hampankatta, Shaktinagar, Vamanjoor, Thokottu and Bantwal, the Christian community began protesting. The protestors blocked arterial city roads in their masses, especially in places such as Hampankatta, Kulshekar, Bejai, Derebail and Thokottu and rang bells in almost all the churches of the city, calling parishioners to their churches. In Hampankatta, over 4,000 Christians united to defend the Milagres Church and protest. Violence broke out at the Adoration monastery as police began caning the protestors with sticks and bursting teargas shells to disperse them, while they pelted stones at police vans and police. The police were reported to have caused further damage to the Adoration monastery by throwing back stones and glass bottles to restrain the protestors. Union Minister of Labour and Employment Oscar Fernandes and MLA B. Ramanath Rai arrived at the Hampankatta scene at 6 pm. In Karkala, the Catholics of Karkala deanery staged a protest on 15 September condemning the attacks and the desecration of the crucifix and sacrament at Adoration Monastery in particular and organised a 3 kilometre silent protest march from the bus stand to the taluk headquarters and submitted a memorandum to tehsildar Laxman Singh. The protests involved over 2,500 people and among those present were incumbent parish priest John Barboza, Valerian Fernandes, Ajekar parish priest Valerian Fernandes, Attur parish priest Arthur Pereira, Miyar parish priest Ronald Miranda, Paschal Menezes, Parappady parish priest Alex Aranha, Michael D'Silva, Hirgan parish priest Michael Lobo, Kanajar parish priest Alwyn D'Cunha and many other priests and nuns in the area. The Christian protestors also clashed with police at St. Sebastian Church in the Permannur area of Ullal on the outskirts of Mangalore, shouting slogans and throwing stones at the police for their failure to arrest the perpetrators of the attacks. The police arrested several Christians after firing into the air and being involved in a lathi charge. Four people of pro-Hindu organisations were reportedly injured at Kalladka and Attavar on the outskirts of the Mangalore when their vehicles were attacked and were pelted with stones by a mob. Ten people, including one of the Sri Ram Sena activists, were reportedly stabbed during the protests and according to the police, the situation was used by some to settle personal scores and not all stabbing incidents were related to attack on churches and the subsequent violence in the city. The Sri Ram Sena protested against the stabbing of one of their activists by organising a shutdown of educational institutions and shops. The district administration responded by declaring a holiday for all educational institutions in Mangalore taluk, and extended prohibitory orders under the Section 144 Criminal Procedure Code for two more days in the wake of the attacks and protests as a precaution. Over 25 Christians were initially arrested by the police during the Adoration incident, in comparison to seven young members of the Bajrang Dal who had initiated the attacks. Chief Minister B. S. Yeddyurappa later stated in a press conference that a total of 153 people had been arrested during the attacks and resultant protests within a two-day period and that some had been charged with looting, arson and rioting, saying that they would be "punished in accordance with the provisions of the law under they were charged." The BBC reported that over 170 people had been arrested during the events. However, Superintendent of Police in Mangalore, N. Satheesh Kumar, claimed to have made just 89 arrests in total. Four policemen, half a dozen people and journalist Anil Jogi were reportedly injured in the Adoration incident, and three police vehicles damaged. The police stated that over 30 people were injured and eight police vehicles had been damaged in the overall attacks, and that nearly 40 people and 20 police were injured in the attacks in total. Several of the injured were taken to Father Muller Medical College and Wenlock District Hospital. Although three churches were attacked in neighbouring Udupi district, it remained peaceful during the aftermath. Many congregations gathered in their churches upon hearing news of the attacks, volunteering to spend the night there to protect them from further attacks. The local Catholic leaders demanded a peaceful bandh on 15 September in and around the city of Mangalore, and as a response Catholic traders and transport owners closed their shops and stopped their vehicles. A memorandum was submitted to the district council at 10.30 am, seeking protection for the lives and property of Christians. Prayers were to be held in all the 48 churches of the district on Wednesday, 17 September. On 6 October 2008, some 10,000 people from civil society and religious organisations organised a march to protest against the anti-Christian perpetrators of the attacks. ### Reports of state and police misconduct The Christian community of Mangalore accused the police of doing nothing to prevent attacks by Hindu radicals. Mangalore Police Superintendent N. Satheesh Kumar himself admitted that the police did have information that pro-Hindu organisations were planning to attack Christian places of worship in the district, but failed to do anything about it. The Christian community accused the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government under B. S. Yeddyurappa of involvement in the attacks and backing the anti-Christian campaigns. In response to the report that the police had information, Fr. Henry Sequeira, chancellor of the Mangalore Diocese said, "If the police knew about this in advance and still could not prevent the attacks, then we have no hope." However, Superintendent Kumar had made security arrangements near the New Life Prayer Centre in Kankanady and had successfully barred the miscreants from entering and vandalising the centre at that particular location, leading to a violent conflict with the police. The police were also criticised by Christians for using excessive force in suppressing the protests and aggressively subduing Christian protesters whilst failing to punish the offending Hindu nationalist perpetrators; photographs and video footage has emerged of the beating of some of the protestors with canes. Caning by the police was also reported at Panemangalore and Farangipet. Phelix D'Souza, a resident of Permannur, alleged that the police took him into custody and tortured him and opened a baseless case against him, sending him to jail for 11 days. Lance Rego, a Mangalore resident, claimed that "many of the police personnel who entered the premises of Holy Cross Church at Kulshekar were wearing helmets usually worn by two-wheeler drivers and not the ones meant for police personnel. Hence, I wonder whether they were police personnel or cadres of the Bajrang Dal." Another resident, Marcel Henry Ferao, alleged that "prohibitory orders were imposed on those who were inside the church compound and not on the Bajrang Dal cadres who were outside the church compound and were pelting stones". Dinal Saldanha of Kulshekar alleged that the police used tear-gas shells which were past their expiry date on the premises, and that exposure to the gas resulted in problems with her eyesight. Many Catholic women reported incidents of police violence to the Deputy Commissioner M. Maheshwar Rao and other government officials, revealing their bruises, and demanding that action be taken against them. Girija Vyas, President of the National Commission for Women (NCW), met with the affected women of Mangalore and visited various hospitals, schools and parishes in the area, and expressed concern at the way in which the police had handled the event. Two police constables, Nandakumar and Shivaram, were suspended following a stone throwing incident within Siddapura police jurisdiction, in which windows of a church had been smashed. Chief Minister of State Yeddyurappa stated that senior civil and police officials of the districts would be held responsible if attacks on churches and prayer halls occurred in areas under their jurisdiction, further stating: "Strict action will be taken against you [the police] without fear or favour". In Dakshina Kanada district, community members reported that the administration had attempted to have Superintendent of Police N. Satish Kumar transferred. However, the official report into the attacks initiated by the government, released on January 2011, contradicted this and stated "the impression and allegations that the top police officers and the district administration had colluded with the attackers in attacking the churches or places of worship has no merit. The concerned police in all districts did their best and have been successful in nabbing most of such miscreants and large number of charge-sheets have been filed in various courts which have to finally adjudicate their identity." Mahendra Kumar, the former state convener of the Bajrang Dal, claimed that he was incarcerated for 42 days in Mangalore before being released on conditional bail by Karnataka High Court Justice Ashok B. Hinchigeri on 25 October 2008, and was used as a scapegoat by the BJP regime to "save the government from further embarrassment after the church attacks and on instructions from the Sangh Parivar leaders. The police had originally protested against his being released on bail, a week after the attacks. Kumar stated that the BJP government in permitting the attacks had "fallen low on values and is engrossed in corruption." ## Reactions ### Political response Prime Minister Manmohan Singh spoke to Karnataka Governor Rameshwar Thakur and Chief Minister B. S. Yeddyurappa by phone from his Delhi residence in the aftermath of the attacks on churches and Christians, and expressed shock at the attacks. He directed the chief minister to take immediate steps to provide ample protection to religious institutions and maintain communal harmony. The Udupi district Congress committee submitted a memorandum to Deputy Commissioner P. Hemalatha, demanding that the state government initiate legal action and punish the culprits of the attacks. The Congress party opposition leader Mallikarjun Kharge said, "The BJP is responsible for the attacks. It is creating social disharmony" further adding that they were "actively inciting further violence" against Christians in the state. Special Home Secretary M. L. Kumawat visited some of the areas affected by the attacks and said that the state government "needs to do more and arrest all those responsible for the attacks." Yeddyurappa strongly denied any involvement of his government in the attacks, but admitted that the police were to blame for not taking precautionary measures, describing it as a "dereliction of duty". He believed the attacks were a response from "some vested interest trying to tarnish the secular image of his government". He said at the press conference, "My government is committed to maintaining peace and harmony in the state; law and order has been top priority by my government.... Nobody is above law, irrespective of caste and creed the culprits will be punished". The state government ensured that special security was given to important places of worship throughout the state in the aftermath of the attacks and Yeddyurappa set up a corps of detectives to investigate. He promised the Christian community leaders that all churches and shrines vandalised in the districts of Dakshina Kannada, Udupi, and Chikkamagaluru during the attacks would be restored and paid a visit to all of the areas affected by communal riots and attacks. Some politicians such as former Prime Minister and Janata Dal (Secular) (JDS) national president H.D. Deve Gowda and M. P. Prakash also visited the Christian institutions in the aftermath. In February 2010, Yeddyurappa allocated ₹500 millions for Christian development projects in Karnataka in his state budget, the first time he had ever done so. The Home Ministry advised the Karnataka government to do all it could in its power to prevent the recurrence of the attacks and to restore faith in the authorities in the region, asking for them to strongly suppress violence and vandalism and to punish the offenders. Senior BJP leader L. K. Advani, during his two-day visit to Assam and Meghalaya, denounced the attacks in Orissa and Karnataka, saying," I strongly condemn these acts of violence and vandalism. The law must take its course and the culprits must be brought to justice." Former defence minister George Fernandes wrote to Yeddyurappa urging him to restore peace and challenging radicals to prove alleged conversions. Deve Gowda wrote a letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh asking for him to impose a "blanket ban" on the Bajrang Dal and Sri Ram Sena in the wake of the attacks, remarking that it "would send a categorical message across the world that secular India will not tolerate fascism, fanaticism and fundamentalism of any colour or kind." He described the attacks as nothing but "state sponsored rowdism", and accused the Karnataka government of trying to turn the state into a "Hindutva laboratory". ### Religious response The Bishop of Mangalore Diocese Aloysius Paul D'Souza stated that Christians were "deeply hurt" over the desecration of the Holy Cross and Sacred Sacrament in the Adoration monastery. The Archbishop of Bangalore Archdiocese, Bernard Moras, who met with Yeddyurappa in the aftermath of the attacks said, "I want to tell you, Mr. Yeddyurappa we are wounded!" Fr. William Menezes, the public relations officer of the Mangalore Diocese, said: "After consulting various leaders and based on the assurance given by Chief Minister B. S. Yeddyurappa, district in-charge Minister J. Krishna Palemar, the police and district administration, we hereby appeal to our community to stop agitation immediately to maintain peace." Fr. Prashant Madtha, former principal of St. Aloysius College said in response to the attacks and resultant protests, "The retaliation from the Christian community you saw was happening for the very first time in the history of the state. It was not the correct response, I condemn it, but then our youth have started imitating the enemy. There is a lot of fear. We don't know when the stones will rain on our roofs. We are even scared to talk." Fr. Joseph Valiaparambil, Bishop of Belthangady, also said that Christian community of Belthangady was deeply hurt and shocked at the attacks, saying that "We strongly condemn the act. We are not violent and do not believe in violence. We respect the administration and the law of the country. We respect all religions. We, the Christian minority community, need protection from kinds of anti-social, anti-religious activities". The community leaders in a press conference also appealed internationally, stating "we want to bring to the notice of the world and human right commissions and authorities in Canada to use their diplomatic channels about the total collapse of law and order in Mangalore and other parts of India, and the failure of the state to protect the lives of the clergy and the minority community". Joseph Dias, General Secretary of the Mumbai-based Catholic Secular Forum (CSF), visited most of the churches attacked in Karnataka during the event and said: > "The vested political and economic interests are hitting back with vengeance. Christians are sitting ducks, where no or negligible retaliation expected. The Church works in areas, where even the government dares not to go because it is not profitable. The Church's education, healthcare and social services in these backward areas has empowered the weak, poor and deprived vested interests of vote banks and cheap labour. The emancipation through education, healthcare, awareness of alternatives and provision of opportunities have set the oppressed classes free from the clutches of the upper caste or rich Hindus and slavery of their political masters. These interests are therefore hitting back at the Christians to maintain their hold on those, whom they have been exploiting since ages... We condemn those indulging in conversion by force or inducement. Catholics do not accept a conversion, unless it comes from the heart. But the saffron brigade raises this bogey, since in believes in Geobbels's (Nazi Propaganda Chief Joseph Goebbels) [sic] principle of repeating a lie umpteen times, so that it will stick. Another ploy is to divide us into Catholics and Protestants, so that they can divide and rule. This makes it easy for Hindutva radicals to take the remaining Christian population. Those who criticise groups that convert by inducement, must realise that an individual, who converts, will do so only if he finds his previous religion with limitations and Christianity a better faith." Indian Christian expatriates in the Middle East united to condemn the attacks. In Kuwait City, Indian Catholics met in Kuwait Cathedral under Reverend Fr. Melwyn D'Cunha on 15 September to voice their support to the Catholic community in Mangalore. They held a special "Prayer Service for Peace & Solidarity" on 18 September at the Cathedral auditorium. In Doha, Qatar, advisory and executive committee members of the Mangalore Cultural Association met on 17 September at the residence of Felix Lobo and denounced the attacks. In the United States on 17 September, many Christian leaders from various organisations met at the residence of Bishop, Rt. Rev. Dr. Jacob Angadiath of Syro Malabar Catholic Mission (SMCC) and announced a day of prayer vigil, fasting and a peace rally at the Syro Malabar Cathedral in Bellwood, Illinois on 28 September. Fr. George Madathiprambil, Vicar General of the Diocese, urged all Christians to "unite under one umbrella", and Jos Anthony Puthenveetil, the Regional Vice-President of FIACONA, urged the communities to unite, regardless of religions. Rev. M. J. Thomas of the Church of South India said "since many Indian Churches and American local Churches are expected to join in the peace seeking rally, this will be a history making event." Various Hindu leaders, including those from Ayodhya, also denounced the attacks. Bajrang Dal leader Mahendra Kumar denied any attack on Catholic churches by his group but reportedly accepted responsibility for the attacks on prayer halls belonging to the New Life Fellowship Trust. He stated that the Bajrang Dal were not against Christianity in the region, but were offended by the alleged forced conversions. Kumar had initially denied any involvement in the attacks before being arrested on 20 September. When asked again at a later date however if he had accepted responsibility for the attacks, he denied it. Kumar resigned from Bajrang Dal on 1 October 2008 after witnessing a Hindu woman who had decided to commit suicide with her three children but was saved by Christian missionaries. He stated "That was the time I realised that life is more important than dharma (religion). A lot needs to be done for the betterment of life. My dream is to build a society that values life more than religion. In jail I read several literary works. I joined Bajrang Dal so that we could mobilise the youth for a good cause, but at the end of the day all our concepts were politically motivated." In February 2011, after the commission reports into the attacks were published, Kumar formally apologised to the public for the attacks and accused the BJP Government of corruption. On 21 February 2011 he joined the JDS, declaring, "I am today shedding the shackles of communalism to strive for communal harmony, for which the JDS is working." His successor Suryanarayana also denied any involvement in the attacks. Some pro-Hindu elements believed that the attacks were politically motivated by the main opposition parties in the state rather than being purely based upon religious indifference, especially the Milagres Church attack. In response to the alleged forced conversions, the VHP gave a 3-month deadline for New Life Fellowship Trust to stop all conversion activities in Mangalore. Bishop Aloysius Paul D'Souza declared that the Mangalore Diocese would distance itself from the New Life Fellowship Trust, stating that the "Catholic Church does not believe in forceful religious conversion". However, this was opposed by Margaret Alva, General Secretary of the All India Congress Committee (AICC). She stated, "Christians were a microscopic minority in India. We must put aside the differences between our various sects and come together to fight fascist forces." She further described the stance taken by the diocese as "improper". Alva also objected to the peace agreement between the local Catholic leadership and the VHP in which the latter had allegedly laid down a code of ethics for the Christians to follow, and remarked that "the Indian Constitution is the only code of ethics for all Indians". An investigation in the Udupi district headed by Mohammad Shafi Qureshi, Chairman of the National Commission for Minorities (NCM), failed to discover any evidence of forced conversion. Qureshi stated that his commission had not received any report of forced conversion from the district administration of Udupi district and said, "Every Indian had the right to profess and propagate any religion. Conversion by force is not permitted". ## Investigations An initial report by a committee, composed of some 17 human rights activists from Orissa, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, Karnataka and Maharashtra, which formed to look into the violence in Mangalore, stated that the attacks were carried out by the Bajrang Dal and the Sri Ram Sena. They asserted that the event was a "pretext by the police to let loose a savage assault on the community and its sacred institutions", and that the police "conducted themselves as activists of the Bajrang Dal and not as officers of the law, under the benign gaze of the friendly state government." The police were reported to be "more interested in interrogating the nuns than in investigating the assaults." The National Commission for Minorities asked for a ban on the Bajrang Dal, after conducting reports into events in Orissa and Karnataka. Retired Justice M. F. Saldanha, formerly of the Bombay High Court, was outspoken against the protests and published a report in 2011 investigating the attacks on Christian institutions and people, written up after he visited 413 locations, examined 673 witnesses and 2,114 victims of the attacks. He described the attacks as "state-sponsored terrorism", and concluded that "the attacks and incidents which took place were instigated and pre-planned. They were not only supported by the state, but were also covered up for by the state." The report also stated, "The responsibility for this devolves squarely on Home Minister V. S. Acharya and the Chief Minister B S Yediyurappa". Saldanha believes that the "communal forces" at work attacking Christian institutions are also part of an anti-Islam movement on the coastal belt of India. This was later backed by Joseph Dias of the Catholic Secular Forum who said that the Karnataka riots were "part of a wider plan of radical Hindutva elements targeting the Christian community after the Muslim community", which had manifested in all of the BJP-ruled states of India. Saldanha further stated, "There is 100 per cent evidence of two things: the state machinery and the police had a role in attacks on churches. There is videographic and photographic evidence of police entering places of worship." The official commission enquiring into the attacks on Christians, originally constituted on 19 September 2009 for a period of three months, had been extended ten times, causing dismay amongst local Christians. Yeddyurappa initially stated that a judicial inquiry into the attacks was unnecessary, as he believed that the state police were competent enough to investigate and bring the perpetrators to justice themselves. Jesuit priest Fr. M. K. George remarked that "The government does not seem to be serious about the early release of the commission report... the government is lacking the political will to act". Revd. Manohar Chandra Prasad criticised the government for "soft pedaling" and believed that the extension was an indication of the government's "step-motherly" attitude toward Christians. The official report of Justice B. K. Somasekhara, initiated by Yeddyurappa's BJP-led state government was eventually made public in January 2011, in which it stated that the attacks were suspected to have been initiated by the Bajrang Dal, denying any involvement of the state government and the police, "true Hindus", or any cover-up in the attacks after collecting 2,204 exhibits and 30 materials related to the attacks, 25 spot inspections and examining attacks on 57 churches in Karnataka. The report stated, "There is no basis to apprehension of Christian petitioners that politicians, BJP, mainstream Sangh Parivar and State Government directly or indirectly are involved in the attacks. No politicians or representative of any political party in the state who politicised the incidents of attack for their benefits immediately did not come before the commission with their affidavits or to give evidence or opinion in the matter." The report—which cost around ₹30 million and took over 28 months, 300 sittings, and 800 pieces of recorded evidence to be realised—concluded that the district authorities and the police had, in most cases, taken the "appropriate steps regarding the Church and the people including the required protection." Somasekhara concluded that the attacks were "carried out by 'misguided elements' following circulation of literature insulting Hindu gods and reports of conversion activity by some Christian groups" and that "the Roman Catholic church and its leaders were not involved in conversion." In the case of Chikkamagaluru district, Somasekhara noted that "the Government may enquire and withdraw the privileges to every people who is indulging or getting converted in such illegal activities of conversions commercially." The report was widely criticised by the Christian community for being "biased" and activists belonging to the Religious Christian Minority Wing of the JDS burnt a copy of the Somasekhara report. `Archbishop of Bangalore Archdiocese Bernard Moras rejected the Somasekhara report, stating, "It has failed to address the terms of reference of the Commission and has failed to do justice to the Christian community." He demanded that the state government launch a Central Bureau of Investigation probe into the attacks, also saying that "we will make a representation to the government putting forth our demand. We will make a representation to the chief minister, the governor, various organisations including the Human Rights and the Central government". Bajrang Dal State convener Suryanarayana also disputed the veracity of the Somasekhara report in its statements about the Bajrang Dal involvement and former Bajrang Dal state convener Mahendra Kumar. He issued a statement saying that "Bajrang Dal had no role to play in the incidents of attacks on churches and the statement given by Mr. Kumar during the attacks in 2008 were his personal views and the organisation had clarified this aspect then. However, Uday Kumar Shetty, the president of the district unit of the BJP, approved of the report, believing that the report was correct in its assertion that the Sangh Parivar were not involved in the attacks.` ## 2011 protest On 20 February 2011, following the publication of Saldanha's and Somasekhara's contradictory reports on the attacks on churches, more than 100,000 Christians representing some 45 Christian denominations and secular organisations gathered in Mangalore to protest. Present was Bishop Aloysius Paul D'Souza of Mangalore Diocese, Bishop Emeritus C. L. Furtado and Bishop John S. Sadananda of the CSI Karnataka Southern Diocese, AICC general secretary Oscar Fernandes, Bishop Lawrence Mukkuzhy of the Catholic Syro-Malabar Diocese of Belthangady, Geevarghese Mar Divannasious of the Syro-Malankara Diocese of Puttur, Diocesan Vicar-General Msgr Denis M. Prabhu; and some 24 new-generation churches united under the Karnataka Missions Network (KMN) including the Campus Crusade for Christ (CCC), Operation Mobilization Bookstall (OMB), Good News Book Centre (GNBC), All India Catholic Union (AICU), Catholic Association of South Kanara (CASK), and International Federation of Karnataka Christian Associations (IFKCA). Secular organisations participating in the protest included Udupi Jilla Alpasankhyatara Vedike (UJAV), the People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), the DK District Committee, the local unit of the Democratic Youth Federation of India (DYFI), and the Muslim Vartakara Sangha (VS) and Muslim Okkoota groups. The protest rally was "organised against a backdrop of an apparent whitewash by the B. K. Somasekhara Commission concerning Hindu radicals and government agencies." The protesters tied black cloths over their mouths and carried black flags as they walked silently for about a kilometre in one of the strongest Christian areas of the city. George Castelino, a Catholic lay leader who guided the march, stated that the black "symbolised that the action of the government and its commission have silenced Christians." Rev. Alwyn Culaso of the Full Gospel Church said that "This is a sea of Christianity that is wounded by the attacks on the churches by the fundamental groups. The government should look at the faith and patience of these people and give justice." On 17 February 2011, Ronald Colaco, Chairman of IFKCA and Higher Education Minister V. S. Acharya submitted a memorandum to Yeddyurappa, demanding that the cases filed against Christian youths be dropped. Following the publications of the reports and subsequent protests, the government of Karnataka announced that it would drop 338 cases against Christians who had protested in the attacks. In December 2011, 23 cases against Christians were dropped upon request by the Karnataka Christians International and the Mangalore Diocese. ## See also - Anti-Christian violence in India - 2008 anti-Christian attacks in Orissa - Religious violence in Orissa - 1998 attacks on Christians in southeastern Gujarat - Jhabua nuns rape case
58,583,013	German torpedo boat T35	1,122,102,753	German torpedo boat	[ "1943 ships", "Ships built by Schichau", "Ships built in Elbing", "Type 39 torpedo boats" ]	The German torpedo boat T35 was one of fifteen Type 39 torpedo boats built for the Kriegsmarine (German Navy) during World War II. Completed in late 1944, she was assigned to convoy escort duties and supporting German forces in the Baltic. The ship escorted a heavy cruiser in January 1945 as she bombarded Soviet troops and helped to evacuate troops and refugees from advancing Soviet forces in May. T35 was allocated to the United States after the war, but was turned over to the French Navy in 1947 to be used as a source of spare parts. She was stricken from the Navy List in 1952 and subsequently sold for scrap. ## Design and description The Type 39 torpedo boat was conceived as a general-purpose design, much larger than preceding German torpedo boats. The boats had an overall length of 102.5 meters (336 ft 3 in) and were 97 meters (318 ft 3 in) long at the waterline. They had a beam of 10 meters (32 ft 10 in), a draft of 3.22 meters (10 ft 7 in) at deep load and displaced 1,294 metric tons (1,274 long tons) at standard load and 1,754 metric tons (1,726 long tons) at deep load. Their crew numbered 206 officers and sailors. The Type 39s were fitted with a pair of geared steam turbine sets, each driving one shaft, using steam from four high-pressure water-tube boilers. The turbines were designed to produce 32,000 shaft horsepower (24,000 kW) which was intended give the ships a maximum speed of 33.5 knots (62.0 km/h; 38.6 mph). They carried enough fuel oil to give them a range of 2,400 nautical miles (4,400 km; 2,800 mi) at 19 knots (35 km/h; 22 mph). At war's end T-35 mounted four 10.5 cm (4.1 in) SK C/32 guns in single mounts protected by gun shields; one forward of the superstructure, one between the funnels, and two aft, one superfiring over the other. Anti-aircraft defense was provided by four 3.7 cm (1.5 in) AA guns of unknown types in two twin-gun mounts on platforms abaft the rear funnel and two shielded single-gun mounts on the bridge wings, together with eight 2 cm (0.8 in) C/38 guns. One quadruple mount was positioned on the aft superstructure and two twin-gun mounts were fitted on platforms in front of the bridge. The torpedo boat carried six above-water 533 mm (21 in) torpedo tubes in two triple mounts amidships and could also carry 30 mines; the full complement of 60 mines made the ships top-heavy which could be dangerous in bad weather. For anti-submarine work she was fitted with a S-Gerät sonar and four depth charge launchers. By the end of the war, T-35 was equipped with a FuMO 21 radar on the foremast, a FuMO 63 K Hohentwiel radar on the searchlight platform and various FumB radar detectors. ## Construction and career T35 was ordered on 20 January 1941 from Schichau, laid down at their Elbing, East Prussia, shipyard on 20 April 1943 as yard number 1517, launched on 12 December 1943 and commissioned on 7 October 1944. After working up for the next several months, the boat was one of the escorts for the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen as the latter ship supported a German counterattack against advancing Soviet forces near Cranz, East Prussia, on 29–30 January 1945. On 5 May, T35 helped to ferry 45,000 refugees from East Prussia to Copenhagen, Denmark, and returned to transport 20,000 more to Glücksburg, Germany, on the 9th. The boat was allocated to the United States when the Allies divided the surviving ships of the Kriegsmarine amongst themselves in late 1945. T35 was taken to the United States for testing and renamed DD-935. She was towed to France in 1947 where she was cannibalized for spare parts. The ship was stricken from the Navy List on 3 October 1952 and subsequently scrapped.
23,122,647	Professor Pyg	1,168,025,343	Fictional character in DC Comics	[ "Characters created by Grant Morrison", "Comics characters introduced in 2007", "DC Comics male supervillains", "DC Comics scientists", "Fictional United Nations personnel", "Fictional characters with disfigurements", "Fictional characters with schizophrenia", "Fictional chemists", "Fictional gangsters", "Fictional illeists", "Fictional kidnappers", "Fictional mad scientists", "Fictional serial killers", "Fictional surgeons", "Video game bosses" ]	Professor Pyg (Lazlo Valentin) is a supervillain who appears in comic books published by DC Comics, commonly as an adversary of the superhero Batman. Pyg was created by Grant Morrison and Andy Kubert and debuted as a corpse in the alternate reality story Batman \#666 (July 2007) before being introduced as a recurring character in the mainstream DC Universe two years later in Batman and Robin \#1 (June 2009). Professor Pyg was re-introduced following DC's The New 52 comics relaunch in 2011, appearing throughout the continuity and the subsequent DC Rebirth relaunch that began in 2016. The character's in-world real name is Lazlo Valentin, a scientist who suffered a schizophrenic breakdown that led him to become a supervillain who wears a pig mask. Morrison intended Pyg to seem disconnected from reality, believing him to be one of the "weirdest, most insane" characters in Batman comic books. Pyg is an obsessive perfectionist who sees human beings as broken individuals; he commonly kidnaps people and uses surgery and chemicals to permanently change them into mind-controlled automatons known as Dollotrons, and sometimes into human–animal hybrids. Morrison took the name "Professor Pyg" from the song "Pygmalism" by Momus and Kahimi Karie; the name "Pyg" is also shorthand for "Pygmalion", referring to both the mythical sculptor who fell in love with his own creation and the 1913 stage play, both of which serve as parallels for Lazlo Valentin and his love for his Dollotron creations. The character's origin story alludes to real-life animal testing carried out in the mid-twentieth century. He has a makeshift mother made of nails and boards, from which he associates auditory hallucinations commanding him to constantly improve his surgical work. Pyg began making substantial appearances in other media in 2013 with the animated series Beware the Batman and has since appeared in video games, television, and film. The character has been positively received by entertainment journalists as a strange and disturbing addition to Batman's rogues gallery. ## Publication history ### Creation and debut Writer Grant Morrison stated a new Batman villain must have "a gimmick. Creepiness. A distinctive look ... You kind of evolve those themes into new forms". Professor Pyg and his mind-controlled Dollotrons first appeared as crucified corpses in the 2007 story Batman in Bethlehem by Morrison and artist Andy Kubert, published in Batman \#666 by DC Comics. The story is set in a future in which Bruce Wayne's son Damian helms the Batman vigilante persona. Although Morrison had developed a detailed backstory for Pyg, they were unsure the character would be used again. The name "Professor Pyg" originates from the song "Pygmalism" written by Momus for Kahimi Karie, "Pyg" being shorthand for Pygmalion. The first storyline of the Batman and Robin series that ran from June to August 2009 saw the character's debut in the main DC Universe. The story line, titled "Batman Reborn", focuses on Dick Grayson, who takes over the Batman mantle after Bruce Wayne is pronounced dead and partners with a younger Damian Wayne, who is now Robin. In the story, Lazlo Valentin was an "extreme" circus mob boss until something turned him into Professor Pyg, leading him to begin funding his scientific experiments by selling narcotics to the criminal underworld. Batman and Robin learn from interrogating his underlings, members of a gang called the Circus of Strange, that Pyg is planning to spread a mind-control virus across Gotham City to hold the population for ransom. This occurred after the group broke into the Gotham City Police Department precinct that teammate Mister Toad was held in only to find him dead. Pyg is stopped and placed in Blackgate Penitentiary but medics cannot save his infected minions known as Dollotrons. ### Return and expanded backstory Batman and Robin \#13, published in July 2010, marked Professor Pyg's return as part of the Batman and Robin Must Die storyline. Pyg had been working for the supervillain Doctor Simon Hurt during the events of "Batman Reborn", and a virus has contaminated the population without Batman (Dick Grayson) or the public realizing it. Grayson discovers this as the virus becomes active. He is swarmed by a mob of infected people in the city streets. Pyg uses the virus as a diversion to escape Blackgate Penitentiary. The following issue focuses on Professor Pyg's business relationship with Doctor Hurt, who says he has "challenged [Pyg] to outline his personal vision for Gotham". As the virus spreads across the city, riots occur under Hurt's command. The story concludes with Bruce Wayne returning to stop Doctor Hurt after being trapped in the timestream. The infected civilians are quarantined and Professor Pyg is captured and transferred to Arkham Asylum. The character's backstory, including his origin, is significantly expanded upon in Batman Incorporated: Leviathan Strikes! (December 2011). Lazlo Valentin was a scientist working for a corrupt United Nations agency known as Spyral and was driven insane by a product that he was developing, which mimics some effects of Alzheimer's disease. Lazlo develops paranoid schizophrenia, leading to drug abuse and self-inflicted surgeries that turn him into Professor Pyg. Lazlo fathered a son named Janosz Valentin, who serves the criminal organization Leviathan and claimed his father taught him to be immune to pain. ### The New 52 In September 2011, DC Comics rebooted their line of comic books under the New 52 banner, establishing a new continuity while keeping landmark stories intact. This iteration of Professor Pyg, still Lazlo Valentin, was introduced in Batman \#1 (September 2011) among other established Batman villains during an escape riot at Arkham Asylum, which was thwarted by Batman (Wayne) and Nightwing (Grayson). He continued to make cameo appearances as an Arkham Asylum inmate in later comics. In the storyline Forever Evil, the inmates of Arkham Asylum and Blackgate Penitentiary battle for control of Gotham. Pyg and his Dollotrons briefly gain control over a district of the city but are usurped by Bane. He is later forced by Scarecrow to ingest the steroid Venom to combat the usurper. In October 2013, a prequel to Batman in Bethlehem titled Damian: Son of Batman, in which an older Damian Wayne succeeds his father as Batman, was written by Andy Kubert under the New 52 imprint. Having plotted the mini-series in 2008, Kubert wanted to return to that timeline, saying, "I had always wanted to write. In talking with editor Mike Marts, he suggested I come up with a mini-series I would like to write and draw. I really loved that Batman and the whole world that Grant [Morrison] dreamed up. So I thought it would be fun to do a story of how Damian actually becomes that \#666 Batman." An aging Pyg appears in the second issue and his henchmen in the third. Batman (Damian) attempts to stop him from experimenting on kidnapped children but Pyg's Dollotrons expel Batman from the area. Pyg is never caught. The character plays a larger role in the first volume of the weekly series Batman Eternal, which ran from April to August 2014, beginning with a brief confrontation with Batman in the first issue. Carmine Falcone attempts to take over Gotham City's criminal underworld, initiating a gang war with Penguin. To provide a distraction, Falcone frames Batman for the destruction of Professor Pyg's laboratory. Angry his work has been destroyed, Pyg sends his remaining Dollotrons to assault Batman, who persuades Pyg that Falcone was responsible. Pyg retaliates by destroying the laboratory of one of Falcone's paid scientists. He later turns several people into human–animal hybrids, whom he labels his "farm hands", and finds Falcone. After the farm hands kill Falcone's guards, Pyg straps Falcone to a table with the intention of operating on him but Batman intervenes. He is arrested and sent to Arkham Asylum under the supervision of Dr. Achilles Milo. In Convergence, the New 52 crosses over with the previous iteration of the DC Universe, during which Pyg's pre-New 52 counterpart is killed. Pyg is also featured in a chapter of the anthology digital comic series Sensation Comics, featuring Wonder Woman. During Robin War, a crossover between several Robin-related publications published from December 2015 to January 2016, Pyg uses an abandoned theatre for his criminal activities while working for the supervillain Brother Blood. Pyg escaped a confrontation with the Teen Titans. ### Debut in other media Professor Pyg, voiced by Brian George, became a recurring villain in the 2013 animated series Beware the Batman, which was intended to focus on lesser-known members of Batman's rogues gallery to set it apart from previous Batman television shows. He appears alongside Mister Toad (Udo Kier), a humanoid toad, as eco-terrorists who hunt people for what they deem to be crimes against the animal kingdom. Pyg is still portrayed as a surgeon, transforming his victims into human–animal hybrids. The character later appeared in a side quest of the 2015 video game Batman: Arkham Knight, voiced by Dwight Schultz. Pyg is described as "a gifted scientist who suffered a schizophrenic break" that caused him to develop his persona. In the game, Pyg uses his Circus of Strange business as a front for abducting people to turn into Dollotrons. After leaving behind a trail of corpses of failed experiments, Pyg is investigated and apprehended in a confrontation with Batman. Pyg also made minor appearances in the animated series Batman: The Brave and the Bold and the video game Injustice 2. In the Harley Quinn episode "There's Nowhere to Go But Down", Pyg makes a brief, silent cameo among the prisoners in Bane's pit. He later appears as the main antagonist of "Gotham's Hottest Hotties", where he attempts to create the perfect woman using stolen parts from various attractive bodies, including Nightwing's buttocks. However, he is defeated and ultimately killed by Harley Quinn, who is working with the Bat Family. Lazlo Valentin played by Michael Cerveris makes his live-action debut in the fourth season of the television series Gotham. The character is introduced under his Professor Pyg alias as a vigilante who slaughters corrupt policemen and dresses their corpses with pigs' heads. Executive producer Bryan Wynbrandt described him as the "big villain" of the first half of the season. The character's modus operandi later expands; he targets the wealthy, who he claims "fed on the poor of Gotham". Police captain James Gordon learns that "Professor Pyg" is a persona used by Valentin, a contract murderer who impersonates serial killers. He is hired by crime figure Sofia Falcone in a conspiracy to turn the corrupt police against kingpin Oswald Cobblepot and usurp his criminal empire. Falcone kills Valentin to keep the conspiracy quiet. ### DC Rebirth and introduction in film In May 2016, DC Comics again relaunched their entire line of comic books under the DC Rebirth brand, restoring elements of the DC Universe that were erased under the New 52 while maintaining the continuity. Pyg re-appears in 2017's Nightwing \#18, operating in Paris and creating Dollotron versions of Grayson and Damian Wayne, known as Deathwing and Robintron. Grayson and Wayne overcome Pyg, who tells them he created Deathwing and Robintron for Simon Hurt. He later appears in Harley Quinn \#43–44 and Batgirl and the Birds of Prey. He appears again in Batwoman \#11, in which Batwoman saves her ally Julia Pennyworth from Pyg after Alice leaks her secret identity to him. Professor Pyg is among the villains who feature in the intercompany crossover The Shadow/Batman, in which Batman and The Shadow team up to combat a conspiracy. Pyg makes his film debut voiced by James Urbaniak in the 2018 animated film Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay, in which he is depicted as an underground surgeon-for-hire for supervillains. Prior to this, his likeness was depicted in a background advertisement in The Lego Batman Movie. In the limited series Doomsday Clock, a sequel to the seminal 1986 Watchmen, Pyg is among the supervillains who attend an underground meeting held by Riddler. In a story in DC's 2018 Halloween anthology Cursed Comics Cavalcade, Damian Wayne teams up with the zombie Solomon Grundy against Professor Pyg, after he kidnaps a group of children. In January 2019, the Mister Miracle creative team Tom King and Mitch Geralds reunited for Batman \#62, which was promoted as a "special issue". Pyg holds Batman captive, as he recalls the mythical Pygmalion and considers how he psychologically mirrors Pyg. ## Characterization and symbolism Professor Pyg is usually characterized in comic books as someone who is suffering from severe mental illness. Cocreator Grant Morrison envisioned him as "one of the weirdest, most insane characters that's ever been in Batman [comics]" and said, "We hear a lot about Batman facing crazy villains but we tried to make this guy seem genuinely disturbed and disconnected ... Professor Pyg isn't from another world; he's from here, but he's very, very sick". Taking inspiration from the works of David Lynch, Morrison wanted the visuals in Batman Reborn, illustrated by Frank Quitely, to feel like a real world crossing over with a world of schizophrenia, paranoia, and the use of narcotics. They've stated that when Batman and Robin are facing Pyg and his Dollotrons, they are dealing with "the eerie, creepy, mentally-ill dark corners of life". The character uses drugs, lobotomy, and doll masks permanently molded onto people's faces to turn them into genderless Dollotrons, which he believes are perfected human beings. The name Pyg is a shortening of Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw's play that was adapted into the musical My Fair Lady starring Rex Harrison, which tells the story of a professor's attempt to convert a street urchin into an educated, high-society woman. According to Morrison, "Movie enthusiasts will know that Rex Harrison also played Doctor Doolittle, who by strange coincidence was famed for teaching barnyard animals to speak proper, so our Professor Pyg mixes all these characteristics and influences together to create a monster who wants to make everything and everyone 'perfect,' as he sees it". On the DC Comics website, journalist Meg Downey notes parallels between Professor Pyg's view of his Dollotrons and the Greek mythological figure Pygmalion, who carved a statue of a woman out of ivory that was so realistic and beautiful he fell in love with his creation. Morrison referred to the character's experiments to force biology to conform to his will as an "attempt to dominate and redefine the feminine principle", comparing it to the wire mother experiments performed by psychologist Harry Harlow on infant monkeys and to the proto-mother mythologies of Mesopotamia and ancient Babylon: "The shattered mind of Lazlo Valentin has mashed all of these connections into a frightening personal 'mythos', constructed to justify his deranged activities as Professor Pyg". Morrison also said Pyg's deranged rants in Batman and Robin Must Die allude to animal experimentation carried out in the US in the mid-twentieth century, including Harlow and John B. Calhoun's Rockville barn rat population research, which collectively influenced the character's origin story. In the comics, Pyg has a makeshift mother constructed from boards and nails from which auditory hallucinations continuously compel him to improve his work. In Batman \#62, Bruce Wayne compares Pyg's love for his work to his own fixation with vigilantism, having built up his ideals and philosophies since he witnessed his parents being murdered as a boy. Pyg was adapted differently from the comics in the television series Beware the Batman; developer Glen Murakami said, "it's not like we're trying to change it, but we only have 22 minutes to tell that story. The theme that we went in with Pyg and Toad was kind of Wind in the Willows, but they also became like a twisted [Sherlock] Holmes and Watson. It felt like it flowed, it felt like it had a theme. That seemed more important for that to track rather than all the backstory." Chris Sims of the journalism website ComicsAlliance said the changes are "about as far from melting people's faces, stripping in front of a wire mother and dosing Gotham City with a psychotropic drug as you're likely to get". According to Comic Book Resources writer Kieran Shiach, the Arkham Knight iteration is a very accurate facsimile of the original comic book portrayal, the major difference being the character's new enthusiasm for opera music. Pyg's in-game attributes label him a perfectionist and an amateur opera vocalist. Before his confrontation with Batman, during which Pyg describes his surgical operations as "fixing" his victims who are unique and broken, Batman is warned by Alfred Pennyworth that Pyg is "unhinged, even by Gotham's standards". After Pyg's capture, he claims his mutilated victims are works of art, and while in a police lockup, he expresses concern for how they are being treated. In the television series Gotham, Lazlo Valentin is portrayed as a contract killer who impersonates other serial killers. He creates an elaborate persona of a murderer under the Professor Pyg alias to aid Sofia Falcone's rise to power in Gotham City's criminal underworld. Actor Michael Cerveris said of the faux persona, "Professor Pyg is a brilliant and chameleon-like person who has a highly developed sense of what's right and wrong—it just might not be a sense of right and wrong that corresponds with everybody else's". Executive producer John Stephens said the character was chosen for the show because "He hits that sweet spot of being grotesque and terrifying, but also a little bit in that fairy-tale-esque world". Cerveris said Pyg takes delight in his actions and sees himself as a mirror image to James Gordon, who also wants to end corruption in the Gotham City Police Department. Pyg spells his name with a "y" as an homage to Pygmalion and because he wants to remake Gotham City in his own image. He also wants to make Gordon into a better version of himself; according to Cerveris, "He is almost looking at Gordon as an ally, like 'I'm on your side, Jim'. And Jim is saying, 'No, you're actually a sociopath'. So it works in many ways as a seduction on Pyg's part as he tries to pull (Jim) in." In early episodes of Gotham, Pyg claims to have suffered at the hands of Gotham City's elite, implying a troubled past for the Pyg persona and a vengeful motive. Cerveris stated Pyg is aware of his actions but may not be comfortable with himself, which may be partly because he is covering his true identity. Layers of his disguise are continuously stripped down and reapplied. Hailing from the southern United States, Valentin uses implanted, shifting metal plates and facial reconstruction to help him hide his true identity. Before the Pyg persona is revealed to be fake, Cerveris said he lacks his alter ego's trademark surgical prowess because it was intended to focus more on his relationship with the city and James Gordon, and that the Dollotrons are not the sole purpose of his existence. Cerveris also said the Dollotrons might be a later part of Valentin's life because the show is about the origins of the Batman mythos. ### Design Professor Pyg most commonly wears a pig mask, a makeshift surgical outfit, and a butcher's apron. Much of his original wardrobe in the comic books was designed by Frank Quitely and is a homage to the Edwardian suits worn by Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady. The television series Gotham was planned to feature a pig mask that more closely resembled the comic book version but it was deemed "a little too cheery and pink". Executive producer Danny Cannon decided the mask should look like decapitated pig flesh. Cerveris found the change to be simultaneously comical and disturbing; he had some difficulty acting in the mask due to its weight and the heat underneath, and because it blocked his peripheral vision. According to Cerveris, "the mask is a really freeing aspect, and I felt naked when I didn't have the mask on, and couldn't really be Professor Pyg". Pyg retains his apron from the source material. ## Merchandise Professor Pyg's opera suite titled "Ode to Perfection" was composed by David Buckley for the Batman: Arkham Knight soundtrack. An action figure of the character was released as part of the third series of Arkham Knight figures from DC Collectibles in February 2016. ## Critical response Meg Downey said Professor Pyg is one of Batman's most disturbing villains. In 2015, IGN writers Jesse Schedeen and Joshua Yehl ranked Professor Pyg as the twenty-third-greatest Batman villain of all time, and in a separate editorial, Schedeen called Pyg "one of the crazier and more unusual" Batman villains created by Grant Morrison. Beth Elderkin of io9 called the character "one of the weirdest villains to come out of the Batman canon" while Bustle referred to him as "one of the comics' modern masterpieces, and one of its most horrifying creations". David Pepose of Newsarama praised the inclusion of Professor Pyg and Jason Bard in Batman Eternal for emphasizing elements of the DC Universe that were underused following the New 52. Comic Book Resources'''s Mike Fugere said the character is a "bigger monster" than Solomon Grundy, an undead creature within the DC Universe who Fugere calls "terrifying". He cited the comic book Cursed Comics Cavalcade \#1 as his reason, a story in which Grundy tries to stop Pyg from mutilating a group of children. According to Fugere, Pyg is "basically Hannibal Lecter on steroids and is a reminder that not all superhero comics are for kids". He also said Grant Morrison accomplished his goal of making Pyg one of the weirdest and most insane characters in Batman comic books. In 2017, John Stephens said Professor Pyg is one of his favorite recently-created Batman villains for being demented, grotesque, and funny. Because the character was created recently, he also said Pyg is more contemporary than the classic rogues and did not have to be revitalized as much. When it was announced Professor Pyg would appear on Gotham, Digital Spy commented, "Gotham season 4 is going to introduce its most disturbing villain ever, so forget about sleeping ever again". Charlie Ridgely of Comicbook.com stated Pyg's appearance on Gotham'' proved he is "one of the most disturbed" villains who has served as an antagonist to Batman. ## See also - List of Beware the Batman characters - List of Gotham characters
25,727,505	Who Killed Archie?	1,167,631,640	Storyline from the BBC soap opera EastEnders	[ "2009 in British television", "2010 in British television", "Detective fiction", "EastEnders storylines", "Mitchell family (EastEnders)", "Slater family (EastEnders)", "Whodunit storylines in soap operas" ]	"Who Killed Archie?" is a storyline from the BBC soap opera EastEnders. It began on 25 December 2009, Christmas Day, when the character Archie Mitchell, played by Larry Lamb, was murdered by an unseen person. Events leading up to and following the murder put several characters in the frame, in the style of a whodunnit mystery. The culprit was kept a tight secret within the production crew as well, with only seven people knowing the identity of the killer. The murderer was revealed as Stacey Slater (Lacey Turner) during a live episode titled "EastEnders Live", broadcast on 19 February 2010, the show's 25th anniversary. Turner was told thirty minutes before the broadcast that Stacey was the killer, and actors rehearsed several possible endings. Finally, a two-hander episode between Stacey and her ex-lover Max Branning (Jake Wood) on 26 March 2010 explained how she killed Archie - who had previously been the show's main antagonist prior to the character's death and murder storyline. ## Storyline creation and development The storyline was created in spring 2009 during a story conference, where executive producer Diederick Santer, storyliner Dominic Treadwell-Collins, series consultant and lead writer Simon Ashdown, series producer Lorraine Newman, script producer Sharon Batten, and Controller of BBC Drama Production John Yorke were considering what to do for the Christmas Day 2009 and 25th anniversary episodes. They discussed the character Archie Mitchell and how everyone hated him, and decided on a storyline with characters' hatred and anger towards Archie building up before Christmas, with a peak on Christmas Day when he is killed and another for the reveal on the 19 February 2010 anniversary. They decided to keep the killer's identity a secret within the small group and decided to reveal it during a live episode so that the secret could be kept for as long as possible, and managed the story on a need-to-know basis. The live episode's director, Clive Arnold, became the seventh person to discover the identity of the murderer. They went through the characters to decide who would create a "shiver" moment, and decided against Janine, even though she could have done it, because she has killed before. The killer was going to be Archie's wife Peggy Mitchell (Barbara Windsor), until producers discovered Windsor had planned to leave the show, so they decided on Stacey. Although scripts initially diverted attention away from Stacey, Santer realised that drawing attention away from her too much might make it more apparent. Santer said there were three big clues to the killer's identity, "one in the Christmas Day episode, one more recently than Christmas and there's another one that, if I were to tell you where it was, would perhaps give it away too easily," however, in a chat with Sharon Marshall shown on This Morning on 18 February 2010, he said the second clue was about halfway through the investigation and the third was "on screen but not necessarily in the programme". He also said that the outcome would be "surprising", "satisfying" and "in retrospect, inevitable", adding that "it makes sense". Santer confirmed the clues in an interview on the EastEnders website: on Christmas Day Stacey disappears and it is never explained why, and then reappears on Boxing Day appearing "not quite with it"; Stacey is the only character still sufficiently angry enough to spit on Archie's grave at his funeral; and Stacey is the first character to feature in the Christmas Day trailers. Plans to broadcast the first ever live episode of EastEnders were announced by the BBC on 15 September 2009. Santer initially refrained from discussing the episode's plot, but commented that it would resolve a "big storyline" which would "keep the audience (as well as the cast and crew) guessing until the very last moment." Santer confirmed that Archie's killer would be revealed in the live episode, and that their identity would be kept secret until the night of broadcast, even from the cast member playing them. The EastEnders cast and crew had two weeks to rehearse the episode prior to its live transmission. The script was issued on the afternoon of 5 February 2010, written by Simon Ashdown. The first read-through took place on 8 February 2010, though producers held back the part of the script revealing Archie's true killer. Ten different possible endings were scripted and rehearsed, each showing one character confessing to the murder. The ten characters were Janine Butcher (Charlie Brooks), Jack Branning (Scott Maslen), Ronnie Mitchell (Samantha Womack), Max Branning (Jake Wood), Ian Beale (Adam Woodyatt), Phil Mitchell (Steve McFadden), Billy Mitchell (Perry Fenwick), Ryan Malloy (Neil McDermott), Peggy and Stacey. Santer reiterated that the actor playing the killer would only be told so thirty minutes before the broadcast. He explained that the killer "may be revealed to the audience rather than the Square", preserving secrecy as the crew began filming episodes to be transmitted after the live broadcast. Brooks, who plays Archie's former lover Janine, found the secrecy difficult to work with, explaining: "In the episodes to be shown afterwards, you're being told to look or speak a certain way, but not why." Santer confirmed that the cast found the episode challenging, stating: "They are as desperate to know who did it as the viewers." Actor Charlie Clements, who played Bradley Branning, announced in November 2009 that he would be leaving the soap in 2010. The moment Turner was told Stacey was the killer was filmed for a live reaction show broadcast immediately after "EastEnders Live" on BBC Three, though it was not broadcast. EastEnders Live: The Aftermath was presented by Lamb's son George and included other behind-the-scenes material. Turner received a call to see Santer about 20 minutes before the broadcast, where she was told that Stacey was the killer. She explained that she had no idea her character was the murderer, even after receiving the call. She hoped viewers would sympathise with the character as she not only has to deal with the guilt of killing Archie but was also inadvertently responsible for Bradley's death. Wood was also told as he supported Turner in the final scene in which she was revealed as the killer. Santer also brought in Maslen and McDermott as decoys in case other cast and crew members realised. Following the live episode, a two-hander episode featuring Max and Stacey was announced. The episode, broadcast on 26 March 2010, explains how and why Stacey killed Archie. ### Later development Although the true identity of Archie's killer is kept a secret between Max and Stacey for several months, Max's daughter Lauren Branning (Jacqueline Jossa) becomes suspicious in November 2010 when Max tells her Bradley was innocent. Lauren suspects Max killed Archie as she becomes paranoid about his anger. Jossa said in an interview with website Digital Spy: "[Lauren]'s thinking about Archie's murder and realising that if Bradley didn't do it, it must have been someone else. As far as she knows, her dad is the only person who knows that Bradley didn't do it, so she's trying to put this puzzle together and it's all adding up to Max being the killer, because everything he does seems to lead to a lot of aggression." However, Lauren soon works out that Stacey is the murderer after speaking to her. Jossa said she was excited that her character was one of only a select few to know the true identity of Archie's killer. ## Suspects and motives There were officially ten suspects for the murder, though the ten were not known to viewers or cast members, who speculated about the identity of the killer. On Christmas Eve, storylines showed Archie evicting his wife Peggy, daughters Ronnie and Roxy, Peggy's son Phil and Phil's son Ben (Charlie Jones) from their home, The Queen Victoria public house, after he became the landlord. Ronnie had a further motive as Archie had caused her to suffer a miscarriage and she blamed him for the death of her daughter Danielle Jones (Lauren Crace) earlier in 2009. Peggy discovered that Archie had paid her daughter Sam Mitchell (Danniella Westbrook) to skip bail, thus plunging the Mitchells into debt, and Sam returned on Christmas Day to discover she had been manipulated. Phil was also a suspect after failing to kill Archie on Peggy's request earlier in 2009. Simons explained that the killer was likely to be the most unsuspecting person, and stated that Roxy was "pretty much the only non-suspect," but said she felt the character would not go so far as to kill her father, even though she had seen his true colours. Woodyatt said his character, Ian Beale, would have done anything to stop his wife Jane (Laurie Brett) from finding out that he had sex with Janine, so it would be plausible if it turned out that Ian had killed Archie. Archie had a laptop recording of Ian and Janine together that he had threatened to give to Jane. Janine, who was engaged to Archie, also had a motive as Archie had been using her to gain ownership of The Queen Victoria and threw her out on Christmas Day. She was seen holding a knife before Archie was killed. McDermott said his character, Ryan Malloy, "probably would have the balls to kill Archie" and it would be a possibility due to the character's past, although he accused Janine of the murder, making it unlikely unless he was "quite conniving." He stated Ryan's only motive would be out of love for Janine. Glynis Barber, who plays Archie's first wife Glenda Mitchell and was not seen in the programme until after the murder, said her instinct was that Glenda did not kill Archie, even though she had been told it was possible. Bradley Branning's motive came from the discovery that Archie raped his partner Stacey, and Clements said that if other characters knew, it would give Bradley a motive and the fact that Bradley punched Archie would make him a prime suspect. He stated that he hoped Bradley was not the killer, though in an interview with daytime television show This Morning, he stated it would be "quite historical to go down as the one who killed Archie Mitchell". The rape also gave Stacey a motive, and before she was sectioned in 2009 for bipolar disorder she accused Archie of trying to kill her. Jack Branning's motive came from his love for Ronnie and hatred of Archie, and he threatened Archie on Christmas Day. Maslen said it would be "great" if Jack was the murderer, but added that he may have taken the blame if Ronnie was guilty. Other possible suspects included Peggy's son Grant Mitchell (Ross Kemp), Billy Mitchell and Tracey the barmaid (Jane Slaughter). Slaughter said Tracey's only motive would be to protect The Queen Victoria or one of the Mitchells. Odds on the killer's identity changed frequently in the fortnight preceding the transmission of "EastEnders Live". On 5 February, the clear favourite was Stacey Slater, with odds at Bodog of 2/1. By 9 February, Stacey's odds had shortened to 6/4, though the character dropped into third place by 12 February, usurped by her brother Sean Slater (Robert Kazinsky), who was last seen in the soap on 1 January 2009, at odds of 9/4, and Ben Mitchell at 7/2. On 14 February, the unlikely favourite became Tracey the barmaid, a background character whose odds shortened considerably from 40/1 to 11/4. Sean moved back into first place on 16 February, with odds of 2/1, and remained there until the eve of broadcast. Stacey Slater's odds fell to 16/1. William Hill had Sean as the favourite on 18 February with odds of 4/7, though on the morning of 19 February, Ben became the bookmakers' favourite. Polls on both the BBC website and on Digital Spy that ran in the week leading up to the live episode showed Bradley Branning as the person viewers most expected to be the killer, followed by Jack Branning, Ben Mitchell, Sean Slater and Sam Mitchell. ## Plot ### Events leading up to the murder On Archie Mitchell (Larry Lamb) and Peggy Mitchell's (Barbara Windsor) wedding day, the true identity of Danielle Jones (Lauren Crace) as Ronnie Mitchell's (Samantha Womack) daughter is revealed. Archie has told Ronnie that her daughter, whom he gave up for adoption as a baby, has died. Just after Ronnie realises the truth, Danielle is hit by a car driven by Janine Butcher (Charlie Brooks) and dies in Ronnie's arms. Peggy throws Archie out and asks her son Phil Mitchell (Steve McFadden) to kill him, but Phil just forces him to leave. The Mitchells also form a new rivalry with Janine, as she was the one responsible for hitting Danielle with her car and causing her death. Ronnie is the most hurt about this and struggles to cope. She starts another relationship with Jack Branning (Scott Maslen), leading to their engagement. However, upon realising she wants another baby, she leaves Walford for a while, selling her portion of the club to Jack, who in turn gives it to Archie. After returning, Ronnie sleeps with Ryan Malloy (Neil McDermott) and Owen Turner (Lee Ross), and becomes pregnant with Owen's child. Stacey Slater (Lacey Turner), Danielle's best friend in Walford, is also deeply affected by the incident, which triggers her bipolar disorder. She becomes non-compliant with her medication, has sex with Ryan, and is raped and attacked by Archie at the launderette. She believes both men are planning to kill her and is involuntarily committed to hospital, where she befriends Becca Swanson (Simone James). Upon her return to Walford along with Becca, Stacey restarts a relationship with Bradley Branning (Charlie Clements) when he rejects his girlfriend Syd Chambers (Nina Toussaint-White) for her. When Archie returns, he attempts to reconcile with Peggy, but comes up with a plan to steal the Mitchells' business, The Queen Victoria public house, with Janine's help. However, Janine, along with Ryan, whom she is dating, plans to steal it from Archie at the last minute. Peggy's daughter Sam Mitchell (Danniella Westbrook), who has been in Brazil on the run from police due to her involvement in the murder of Den Watts (Leslie Grantham), returns to Walford, thinking the charges have been dropped. She is subsequently arrested, and the Mitchells put up £250,000 bail to have her released. Archie convinces Sam to leave again, paying for her to go. Phil is then forced to take out a loan from Ian Beale (Adam Woodyatt). Ian accepts, on the condition that if the loan is not paid back within a certain time, he becomes owner of The Queen Victoria. Archie and Janine learn of this and try to get Ian to sell the loan to them. When Ian's wife Jane Beale (Laurie Brett) leaves him, Janine gets him drunk and has sex with him, making an audio recording of them together. Archie and Janine blackmail Ian into selling them the loan and Archie tells the Mitchells they are trespassing. Once Archie finds out that Janine plans to fleece him, he proposes to her to keep her from going astray. Ryan is hurt by this setback and ends his relationship with her. Ronnie stands up to Archie and he pushes her into the bar, not knowing she is pregnant, though Roxy Mitchell (Rita Simons) then reveals it. Ronnie has a miscarriage and Peggy tells Archie he has killed another of Ronnie's children, warning him to stay away from her. Peggy eventually hands over the keys and the family of Peggy, Phil, Ronnie, Roxy, Ben Mitchell (Charlie Jones) and Roxy's baby Amy Mitchell leave on 24 December 2009. They end up being taken in by Jack, who vows revenge on Archie. On Christmas Day, Archie tells Ian the CD of the recording is under Ian's Christmas tree for Jane, but Ian fails to find it. Archie tells Janine that they should skip Christmas dinner as he has made a surprise treasure hunt for her. Janine eventually finds an envelope containing a one-way ticket to Gdańsk, Poland and Archie throws her out onto the street telling her he knows how she and Ryan tried to double-cross him. Archie is visited by Jack who threatens to kill him if he hurts Ronnie again. Archie finds Ian searching his living room for the CD and Archie says it is on his laptop and he can make copies at any time, threatening Ian with a phone call to Jane, before ejecting him from the pub. Ian leaves, though not before telling Archie that if he does call Jane he'll wish he was dead. Sam then returns and attempts to confront Archie but he shuts the door on her. Ronnie subsequently arrives and tells him with no emotion that he will not make her care for him and she would not care if he died. Archie, after explaining how his father never smiled at him once and the impact had practically taught him to do the same, throws her out onto the street reminding her that it was the exact spot she pushed Danielle onto the night she died. Shortly afterwards, Archie is visited by Peggy and he pleads with her to come home to him as she is the woman he loves. Peggy says she is not just a sweet and innocent old lady and that he has no idea who he is messing with. She tells Archie if he does not leave the pub that night he will regret every cruel and evil act he has ever done. He tells her that unless she returns he will have the pub converted to flats. He then becomes emotional as he tells Peggy that he will be waiting for her as she walks out on him. Bradley walks in and punches Archie in the face twice but accidentally punches the bar as well, cutting his hand. He tells Archie to stay away from his girlfriend Stacey because she has said Archie raped her three months previously which resulted in her becoming pregnant with his child, and Bradley leaves. As Archie picks up his snowglobe from the floor, the bust of Queen Victoria is pushed from the bar and hits him on the head. ### After the murder Ronnie finds Archie on the floor of The Queen Victoria and he apologises to her before he dies. When the police are notified of the death they arrest Ronnie, but later release her without charge. DCI Jill Marsden (Sophie Stanton) investigates the rest of the Mitchell family. Phil is given a false alibi by his friend Shirley Carter (Linda Henry), who finds a blood-stained shirt amongst his belongings. Phil explains that he found Archie dead and lost his balance, falling into the blood, but did not call the police because he panicked. They burn the shirt, and when Marsden visits them again, asking to see the clothes Phil was wearing at Christmas, Shirley produces a freshly laundered one. Shirley's flatmate Heather Trott (Cheryl Fergison) reveals that Phil was not really with Shirley on Christmas Day, prompting Shirley to make an anonymous call stating she saw Janine enter The Queen Victoria on the day of the murder, deflecting suspicion from Phil. Peggy and Phil attempt to pin the murder on Sam, who retaliates by blaming Peggy. Both are questioned by Marsden at the police station, and though Peggy is released without charge, Sam is arrested for breaking her bail. Ian has Archie's laptop, and though he deletes the audio file of him and Janine from it, it later comes to light, and he and Jane throw the laptop into the canal. Janine attempts to blackmail Ian, and when he rebuffs her, she tells the police about the recording and the laptop, leading to his arrest. Ian admits to stealing the laptop from The Queen Victoria on Christmas Day, but denies murder. The police charge him with murder, but when Janine admits the truth, the charges are dropped. Marsden and her colleague DC Wayne Hughes (Jamie Treacher) attend Archie's funeral, but do not see Stacey spit on Archie's grave. Jack, a former police officer, tells Hughes he can help out with any "local information" they might need. After the funeral, Bradley proposes to Stacey at the car lot, and she accepts. Jack later learns that Archie raped Stacey, that she is now pregnant with what she believes is Archie's baby, and that Bradley punched him on Christmas Day. Jack urges Bradley to tell the police what he did, desiring to keep Ronnie out of trouble. Marsden reveals she has a new forensic profile and a DNA screening process will begin. She asks all white males to volunteer for DNA screening, and when Bradley complies, Jack bribes Hughes to make the samples disappear. A ring Roxy inherited from Archie, which went missing at Christmas, is planted in Janine's flat. Marsden receives an anonymous tip-off and Janine is arrested after the ring is found in her teapot. She is interviewed, but is released due to lack of evidence. She realises that Peggy planted the ring in an attempt to frame her. When Shirley thinks Phil is seeing another woman, she accuses him of only being interested in her for her alibi. He says it is not true, but she drunkenly threatens to withdraw the alibi, and walks to the police station. Becca becomes hurt upon realising that Bradley and Stacey are getting married. While they are away at their own wedding, Becca steals a hairbrush with Archie's hair from The Queen Victoria, intending to have a DNA test done on Stacey's baby to prove if it is really Archie's. However, she has doubts and goes back with Stacey to return the brush, but is caught by Ronnie. Becca coerces Stacey to confess Archie raped her and the baby is his. However, Ronnie tells Stacey that Archie underwent an operation a few years back that left him infertile, meaning that Stacey's baby is not his. Roxy accuses Ronnie of murdering Archie. Ronnie denies it, but tells her she found out about Archie raping Stacey, and admits that Archie had also raped her as a child. Peggy tells the two of them that when Archie was murdered, she found him lying on the floor, took her divorce papers from the bar and left him to die. Phil tells Peggy about his alibi, the shirt and that he found Archie dead on Christmas Day. Shirley then returns and says Phil has got away with it as she has not told the police anything. Meanwhile, Becca anonymously reports to the police that Bradley had a motive for the murder. Jack receives a call from Hughes to say that Bradley is about to be arrested and urges Bradley to leave Walford as quickly as possible. Bradley and Stacey quickly pack their bags at home. Max Branning (Jake Wood) says an emotional goodbye to his son and Jack agrees to help them escape. They leave via the back door as Max delays the police at the front, and hide a few streets away. Jack also leaves by the back door but Marsden sees him and he is unable to meet Bradley and Stacey, who are nervously waiting. Bradley says they should go without Jack, but when they go to get a taxi to St Pancras railway station, Bradley realises he has left the passports at home and goes back to get them, leaving Stacey to wait. However, Stacey grows impatient and phones him. The police notice him when his phone rings, and in a bid to escape them, he runs up a fire escape and crawls across the roof of The Queen Victoria with an officer following him. He shouts at Stacey to run, but stumbles and falls backwards from the roof to his death as the residents look on in horror. Max and Stacey are devastated, and he pulls her away from the body. She tells him it is her fault, as Bradley did not kill Archie, she did. The following day, Marsden says the police will no longer be pursuing the investigation. Stacey then goes missing, and on the day of Bradley's funeral, Jack receives news that a court has found Bradley guilty of Archie's murder. Max tracks down Stacey to a flat where Stacey explains that she was angry at Archie and was worried about what Bradley would do to him after he found out about the baby. A minute after Bradley confronted Archie, she found Archie on the floor and, lucid and angered at what he had done to her and to Danielle, pushed the bust onto his head, but ran after his fingers twitched, fearing he would call the police. Stacey reveals that she did not initially tell Bradley the truth about what she did that night, fearing that he would take the blame for her. When she finally told him while they were packing on their wedding night, she offered to confess to the police herself, but he convinced her to flee Walford with him regardless. After forcibly trying to make her confess to the police, Max eventually tells Stacey that no one else needs to know that she killed Archie, reasoning that Bradley would want her to be happy, and sends her home. Becca continues to live with Stacey, and tries to exclude Stacey's mother Jean Slater (Gillian Wright) from her life. However, when Jean reveals Becca's involvement in Bradley's death, Stacey slaps Becca, which causes her to have a meltdown leading to getting kicked out by Jean as Stacey tells her mother she can trust her again. Later, Stacey figures out that Ryan must be her baby's father but decides not to tell him so as to not complicate his rekindled relationship with Janine, even when he is with her in the hospital as she gives birth to her daughter Lily. Several months later, at Janine and Ryan's wedding reception, Stacey confesses her fear about Archie still being alive to Peggy, who tells Stacey that Archie is dead and that Bradley killed him, accidentally causing Stacey to confess the truth to her. Peggy wants to call the police but after a fire at The Queen Victoria, Peggy tries to convince Stacey to admit to arson as the sentence would be a lot less than that for murder. She leaves Walford while letting Stacey take care of Lily who needs her. Stacey also tells Ryan that he is Lily's father, and although he initially refuses to acknowledge her, he later bonds with her and gets used to the idea of being a father while Janine and Stacey are arrested on a night out. Upset with this, Janine attempts to sabotage his relationship with Stacey, but her actions inadvertently cause them to realise their growing attraction to each other. Max's daughter Lauren Branning (Jacqueline Jossa) becomes angry at Max for never mentioning Bradley, leading to his confessing that he knows Bradley did not kill Archie. Lauren starts to suspect Max as he has become violent towards other people, but he tells her he promised to look after the real killer, who is no longer a danger. When Lauren sees Stacey dancing with Max, she accuses her of flirting with Max, but Stacey says they are just friends and he promised he would always look out for her. Lauren realises that Stacey is the killer and tells Max she knows this. She confronts Stacey, who confesses, and Lauren records it on her mobile phone. Lauren later hands the recording to Janine as Stacey and Ryan have begun having an affair. Max wipes the recording so on Christmas Eve, Janine publicly announces in the pub after trying to play the recording that Stacey killed Archie. Outside, Stacey privately tells Ryan that Janine is telling the truth. As Christmas Day runs through, Stacey experiences numerous upsetting thoughts about her role in Archie's death, and tells Jean about this. Upset, Jean takes Lily away from her, and things are made worse when Janine attempts to frame Stacey by stabbing herself while placing the knife in Stacey's hands and convincing Jean to call the police. Stacey considers suicide, but Max offers to help her flee the country. On the way, Stacey convinces Jean that Janine has framed her for the stabbing, and breaks off her romance with Ryan when he offers to come with her. Before Stacey and Max leave Walford with Lily, Ronnie and Roxy confront Stacey about the truth. Although Roxy wants her jailed, Ronnie quickly tells Stacey to go, feeling that she has suffered enough. Max drives Stacey to the airport, and tells her that he still loves her, offering to leave the country with her. Stacey tells him that the only man she has ever loved is Bradley. They share a teary and emotional goodbye with each other as Max watches Stacey leave for her flight. Stacey is last seen holding Lily in her arms while on the plane. In 2014, Stacey is found living in London using a false name. Her cousin Kat Moon (Jessie Wallace) brings her back to Walford. Stacey is still wanted by the police for stabbing Janine, and is eventually seen by Ronnie and Roxy. Roxy threatens to call the police but Ronnie convinces her not to. However, after Janine drops the charges, Stacey decides that she needs to clear Bradley's name, so tells the police she killed Archie. She is subsequently sentenced to five years in prison, but she decides to appeal the sentence, taking her bipolar disorder into account. The appeal is successful and Stacey is released. In 2019, while Stacey's old friend Ruby Allen (Louisa Lytton) tries to find some closure after being raped, she learns what Archie did to Stacey and they visit his grave together - with Ruby convincing Stacey to get the closure she needs in order to move forward with her life. Stacey does so by telling Archie off for his actions against her and ruining her life, before concludingly telling him he cannot hurt her anymore - nor does he deserve any sympathy from her or anybody else. ## Reception Overnight figures showed that Archie's murder on 25 December 2009 was watched by 45.9% of the viewing audience for that time, an average of 10.9 million and a peak of 11.9 million. It was the most watched TV show on Christmas Day 2009 in the UK. The following episode where the murder was discovered was also the most watched show of the day, with overnight ratings of 8.1 million, representing a 37.9% audience share. The investigation storyline helped EastEnders become the most watched soap opera on British television for the first time in three years, with average viewing figures for January 2010 of 10.8 million (40.4% audience share) compared to Coronation Street's 10.4 million (38.2%). Overnight figures for the live episode indicated that it averaged 14.91 million viewers and a 54.6% audience share, peaking at 16.58 million with a 59.4% share in the final five minutes of broadcast when Stacey was revealed as the killer. The 10:30 pm repeat of the episode on BBC Three drew a further 1.42 million viewers, attaining a 7.7% share. EastEnders Live: The Aftermath drew 4.3 million viewers and a 15.9% audience share, becoming BBC Three's highest rated programme ever, as well as the most-watched multichannel programme of the day. The documentary attained a further 1.21 million viewers and a 9.4% share upon its repeat at 11 pm. Santer was delighted by the viewing figures, stating: "To get this incredible response from the audience is truly remarkable – these numbers go far beyond what we ever hoped for. I am so proud of our cast and crew for their incredible performance last night. This rating is the icing on our silver anniversary cake." Jay Hunt, controller of BBC One commented: "[The] extraordinary live episode was a fitting celebration of 25 magnificent years for EastEnders. The audience were clearly gripped by one of the greatest soap whodunnits ever." Discussing the ratings for EastEnders Live: The Aftermath, controller of BBC Three Danny Cohen appraised: "It is an amazing testament to the EastEnders team and the brave and brilliant drama they provided." Archie's murder was compared to that of Den Watts in EastEnders in 2005 by Polly Hudson of the Daily Mirror, while Nancy Banks-Smith of The Guardian called it a rip-off of Citizen Kane. Andrew Grimes from Manchester Evening News said the Christmas Day episode was "in every sense compelling, and to my utter astonishment, a complete and utter joy", and John Gibson of Edinburgh Evening News gave the murder discovery episode on 26 December 2009 a negative review, saying "Hard to tell what was most horrific ... the murder, which was bloody, the acting, which was dire, or the script, which was torture." Tim Teeman of The Times called the revelation of Stacey as Archie's killer a "genuine surprise", while Pat Stacey of the Evening Herald felt that revealing Stacey as Archie's killer was "a slight let-down" and "a little bit predictable". The storyline was nominated in the Killer Secret category at the 2010 All About Soap Bubble Awards. It also received a nomination in the Best Storyline category at the 2010 British Soap Awards and the Best Soap Storyline category at the 2010 TVChoice Awards. Real life police detectives criticised the portrayal of detectives in the show, saying that viewers who see them talking to residents about the case and accepting bribes may believe they operate that way in reality. The BBC insisted that a police consultant was used, adding that "this is heightened fiction and all the things that we show might not always represent real life." The storyline was referenced by Prime Minister Gordon Brown when referring to allegations of bullying, saying "The only thing I haven't been accused of is murdering that guy Archie Mitchell in EastEnders." Bookmakers estimated that over £1 million would be spent gambling on the outcome of the storyline. Ladbrokes experienced its busiest ever 24 hours of gambling on a television series ahead of the episode's transmission, taking £100,000 in bets on 30 different characters, while William Hill took £500,000, surpassing the amount placed on Dallas's Who shot J. R.? storyline in 1980. Spokesman Rupert Adams commented: "The BBC were amazing keeping this quiet. We have broken even which in a market like this is amazing. We have had a roller-coaster but have enjoyed every minute."
34,349,329	Section 3 of the Human Rights Act 1998	1,167,070,148	Provision of the Human Rights Act 1998	[ "Constitutional laws of the United Kingdom", "Human rights in the United Kingdom", "Human rights legislation", "United Kingdom Acts of Parliament 1998" ]	Section 3 of the Human Rights Act 1998 is a provision of the United Kingdom's Human Rights Act 1998 that requires courts to interpret both primary and subordinate legislation so that their provisions are compatible with the articles of the European Convention of Human Rights, which are also part of the Human Rights Act 1998. This interpretation goes far beyond normal statutory interpretation, and includes past and future legislation, therefore preventing the Human Rights Act from being impliedly repealed by subsequent contradictory legislation. Courts have applied section 3 of the Act through three forms of interpretation: "reading in" – inserting words where there are none in a statute; "reading out" where words are omitted from a statute; and "reading down" where a particular meaning is chosen to be in compliance. They do not interpret statutes to conflict with legislative intent, and courts have been reluctant in particular to "read out" provisions for this reason. If it is not possible to so interpret, they may issue a declaration of incompatibility under section 4. Section 3 does not apply to the Illegal Migration Act 2023. ## Context Human rights are rights taken to be universal, of considerable importance, and relate to the individual and not collectively; among other things, they can grant freedoms, claims, immunities and powers. The European Convention on Human Rights was drawn up in the wake of the Second World War to uphold such rights. The United Kingdom ratified the European Convention on Human Rights in 1951, and accepted the right of individual petition to the European Court of Human Rights, Strasbourg, in 1966. The Human Rights Act 1998 made most Convention rights directly enforceable in a British court for the first time. Excluded are Articles 1 and 13, which the government argued were fulfilled by the Act itself, and therefore were not relevant to rights enforced under it. The Human Rights Act has had a considerable effect on British law, and remains an Act of "fundamental constitutional importance". ## Provisions Section 3(1) states that "So far as it is possible to do so, primary legislation and subordinate legislation must be read and given effect in a way which is compatible with the Convention rights." Accordingly, a court must read any statute passed by parliament so as to uphold Convention rights, where this is possible. It is possibly the section of the act with the widest scope. The Human Rights Act therefore built upon a small number of previously recognised absolute freedoms which could only be expressly subjugated to another aim. This is different from other systems, such as the New Zealand Bill of Rights, that require an interpretation to be "reasonable". As happened in R (Anderson) v Home Secretary, the alternative where such interpretation is not possible the alternative is a declaration of incompatibility under Section 4. Lord Hoffmann in a case, R (Simms) v Home Secretary, which bridged the introduction of the Human Rights Act, said: > Parliamentary sovereignty means that Parliament can, if it chooses, legislate contrary to fundamental principles of human rights. The Human Rights Act 1998 will not detract from this power. The constraints upon its exercise by Parliament are ultimately political, not legal. But the principle of legality means that Parliament must squarely confront what it is doing and accept the political cost. Fundamental rights cannot be overridden by general or ambiguous words. This is because there is too great a risk that the full implications of their unqualified meaning may have passed unnoticed in the democratic process. In the absence of express language or necessary implication to the contrary, the courts therefore presume that even the most general words were intended to be subject to the basic rights of the individual. In this way the courts of the United Kingdom, though acknowledging the sovereignty of Parliament, apply principles of constitutionality little different from those which exist in countries where the power of the legislature is expressly limited by a constitutional document. "Read and give effect" requires the interpretation "where possible" of legislation – where there is an interpretation open to the court that is consistent with Convention rights, it must be chosen over those that do not. Following the introduction of the Human Rights Act, there was some disagreement between judges as to how far this provision went. Lord Steyn, in R v A, has said "the interpretative obligation under section 3 of the 1998 Act is a strong one. It applies even if there is no ambiguity in the language in the sense of the language being capable of two different meanings." He further noted that it may be necessary under section 3 to "adopt an interpretation which linguistically may appear strained" and that a declaration of incomparability was a "measure of last resort". However, In re S established that there may be cases where interpretation can go too far; that the court can assume an administrative power it would not ordinarily have, with practical consequences that it is not best placed to consider: "a meaning which departs substantially from a fundamental feature of an Act of Parliament is likely to have crossed the boundary between interpretation and amendment." Given that the precise wording of a statute could be altered under the section, the "thrust" was important; going against the "thrust" required legislative power that the courts did not have. Although other sources could be used (see, for example, Pepper v Hart), the wording of a statute must be considered the primary intent of parliament. The decision in Ghaidan v Godin-Mendoza appears to have achieved some settling of the approach taken in extreme cases. Section 3(2)(a) extends the scope of section 3 to past and future Acts of Parliament in addition to present legislation. It therefore contradicts the usual policy of implied repeal – whereby any inconsistency between statutes are resolved in favour of the later statute. The Human Rights Act must therefore be explicitly (or "expressly") repealed by an Act of Parliament deliberately doing so, not merely be introducing contradictory legislation. The act therefore carries an additional normative force and has been considered constitutional in character as a result. It is widely recognised that parliament may never directly contradict convention rights, or at least do so very rarely. Sections 3(2)(b) and 3(2)(c) confirm the validity of all legislation, whether or not it has been interpreted under Section 3. Section 3 can therefore be said to protect primary legislation which is incompatible, and any secondary legislation made under such primary legislation. ## Interpretation Three types of judicial interpretation are commonly identified in the context of section 3: "reading in", "reading out" and "reading down". "Reading in" refers to adding in words that are not present in the statute so as to ensure compliance with Convention rights, and "reading out" removing words in a statute to do so. These processes had already been implemented with reference to the implementation of European legislation, so as to ensure compliance of domestic law with European law. Although accepted with secondary legislation, they remain controversial with primary legislation, since parliament would have included or omitted such words if it had had such an intent; reading in or out words would therefore conflict with parliamentary intention. Courts have, however, accepted these powers, and during the passing of the Human Rights Act, it was agreed that the courts would have such a power. In R v A, extra provisions were read into a statute to ensure compliance, since the statute itself had the legitimate aim of protecting potential rape victims; it was merely, in the words of Lord Steyn, that "the methods adopted amounted to legislative overkill". In Poplar Housing v Donaghue, the Court of Appeal rejected the possibility of reading in a provision, because it would have altered the method of remedying the problem to that laid down by Parliament, amounting to starting afresh on how best to approach the issue. Courts have been far more reluctant to read out wording for fear of going against parliamentary intention, but it remains a possibility. "Reading down" involves choosing an interpretation that is compatible, where more than one is strictly possible. For example, placing a persuasive burden of proof on a defendant raising a defence – that he need persuade the jury that it is the case, was judged to be incompatible with Article 6(2) of the convention, which related to the presumption of innocence, which had long been a part of English law in R v Lambert. The court read down the burden of proof as merely one of an evidential burden – meaning the defendant merely had to raise some evidence to support the defence, which it believed did not conflict with Article 6(2). However, in Sheldrake v DPP, the court instead requiring a persuasive burden, because it believed in the context of the motoring offence in the case, this was not disproportionate and did not conflict with Article 6(2). ## Controversy The relationship between sections 3 and 4 and parliamentary sovereignty has been commented on most extensively. The most common criticism has been of the implied limitations on legislative supremacy. Opponents of this criticism has questioned both its factual accuracy and its suggestion that the weakening of parliamentary sovereignty should be avoided. They instead cite morality and constitutionalism as among positive features of this change. The limits of courts' powers have also been queried. The retroactivity of law making is one criticism related to the rule of law, although the advancement of human rights is seen as a positive feature also associated with the rule of law. Whilst the scope of section 3 has been criticised for being vague and there have been warnings about the imposition of the judiciary on parliament's domain, these have also been challenged. ## Academic commentary Before the Human Rights Act was brought before parliament, the government's white paper considered that it was necessary to prevent courts from setting aside legislation on the basis of incompatibility (reflecting a strong need to respect parliamentary sovereignty). However, the effect on parliamentary sovereignty has been criticised despite the safeguards put in place. Section 3 has been defended, however, by reference to the enhanced morality and constitutionalism of the new system, prompted by an "incoming tide" of human rights. Aileen Kavanagh considers the choice of a court in cases not a question of parliamentary sovereignty, but a complex question of how far the judiciary can perform a legislative function in that area. She considers the political and legislative pressure on government after section 3 or 4 overwhelming to the extent that the concept of parliamentary sovereignty should be "eliminated". However, other writers have stressed the importance of the formal right to ignore either decision. The result of this debate has been to label section 3 either a "radical tool" to implement human rights, or a "significant limitation" of Parliament's will. Geoffrey Marshall has characterised section 3 as a "deeply mysterious provision" in several respects, including judging how strong a provision it is – an issue since dealt with by the courts – but has also noted a disparity between what the Act might be expected to do and what it does. He argues that a litigant would hope that courts would strive to uphold his rights under the convention, accepting a derivation from them only rarely; instead section 3 requires courts to find compatibility with the Convention where possible – in other words, to strive to find that the Convention does not impact the claimant. Alison L. Young has examined the upper boundaries to courts' powers of interpretation. She puts forward three possible limits: firstly, where the text of a statute is not ambiguous; secondly, where reading in words is inappropriate; and, thirdly, where any interpretation is restricted to cases where it does not involve implied repeal. Young dismisses the first two as incompatible with the legislative history (and, in at least the first case, judicial history) and believes the third to present no rigid limit on courts' powers at all. The decision of Pepper v Hart provides a method for the legislative history of a bill to play a role in its interpretation. Philip Sales and Richard Ekins are among those that believe that section 3 has not displaced the purpose of interpretation – to discern parliamentary intention. In their eyes, section 3 is about "how interpreters are to infer that intention". They also criticise the "judicial lawmaking" because it applies to the case in hand, concluding that this breaks the non-retroactivity commonly considered part of the rule of law, although it is sometimes necessary. They also note that rules made by courts are not transparent, because their new interpretation under section 3 differs from their ordinary meaning – after all, section 3 must go beyond standard interpretation. This leaves citizens uncertain of what the law is. Sales and Ekins also suggest that while applying section 3 to post-Human Rights Act legislation might be merely using a presumption that the legislature intended to follow it, applying it to pre-Human Rights Act legislation cannot possibly base itself on such an inference. Section 3, though, still allows them to do so. Another view is that Section 3 provides a much strengthened basis for the sort of "weak review" – the scope of which carefully determined between courts on one hand and parliament on the other – in a statutory form. There have been at least three criticisms put forward: firstly that the impossibility of implied repeal goes against some formulations of parliamentary sovereignty that require that no parliament can bind a future parliament. Secondly, whether section 3 interpretations follow parliamentary intent is questionable; thirdly, if it does allow interpretations contrary to intent, section 3 may render section 4 necessary. However, judicial powers are probably not unconstrained. The analysis of what the courts can and cannot do would also provide the answer the third criticism, depending on the viewpoint. Whilst the scope of section 3 has been criticised for being vague, and leading therefore more easily to the imposition of the judiciary on the legal domain of parliament, this viewpoint is controversial: they do not seem to have yet so encroached and there are rules emerging about the application of section 3.
30,959,062	SMS Hamburg	1,168,027,142	Bremen-class light cruiser of the Imperial German Navy	[ "1903 ships", "Bremen-class cruisers", "Maritime incidents in 1915", "Maritime incidents in July 1943", "Ships built in Stettin", "World War I cruisers of Germany" ]	SMS Hamburg ("His Majesty's Ship Hamburg") was the second member of the seven-vessel Bremen class of light cruisers, built for the German Kaiserliche Marine (Imperial Navy) in the early 1900s. She and her sister ships were ordered under the 1898 Naval Law that required new cruisers be built to replace obsolete vessels in the fleet. The design for the Bremen class was derived from the preceding Gazelle class, utilizing a larger hull that allowed for additional boilers that increased speed. Named for the city of Hamburg, the ship was armed with a main battery of ten 10.5 cm (4.1 in) guns and had a top speed of 22 knots (41 km/h; 25 mph). Hamburg served with the reconnaissance force of the main fleet for the majority of her early career, and during this period, she frequently escorted Hohenzollern, the yacht of Kaiser Wilhelm II. During World War I, she served as the deputy flagship of a flotilla of U-boats, and she frequently cruised with the High Seas Fleet during patrols in the North Sea. She was present at the Battle of Jutland on 31 May – 1 June 1916, where she was damaged in clashes with British light forces as the German fleet withdrew in the night. Obsolescent by that time, Hamburg was reduced to a stationary headquarters ship and was also used as an accommodation ship for the rest of the war. Following Germany's defeat, Hamburg remained in Germany and was among the vessels permitted to the Reichsmarine by the Treaty of Versailles. She was among the first vessels to be recommissioned in 1920 and in 1921, while escorting minesweepers, she engaged Soviet coastal artillery. Her crew assisted in the suppression of unrest in Hamburg in October 1923. Reduced to a training ship in 1926, she embarked on a world cruise, after which she was decommissioned and reduced to a barracks ship. She served in that capacity in Kiel until early 1944, when the Nazi-era Kriegsmarine moved her to Hamburg to be broken up; British bombers sank the ship in April before she could be dismantled. The wreck was raised after the war in 1949 and was finally scrapped by 1956. ## Design The German 1898 Naval Law called for the replacement of the fleet's older cruising vessels—steam corvettes, unprotected cruisers, and avisos—with modern light cruisers. The first tranche of vessels to fulfill this requirement, the Gazelle class, were designed to serve both as fleet scouts and as station ships in Germany's colonial empire. They provided the basis for subsequent designs, beginning with the Bremen class that was designed in 1901–1903. The principle improvements consisted of a larger hull that allowed for an additional pair of boilers and a higher top speed. Hamburg was 111.1 meters (365 ft) long overall and had a beam of 13.3 m (44 ft) and a draft of 5.28 m (17.3 ft) forward. She displaced 3,278 metric tons (3,226 long tons) as designed and up to 3,651 t (3,593 long tons) at full load. Her propulsion system consisted of two triple-expansion steam engines with steam provided by ten coal-fired Marine-type water-tube boilers. Her propulsion system was rated at 10,000 metric horsepower (9,900 ihp) for a top speed of 22 knots (41 km/h; 25 mph). Hamburg carried up to 860 t (850 long tons) of coal, which gave her a range of 4,270 nautical miles (7,910 km; 4,910 mi) at 12 knots (22 km/h; 14 mph). She had a crew of 14 officers and 274–287 enlisted men. The ship was armed with ten 10.5 cm (4.1 in) SK L/40 guns in single mounts. Two were placed side by side forward on the forecastle, six were located amidships, three on either side, and two were placed side by side aft. The guns could engage targets out to 12,200 m (13,300 yd). They were supplied with 1,500 rounds of ammunition, for 150 shells per gun. For defense against torpedo boats, she carried ten 3.7 cm (1.5 in) Maxim guns in individual mounts. She was also equipped with two 45 cm (17.7 in) torpedo tubes with five torpedoes. They were submerged in the hull on the broadside. The ship was protected by an armored deck that was up to 80 mm (3.1 in) thick. The conning tower had 100 mm (3.9 in) thick sides, and the guns were protected by 50 mm (2 in) thick gun shields. ## Service history ### Construction – 1907 Hamburg, ordered under the contract name "K", was laid down at the AG Vulcan shipyard in Stettin in August 1902. She was launched of 25 July 1903; at the ceremonies, the First Mayor of Hamburg, Johann Heinrich Burchard christened the ship after the city. A shipyard crew then transferred the unfinished vessel to Kiel for fitting-out. Hamburg was the first member of her class to enter service, being commissioned on 8 March 1904. The naval command intended to send Hamburg as an escort for Hohenzollern, the yacht for Kaiser Wilhelm II, but delays during her sea trials prevented her from joining Hohenzollern until June. She thereafter operated with the yacht for the following three months, beginning with a voyage from Kiel to Hamburg, where Wilhelm II embarked upon Hohenzollern for a sailing regatta. The ships then began a cruise to Norway from 7 July to 9 August; upon the Kaiser's return to Germany, he observed the fleet maneuvers in late August and early September aboard Hohenzollern, with Hamburg accompanying him. Beginning on 28 September, Hamburg joined the Reconnaissance Unit for the main fleet, taking the place of the light cruiser Niobe. She operated with the fleet that autumn and embarked on a winter training cruise in the Baltic Sea at the end of the year. The ship took part in the peacetime routine of unit and fleet exercises in 1905, interrupted by another voyage in company with Wilhelm II aboard Hohenzollern to Helgoland in March and another to Pillau and Glücksburg in October. She also took part in a cruise with her steam turbine-equipped sister ship Lübeck to compare the two vessels' propulsion systems. The years 1906 and 1907 passed uneventfully for Hamburg, her time occupied with training exercises with the fleet. During this period, Fregattenkapitän (FK—Frigate Captain) Oskar von Platen-Hallermund served as the ship's commander from September 1906 to the end of September 1907, when he was replaced by Korvettenkapitän (KK—Corvette Captain) Ernst Ritter von Mann und Edler von Tiechler. ### 1908–1914 In February 1908, Hamburg embarked on a major training cruise into the Atlantic with the other ships of the Reconnaissance Unit. The vessels steamed as far as Spain, where they visited Vigo. The ship once again escorted Hohenzollern from 6 March to 19 May. During this period, the two ships—along with the dispatch boat Sleipner—cruised to the Mediterranean Sea. They stopped in Venice, Italy, and the Greek island of Corfu before departing on 5 May to return to Germany. She then returned to fleet duties, which included a major training exercise in the North Sea and a cruise by the entire High Seas Fleet. Hamburg was scheduled to be decommissioned during the winter of 1908–1909, as soon as the new cruiser Dresden was ready to take her place. But the turbine-powered cruiser proved to have trouble completing her initial testing, which forced Hamburg to remain in service for another year. Another cruise to Spain took place in February 1909, during which time Hamburg again stopped in Vigo from 17 to 23 February. Upon returning to German waters, she was again designated the Kaiser's escort for another Mediterranean cruise. Hamburg, Hohenzollern, and Sleipner left Kiel on 24 March and arrived in Venice on 4 April. From there, they moved to Corfu on 16 April, where the Kaiser and his family planned to take their vacation. While there, reports of the persecution of Armenian Christians in the Ottoman Empire prompted widespread reaction throughout Europe; several countries dispatched warships to the southern Anatolian peninsula to protect the Armenians and Europeans in the area. Hamburg was detached as part of the operation and sailed on 21 April to Mersina, arriving there four days later. She was joined by the British battleship HMS Swiftsure and the French armored cruiser Victor Hugo, and later by Lübeck. The ships sent landing parties ashore to protect civilians, distribute food, and establish field hospitals. The situation had calmed by the mid-May, and on the 17th, Hamburg was detached to return home. She made the voyage, stopping in Port Said, Egypt and Málaga, Spain on the way, and ultimately arriving in Kiel on 28 May. After returning to Germany, Hamburg was assigned to the Reconnaissance Unit. Shortly thereafter, Hamburg was detailed to escort Hohenzollern once again, though this time would be in company with the new armored cruiser Gneisenau. The ships left Kiel on 13 June and sailed to Neufahrwasser, where Wilhelm II came aboard Hohenzollern. From there, they proceeded into the northern Baltic to Finnish waters, where they met Wilhelm's cousin, Tsar Nicholas of Russia aboard his own yacht. Hamburg returned to Kiel at the conclusion of the trip on 20 June. She continued to operate in company with Hohenzollern for the next month, including during a sailing regatta in early July, the inauguration of the joint German and Swedish passenger ferry service between Sassnitz and Trelleborg. Another summer cruise to Norway followed from 18 July to 3 August, and upon their return to German waters, Hamburg was detached to resume fleet service. She took part in the annual fleet maneuvers in late August and early September for the first time in her career. She was then decommissioned in Wilhelmshaven on 15 September, as by that time, Dresden was finally ready for service. Hamburg spent the years 1910 and 1911 in reserve, during which time she was overhauled but not modernized. She was recommissioned on 2 July 1912 to serve as the second command flagship for I U-boat Flotilla, part of the Torpedo-craft Inspectorate. She arrived at the unit on 6 August and thereafter took part in training exercises in the North Sea, followed by the fleet maneuvers later in August and September. She served in this capacity for the next two years, and during this period, KK Hermann Bauer served as the ship's commander from November 1913 to March 1914. At that time, on 15 March, she was transferred to the newly created U-boat Inspectorate. ### World War I Following the outbreak of World War I in July 1914, I U-boat Flotilla was stationed at Helgoland. On 6 August, she and the cruiser Stettin escorted a flotilla of U-boats into the North Sea in an attempt to draw out the British fleet, which could then be attacked by the U-boats. The force returned to port on 11 August, without having encountered any British warships. Another such operation took place the next day, also without resulting in contact with enemy vessels. On 21 August, the naval command dissolved both I and II U-boat Flotilla and reorganized the vessels of both units under Bauer's command, who was then given the title Führer der Unterseeboote (Leader of Submarines). Hamburg remained the flagship of the unit. Hamburg also operated with the High Seas Fleet during this period, generally in company with the light cruisers of IV Scouting Group. The first such operation was the bombardment of Scarborough, Hartlepool and Whitby conducted over the course of 15–16 December. IV Scouting Group was tasked with screening the main element of the fleet while the battlecruisers of I Scouting Group shelled the towns; the intention was to lure out a portion of the British fleet that could be defeated in detail. At 06:59 on 16 December, Hamburg, the armored cruiser Roon, and the light cruiser Stuttgart encountered British destroyers under Commander Loftus William Jones. Jones shadowed the Germans until 07:40, at which point Hamburg and Stuttgart were detached to sink their pursuers. Reports of the destroyers prompted Admiral Friedrich von Ingenohl, the German fleet commander, or order the fleet to withdraw. At 08:02, Roon signaled the two light cruisers and ordered them to abandon the pursuit and retreat along with the rest of the High Seas Fleet. The ship continued to operate with the fleet through 1915, in addition to her U-boat flagship duties. While cruising off the mouth of the Weser river on 21 April, she accidentally collided with the torpedo boat S21, breaking her in half and sinking her. Hamburg had to be drydocked for repairs, though these were completed in time for the ship to participate in a fleet sortie on 17–18 May. Another operation followed on 29–30 May; the ship saw little activity until the fleet conducted another sweep into the North Sea on 11–12 September, by which time the II. Führer der Torpedoboote (2nd Commander of Torpedo Boats), Kommodore (Commodore) Karl von Restorff had hoisted his flag aboard Hamburg. A final operation for 1915 took place on 23–24 October. None of the year's operations had resulted in contact with elements of the British Royal Navy. The fleet continued these operations in 1916, with sorties on 5–7 and 25–26 March and 21–22 and 24–25 April, the last of which resulted in the raid on Yarmouth and Lowestoft. Hamburg was assigned to IV Scouting Group during the Battle of Jutland on 31 May – 1 June 1916. The IV Scouting Group, under the command of Commodore Ludwig von Reuter, departed Wilhelmshaven at 03:30 on 31 May, along with the rest of the fleet. Tasked with screening for the fleet, Hamburg and the torpedo boat V73 were positioned on the port side of the fleet, abreast of II Battle Squadron. Hamburg and IV Scouting Group were not heavily engaged during the early phases of the battle, but around 21:30, they encountered the British 3rd Light Cruiser Squadron (3rd LCS). Reuter's ships were leading the High Seas Fleet south, away from the deployed Grand Fleet. Due to the long range and poor visibility, only München and Stettin were able to engage the British cruisers. Hamburg only fired one salvo, since the haze rendered it impossible to spot the fall of shot. Reuter turned his ships hard to starboard, in order to draw the British closer to the capital ships of the German fleet, but the 3rd LCS refused to take the bait and disengaged. After a series of night engagements between British cruisers and destroyers and the leading elements of the German fleet, including IV Scouting Group and the battleships of I Battle Squadron, the High Seas Fleet punched through the British light forces and reached Horns Reef by 04:00 on 1 June. In the course of the fighting, amburg and the other cruisers bore the brunt of subsequent attacks from British cruisers and destroyers, which scored several damaging hits on Hamburg. The German fleet reached Wilhelmshaven a few hours later; several of the battleships still in fighting condition took up defensive positions outside the port while he rest of the fleet entered Wilhelmshaven. In the course of the battle, Hamburg's crew suffered fourteen killed and twenty-five wounded. She was under repair until 26 July. The German experience at Jutland had demonstrated that older vessels, particularly the pre-dreadnought battleships of II Battle Squadron and cruisers like Hamburg possessed inferior defensive characteristics and were no longer suited to offensive operations. Hamburg also had limited wireless equipment, which hampered her ability to coordinate U-boats while at sea. She participated in her last fleet sortie on 18–20 August, during which Restorff had moved to the dreadnought Prinzregent Luitpold to use its superior wireless sets. The operation resulted in the action of 19 August 1916, though she was not engaged in the minor battle. Hamburg thereafter served as a headquarters ship for use in port, later being converted into a barracks ship for U-boat crews in Wilhelmshaven. Crew shortages elsewhere in the fleet led her crew to be reduced on 15 March 1917, and from then, KK Friedrich Lützow, who was Restorff's chief of staff, also performed the duties of Hamburg's commander. In the final weeks of the war, Germany was forced to abandon the U-boat campaign as a requirement for a cease-fire. Hamburg was not interned in Scapa Flow under the terms of the armistice that ended the fighting, and she remained in Wilhelmshaven during the peace negotiations that ultimately produced the Treaty of Versailles. The 'Führer der Torpedoboote and his staff came aboard the ship in February 1919. Following the signing of the treaty in June 1919, Hamburg was taken into the Reichsmarinewerft in Wilhelmshaven and was decommissioned there on 16 August. ### Postwar career and fate Hamburg remained out of service into 1920; instability in Germany during and after the Revolution of 1918–1919 culminated in the Kapp Putsch of March 1920, after which the new German navy, the Reichsmarine, began to recommission the old vessels that it was permitted to retain under the Versailles Treaty. Hamburg was among those vessels, and she was recommissioned on 7 September under the command of FK Bernhard Bobsien. She was assigned to the Marinestation der Nordsee (North Sea Naval Station), becoming the flagship of Konteradmiral (KAdm—Rear Admiral) Friedrich Richter, who fell ill in November and was temporarily replaced by Kapitän zur See (KzS—Captain at Sea) Walter Hildebrand. In addition to serving as the commander of the Marinestation, Richter, and then Hildebrand, was also the commander of II, IV, and VI Flotillas, which were tasked with clearing the minefields that had been laid in the North Sea during the war. KAdm Konrad Mommsen took command of the units on 2 April 1921, keeping Hamburg as the flagship. The cruiser visited the Shetland Islands from 13 to 17 June, the first time since the end of the war that a German vessel visited a foreign port. In July 1921, Hamburg took part in fleet training exercises with the battleship Hannover and the light cruiser Medusa, along with I and II Flotillas. She escorted minesweepers from the 8th and 11th Minesweeper Half-Flotillas as they cleared a field that had been laid by the auxiliary cruiser Meteor during the war. While in Kola Bay, the German unit came under fire from a Soviet coastal battery; the Germans returned fire and withdrew. Once the mine-clearing work was completed, the ships returned to Germany, stopping in several Norwegian ports, including Vardø, Hammerfest, Tromsø, Ålesund, and Bergen. They arrived back in Wilhelmshaven on 31 August; Hamburg saw no further activity of note during the year. In February 1922, the ship was employed as an auxiliary icebreaker in the Baltic to assist merchant vessels in the area. Her hull was not strong enough for the task, and she had to be drydocked to repair damage sustained at the end of February. While the work was being done, the battleship Braunschweig returned to service, replacing Hamburg as the flagship of the Marinestation on 1 March. The rest of the year passed fairly uneventfully, with the only notable occurrences being a visit to Odda, Norway and the annual fleet maneuvers in August and September. After the maneuvers, FK Erich Heyden replaced Bobsien. In July 1923, Hamburg visited Hanko, Finland, and Rønne on the Danish island of Bornholm. Continued unrest in Weimar Germany necessitated the deployment of Hamburg and two torpedo boats to the cruiser's namesake city in October. The two torpedo boats were detached to the Harburg district of the city and Hamburg sent a landing party ashore to help the city's police restore order. During this period, the fleet was reorganized, effective on 15 October; the position of Oberbefehlshaber der Seestreitkräfte (High Command of Naval Forces) was created as the superior command of the two Marinestation. Hamburg served as the flagship of KzS Adolf Pfeiffer, the commander of light naval forces in the North Sea. She spent the year 1924 conducting the normal peacetime routine of training exercises, interrupted by a visit to Riga from 8 to 14 July. After the August–September maneuvers, Heyden was relieved by now-KzS Lützow and Pfeiffer was replaced by KAdm Erich Raeder, though he remained in the position aboard Hamburg briefly, before Kommodore Franz Wieting replaced him in January 1925. At the same time, Hamburg was transferred to the Marinestation der Ostsee (Baltic Sea Naval Station), based in Kiel. Wieting remained the commander of light forces in the North Sea until 1 April, when that position was amalgamated with the deputy commander the battleship division; he thereafter transferred to Hannover in that role. In May, KzS Ernst Junkermann took command of the ship, though he served as the captain for just two months before being replaced by KzS Paul Wülfing von Ditten, who was in turn also relieved after two months by KK Hermann Densch. The ship was transferred to the Training Inspectorate to be used as a training ship, under the command of FK Otto Groos. Preparations began for a major training cruise that would circumnavigate the Earth; Carl Wilhelm Petersen, the mayor of Hamburg, presented the city's flag to the cruiser during ceremonies on 14 February 1926. Petersen then embarked on the cruiser, which took him to Cuxhaven, further downstream on the Elbe. From there, Hamburg passed through the English Channel into the Atlantic; as she steamed south, she made port calls in Pontevedra, Spain, Funchal, Portugal, and Las Palmas in the Canary Islands. From the central Atlantic, she crossed to the West Indies and passed through the Panama Canal and visited the west coast of North and Central America, cruising as far north as San Francisco, United States. She then began her voyage across the Pacific Ocean, stopping in Honolulu in the Territory of Hawaii, on her way to Japan. Hamburg then steamed south to the Philippines, where she visited Manila and Iloilo City, and the Dutch East Indies, where she visited a number of ports. After crossing the Indian Ocean, she stopped in Colombo, British Ceylon, and entered the Red Sea, thereafter passing through the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean. After stopping in Vigo, the last foreign port the ship visited on the trip, she arrived back in Wilhelmshaven on 20 February 1927. Hamburg was decommissioned on 30 June 1927 and she was reduced to reserve status the following year. She was stricken from the naval register on 31 March 1931, and five years later was converted by the Kriegsmarine into a barracks ship for submarine crews starting in 1936. During this period, she was based in Kiel, and she served in this capacity until 1944, when the Kriegsmarine decided to break her up for scrap. She was towed to her namesake city on 7 July 1944 for dismantling, where she was later sunk by British bombers on 27 July. The wreck was raised in 1949 and ultimately broken up in 1956.
23,846,370	Monster (Millennium)	1,094,200,865	null	[ "1997 American television episodes", "Millennium (season 2) episodes" ]	"'Monster" is the fourth episode of the second season of the American crime-thriller television series Millennium. It premiered on the Fox network in the United States on October 17, 1997. The episode was written by Glen Morgan and James Wong and directed by Perry Lang. "Monster" featured guest appearances from Kristen Cloke, Robert Wisden and Chris Owens. In the episode, Millennium Group profiler Frank Black (Lance Henriksen) travels to Arkansas to investigate allegations of child abuse in the community, meeting fellow Group member Lara Means (Cloke). They soon discover that the abuse may actually be the work of another child. "Monster" introduces the recurring character Lara Means, who would appear throughout the second season. The episode also features music by Bobby Darin, a hallmark of Morgan and Wong's work. The episode has been well received by critics, and earned guest star Lauren Diewold a nomination at the 1998 Young Artist Awards. ## Plot Millennium Group member Frank Black (Lance Henriksen) travels to Springdale, Arkansas to investigate allegations of child abuse brought against a daycare owner, Penny Plott (Mary Gillis). Before he leaves Seattle, he takes his daughter Jordan (Brittany Tiplady) shopping for shoes, but chastises her when she begins acting out for attention. In Arkansas, sheriff's deputy Bill Sherman (Chris Owens) discovers bite-marks on his son's skin after he returns home from the daycare. When his son refuses to discuss what happened, Sherman is convinced of the rumours about Plott. Black arrives in town, and pretends to be a local parent interested in using the daycare. His visit is interrupted by Lara Means (Kristen Cloke), who is investigating for Plott's defence. However, the two are forced to work together when one boy, Jason Wells, stops breathing. Despite attempts to revive him, the boy dies. Meanwhile, in Seattle, Black's wife Catherine (Megan Gallagher) takes Jordan to the dentist after she spits blood while brushing her teeth. The dentist tells her such an injury is most commonly caused by blunt force trauma. Catherine dismisses the idea outright, but Jordan mentions Black losing his temper during the shopping trip. An autopsy reveals Wells' death was the result of an asthma attack. However the ambitious district attorney, Gordon Roberts (Robert Wisden) believes Plott is somehow responsible. The investigation stalls until another child, Danielle Barbakow (Lauren Diewold), mentions overhearing Wells being physically abused by Plott. Plott is arrested by Sherman, who she reprimands sternly, reminding him that she looked after him as a child too, and has never been accused of anything in three decades of childcare work. Sherman sees she is incapable of what she has been accused of and continues to send his son to the daycare, but other parents protest, to the point of picketing and vandalizing the fence around the daycare. Black and Means discover that they have both been sent to investigate by the Group, realizing that this is some kind of test for them. They both come to believe that Barkabow, from whom Black senses a demonic presence, is responsible for Wells' death, and visit her home. Means speaks to Barkabow's mother while Black interviews the child. As they speak, Barkabow begins screaming and accuses Black of harming her; after he leaves the room she hits herself in the face and breaks her jaw. This leads Roberts, who learns that Black is under suspicion of harming Jordan, to arrest him for assault. Means has ultraviolet photographs taken of Barkabow's injuries, deduces that the girl was injured with an angel statue from her room. Means realizes that Black could not have wielded this statue, and Barkabow's mother admits to having heard her daughter hit herself. Black is released, and the Seattle investigation against him is dropped when Catherine defends him. The Black family and Lara return to Seattle, while Barbakow is adopted by a family of the Millennium Group. ## Production "The Beginning and the End" was written by frequent collaborators Glen Morgan and James Wong, and directed by Perry Lang. The episode was the sixth to have been written by Morgan and Wong, after the duo had penned "Dead Letters", "522666" and "The Thin White Line" in the first season, and "The Beginning and the End" and "Beware of the Dog" in the second. The pair would go on to script a further nine episodes over the course of the second season, having taken the roles of co-executive producers for the season. "Monster" saw director Lang's only contribution to Millennium. The episode makes use of Bobby Darin's song "Goodbye Charlie" in a diegetic manner; the song would also be put to use in the later second season episode "Goodbye Charlie". Darin's music has been noted by Millennium's resident composer Mark Snow as a hallmark of the works of Morgan and Wong, and would also appear in the episodes "Beware of the Dog" and "Sense and Antisense". "Monster" opens with a quote from William Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part 2—"First thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers". "Monster" marked Kristen Cloke's first appearance in the series as Millennium Group member Lara Means. Cloke would make several further appearances as the character, with the last of these being the second season finale "The Time Is Now". Guest stars Robert Wisden and Chris Owens both appeared in Millennium's sister show The X-Files—Owens first appeared in the Morgan and Wong-penned "Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man", before taking on the recurring role of Jeffrey Spender in that series' fifth season; while Wisden appeared in "Pusher". Wisden would also reappear in Millennium's third season, acting in an unrelated role in "TEOTWAWKI". ## Broadcast and reception "Monster" was first broadcast on the Fox network in the United States on October 17, 1997. The episode earned a Nielsen rating of 6 during its original broadcast, meaning that 6 percent of households in the United States viewed the episode. This represented approximately 5.88 million households, and left the episode the seventy-second most-viewed broadcast that week. Guest star Lauren Diewold received a nomination for Best Performance in a TV Drama Series – Guest Starring Young Actress at the 1998 Young Artist Awards for her role in "Monster", losing out to Cara Rose for Touched by an Angel. The episode received positive reviews from critics. The A.V. Club's Zack Handlen rated the episode B+, finding that it has "impressive ambition" but "doesn't really work". Handlen found the episode "immensely fun to watch", and was pleased that the series had departed from the sexually motivated serial killings of past episodes; however, he felt that the plot was "muddled" and found Black's personal involvement in the case to be unnecessary. Bill Gibron, writing for DVD Talk, rated the episode 4.5 out of 5, calling Cloke "an amazing addition to the series". Gibron also felt positively about the increasingly plot-driven nature of the series, describing Morgan and Wong's developments as a "complex, completely innovative mythology". Robert Shearman and Lars Pearson, in their book Wanting to Believe: A Critical Guide to The X-Files, Millennium & The Lone Gunmen, rated "Monster" four stars out of five, describing it as "a brave story well told". Shearman praised Diewold's guest appearance, and felt that the introduction of Lara Means was a positive addition, although it caused the character of Catherine to seem increasingly needless.
569,710	Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time	1,172,053,908	2003 video game	[ "2003 video games", "3D platform games", "Action-adventure games", "D.I.C.E. Award for Action Game of the Year winners", "D.I.C.E. Award for Adventure Game of the Year winners", "D.I.C.E. Award for Outstanding Achievement in Animation winners", "D.I.C.E. Award for Outstanding Achievement in Game Design winners", "D.I.C.E. Award for Outstanding Technical Achievement winners", "Game Boy Advance games", "GameCube games", "Gameloft games", "Games with GameCube-GBA connectivity", "Jade (game engine) games", "Mobile games", "Parkour video games", "PlayStation 2 games", "PlayStation 4 games", "Prince of Persia games", "Single-player video games", "Ubisoft games", "Video game reboots", "Video games developed in Canada", "Video games developed in India", "Video games featuring female protagonists", "Video games featuring non-playable protagonists", "Video games scored by Stuart Chatwood", "Video games set in India", "Video games set in Iran", "Video games with time manipulation", "Windows games", "Xbox One games", "Xbox games" ]	Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is an action-adventure video game developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft. The game was released on the Game Boy Advance, PlayStation 2, GameCube, Xbox and Windows in November 2003. The Sands of Time is a reboot of the Prince of Persia series created by Jordan Mechner. Mechner served as creative consultant, designer, and scenario writer for The Sands of Time. The game follows an unnamed Prince whose father sacks an ancient city at the instigation of a traitorous Vizier. During the attack, the Prince obtains an artifact called the Dagger of Time, while his father's army captures an hourglass containing the mysterious Sands of Time. Visiting the palace of the Sultan of Azad to present the Sands as a gift, the Vizier tricks the Prince into releasing the Sands, transforming the people of Azad into savage monsters under his control. Together with Farah, a young Princess who knows the power of the Sands, the Prince works to correct his mistake and foil the Vizier's evil plans. The gameplay revolves around the Prince's platforming abilities, broken up by fights with the creatures created by the Sands. A key mechanic in the game is using the Dagger to rewind time if the Prince makes a mistake while platforming and use it to kill and freeze enemies. Concept work began in spring of 2001, after Ubisoft acquired the Prince of Persia catalog. After Mechner was brought on board, production began in June of that year. After the initial story draft was scrapped as it was too complex, the team began with four guiding concepts, including the ability to rewind time: this idea grew into the Dagger, the Sands, and the various powers related to them. Mechner's script drew inspiration from the Shahnameh, with the main focus on creating a simple narrative that worked with the pace of gameplay. The game used Ubisoft's Jade engine, originally designed for Beyond Good & Evil, another game published by the company. Production was troubled, with the team facing problems with the engine structure and delays with environment assets, while also managing to create an effective tester network to seek out the game's bugs. In 2004, a version for mobile phones was developed and published in North America by Gameloft. Upon release, it received critical acclaim, being nominated for and winning numerous awards and has been recognized by many as one of the greatest video games of all time. Sales of the title were initially slow, but it eventually became a commercial success. Its success prompted the development of a sequel, Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, which was released in November 2004. Further games set in the Sands of Time continuity have been developed, and is generally cited as the reason for the Prince of Persia series' return to fame. As of 2014, the game has sold over 14 million copies worldwide, across all platforms. A remake is currently in development. ## Gameplay Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is an action-adventure puzzle-platformer. The player controls the main protagonist, an unnamed Prince from a kingdom in Persia. Environments are seen through a controllable third-person view. The camera's view changes to different positions triggered by entering certain areas or performing actions. The Prince can be moved in all directions, and he is able to manipulate large objects such as blocks and levers connected to mechanisms. His health and power meter are represented in the top left-hand corner of the screen. The Prince restores health by drinking water from pools and fountains. Collecting Sands increases the Prince's power, and drinking from hidden magic fountains increases the Prince's maximum health. During several points in the game, the Prince is assisted by his companion Farah, controlled by artificial intelligence, who fires a bow at enemies, though her arrows can also hit the Prince if he strays into her line of fire. Monsters will attack her, and if she is killed, the game ends. During exploration, the Prince navigates areas filled with traps: these traps include spike pits, arrow traps, wall-mounted blades and saws, and spinning spiked stakes. The Prince's main contextual move is wall-running, an action where he runs up onto and along a wall for a set distance, either to land on or jump off to a platform. The Prince's other acrobatic abilities include climbing along and across ledges, walking along beams, swinging on and jumping from poles, jumping onto and between pillars, and swinging on ropes. Large environmental puzzles are encountered during the Prince's journey, extending across multiple areas in large rooms. Many puzzles are cooperative, requiring Farah's help to complete them. In combat, the Prince fights monsters created by the Sands infecting the Palace's inhabitants with dual wielded melee weapons, his sword and Dagger of Time, each controlled by a single button. With the sword, a single command contextually triggers different moves depending on position and directional movement, while other special moves such as a somersault attack and bouncing off walls into enemies require additional commands. After being damaged by the sword, enemies can only be killed by stabbing them with the Dagger of Time, which gathers up the Sands inside them. The Sands the Prince collects from enemies and the environment are tied to his magical abilities, themselves connected with the Dagger. The most basic power is Rewind, the ability for the Prince to rewind time by up to ten seconds to reverse fatal game-ending mistakes such as missteps in platforming, getting overwhelmed by enemies or losing Farah. In combat, the Prince can also slow time immediately around him, freeze time for a single enemy, and freeze time completely so the Prince can attack his enemies at great speed while they are unable to move. Each use of power uses up one Sand Tank, and when empty, all powers become inaccessible until more Sand is collected. More powerful abilities, such as freezing time, are powered by Power Tanks. Increasing their number unlocks new Sand-based powers. Starting out with a small amount of Sand available to him, its capacity can be increased by collecting Sand from enemies, along with Sand Clouds scattered around the palace. Large columns of Sand within the Palace grant visions of future areas and act as save points. The Game Boy Advance version shares basic elements with its console counterparts. Displayed from a side-scrolling view, the Prince navigates the palace of Azad using his acrobatic skills. The Rewind ability is still present to save the Prince's life, and is also involved in solving some puzzles and fighting bosses. New moves and abilities are gained by the Prince by performing moves and solving puzzles. Farah is featured as a second playable character in some sections, with switching between the two being key to some puzzles. The mobile version is similarly a side-scroller, featuring simple puzzles and traps. The powers linked to the Sands are absent, but enemies must still be killed by stabbing them with the Dagger. There are three enemy types: archers, flying enemies, and foot soldiers. ## Plot The game is set in Persia during the 9th century AD, and begins with the Prince narrating to an unseen listener about his adventures. The Prince and the army of his father Shahraman are passing through India to visit the Sultan of Azad. The Vizier of a local Maharaja, wanting to prevent his death using a substance known as the Sands of Time, entices them into attacking the Maharaja's palace, where the Sands are stored. During the fight, the Prince loots an artifact called the Dagger of Time, and the Maharaja's daughter Farah is taken as a gift for the Sultan of Azad. Visiting Azad, the Vizier tricks the Prince into releasing the Sands, turning everyone but the Prince, the Vizier and Farah (protected by the Dagger, a staff and a medallion respectively) into monsters. The Vizier attempts to seize the Dagger from the Prince, but he escapes and eventually allies with Farah to undo the damage he has caused and prevent the Sands from covering the world, even though he has doubts about her loyalties and motives. Despite mistrusting each other, the Prince and Farah gradually fall in love. After navigating the palace of Azad and reaching the hourglass of the Sands in the Tower of Dawn, the Prince hesitates when following Farah's instructions on containing the Sands, unsure of whether to trust her as he has reoccurring visions of her stealing the Dagger from him. The Vizier ambushes them and they barely escape with the Dagger, ending up in a tomb beneath the city. As they try to find their way out of the tomb, Farah recounts a childhood story to the Prince that she has never told anyone else. Eventually finding shelter in a mysterious bathhouse, Farah seduces the Prince into the bath and they spend the night together. When the Prince wakes back in the palace, he realizes that Farah stole the Dagger while he was asleep and left the Prince her medallion to protect himself. He follows her and only just manages to catch her as she is driven over a ledge above the hourglass by monsters. To save the Prince, Farah allows herself to fall to her death. As the Prince mourns over her, the Vizier offers him eternal life in exchange for the Dagger. The Prince refuses and stabs the hourglass with the Dagger. Time rewinds to before the attack on the Maharaja's palace, and the Prince, still in possession of the Dagger and his memories, runs ahead to warn Farah of the Vizier's treachery. It is now revealed that the Prince has been recounting his tale to Farah, and as he finishes, the Vizier enters to kill him. The Prince kills the Vizier and returns the Dagger to Farah, who believes his narrative was just a story. The Prince passionately kisses Farah but she rebukes him because she no longer has any memory of ever having fallen in love with him. The Prince promptly rewinds time to undo his kiss. In parting, the Prince mentions a private word Farah told him during their time in the tomb, leaving her amazed and proving to her that what he had told her was indeed real. ## Development The development of the initial concept work for The Sands of Time began in the second quarter of 2001, after Ubisoft had bought the Prince of Persia license. While Ubisoft held the Prince of Persia catalog, the actual IP still belonged to the series original creator Jordan Mechner, but he was initially unwilling to return to the series after poor experiences with Prince of Persia 3D. The game was developed by Ubisoft Montreal, which was also a year into developing Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell. After some mock assets had been created, Ubisoft asked Mechner to come and help develop the game, showing them their concepts and the assets as AVIs. Mechner was impressed by Ubisoft's work and came on board as a creative consultant. He soon became more involved with the project, becoming the game's designer and writer. Full production began in June 2001, and at its peak was worked on by a staff of 65 people, internally known as "PoP Team". Development ran parallel to that of Splinter Cell, and as part of their research, the development team read One Thousand and One Nights, a collection of stories originating from the Middle East that Mechner had previously used as inspiration when designing the original Prince of Persia. Over the course of production, the team ran through over 150 different versions before the retail version. The Sands of Time was announced in March 2003. It was released for the PlayStation 2, Xbox, GameCube, Game Boy Advance and Windows. The versions were released gradually between October and November the same year. The various versions had multiple differences in both graphics and control options. The GameCube and Xbox versions included a documentary about the making of the game. The PC port came with support for EAX, EAX2, and EAX3 Advanced HD. Gameloft developed a version of the game for mobile phones, which was released in April 2004. Two versions were developed for higher and lower-spec mobile phones. Connecting the GameCube and Game Boy Advance versions of the game gave access to a port of the original Prince of Persia with the GameCube version, along with the ability for the Prince to automatically regenerate health. The PS2 version was released in Japan in September 2004. The game was published in the region by Sony Computer Entertainment Japan, who were impressed by both the quality and the praise it earned in the west. ### Design The game's title was thought up by the production team, but the original story built around the title proved impossible to work. The original draft had nine characters (including the Prince, two love interests, two villains, and two helper characters) representing different political factions, and the setting of the Prince's own palace home instead of in another kingdom. This storyline ultimately impeded other aspects of development, and so was scrapped. In starting over, the team returned to "The Sands of Time" title and concept. They decided upon four key elements for the game: "Unity of time and place", with the game taking place over twenty-four hours within the palace of Azad; "Acrobatics", referring to the gameplay and how the setting was constructed around this concept; "Combat", with the palace being filled with monsters to give the game and story a fast-paced feeling; and "Rewind", the ability to turn back and manipulate time. One of the early decisions made by the production team was not to refer to Prince of Persia 3D in any degree in designing the gameplay, instead looking to the 1989 original for reference. They intended to capture the original feeling of platforming an adventure in a 3D environment. The Rewind mechanic began as a gameplay wish for the title, surviving the initial rewrite of the story and becoming key to both story and gameplay. The Dagger of Time and the Sands were both born from the need to explain this mechanic in-game. The initial concept was simply using the Dagger to rewind time and dispatch enemies, but its powers were gradually expanded into its current roster. The main character's acrobatics were designed to be novel to the video game medium, inspired by similar stunts performed in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Matrix. A video game which provided inspiration for the acrobatic feats of the Prince was Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. Elements such as using ladders as part of combat, and riding on a magic carpet or a horse were axed early in development. The Rewind function was suggested by the game's director Patrice Désilets based on experiences playing Donald Duck: Goin' Quackers, where he had wished to rewind after making a mistake rather than restarting the entire level. The game design was also influenced by Ico. According to Désilets, they "spent an entire day going through Ico, the entire team together sitting down, looking at it, playing it, discussing it, brainstorming" and they particularly liked "how the castle in Ico seems real and you always know where you are, so we tried to have this a little bit also in the second palace". It also influenced the interaction between the player and the lead female character, but with some changes. According to Désilets, Farah "has some behaviors to help you out, but we didn't want for her to become a key just like in Ico, a key to a door all the time". Pre-production was originally estimated at ten months, but ultimately extended to fourteen months. Each time a new movement or ability was created for the Prince, it required adjustments to multiple other systems, as leaving them alone would have damaged the game. They also needed to make adjustments to the enemy and partner artificial intelligence, and they did not have time to polish those systems. All this meant that the debugging started much later than originally scheduled. The Prince had over 780 scripted movements, far more than any other character in the game. This caused problems with creating the movements for other characters. To make the character movements realistic, the team used motion capture to animate their movements. Art director Raphael Lacoste did not join the team until July 2002, well into the game's production, resulting in multiple delays in creating the game's environments. This issue was compounded by the need to produce a demo for the 2003 Electronic Entertainment Expo, then to deliver an entire game at the same if not a higher quality than the demo. Each environment needed to work for the Prince's set of movements and abilities: the work needed involved checking each rewind sequence, and each of the Prince's movement in and effect on the environment worked. These issues were compounded by the late delivery of environmental maps. In hindsight, producer Yannis Mallat lamented the fact that they did not have enough time to work out the problems caused by these issues. Despite these problems, other parts of production including play-testing, management of creative tools, and the integrated testing system worked smoothly. A cited example was the team discovering a tester that was good at finding severe bugs, so they included her in one of their testing groups, giving her a development kit she could use to sort out those bugs. This was replicated, and managed to greatly increase the amount of bugs that could be found and fixed. The development team's enthusiasm was also high, which enabled the problems during development to be overcome. During the aftermath of E3, the team considered release The Sands of Time as two games so they could include all the desired content, but the idea was dropped. Another element that needed to be cut after the demo was a griffin boss that would appear three times during the Prince's journey. The game used an updated version of the company's Jade engine, designed for Beyond Good & Evil. When the team saw the capacities of the Jade engine, they decided to use it for The Sands of Time. For The Sands of Time, the team made improvements to the engine by adding additional walking and running animations, enabling smoother character movement. They also made custom animations for the character. The engine made editing and fine-tuning the game very easy due to its easy-to-use tools. Using this as a base, they were able to focus on rapid integration of new elements into the game, and were also able to do quick testing and adjustments. The team developed "substance" and "glow" systems, which respectively enabled natural movements of cloth and gave the lightning effects a "magical" feel. The way the engine was structured, with all assets in a single accessible folder, proved problematic when alterations needed to be made or new features added, as the team size meant too many people were accessing the engine and were causing data to be overwritten, files to be corrupted, and the whole system to crash. They attempted to solve the problem using a "data monkey" solution which would allow for simultaneous access, but it came late in development and they did not risk making such a radical change to the system. Instead, they set up a file server to manage check-in times, which could allow for management of access and prioritisation of critical work. ### Writing Mechner created the scenario and wrote the game's script. While doing his research for the script, Mechner read a translation of the Shahnameh, an epic poem written by Ferdowsi between the 10th and 11th century. Reading it through helped Mechner visualise the new Prince as a more mature character than the original. Despite this, Mechner felt that the character could not fully shed the "happy-go-lucky" elements of One Thousand and One Nights. In retrospect, Mechner also felt that this inability to resolve this inherent conflict gave the character his charm. Mechner also included specific references in the Prince's dialogue to stories from the Shahnameh. The story and the Prince were created for newcomers to the series. The main scenario was based around second chances, while an unstated anti-war theme was also included by Mechner and showcased in the game's opening level. Mechner created the Dagger of Time as a combined gameplay and narrative device within the four core concepts created by the team. Its acquisition by the Prince was directly inspired by the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark, which had previously inspired his portrayal of the Prince in the original Prince of Persia. The palace of Azad was crafted to be the Prince's "playground", while some scenes which developed the Prince's portrayal (the opening attack on the Maharaja's palace, activating Azad's traps on the instructions of a deranged guard) were deliberately meant to be morally dubious to the player while increasing empathy with the character. Mechner's main preoccupation for this new storyline was keeping the narrative simple and engaging, using his preferred writing style of keeping cutscenes short and working as much of the story as possible into the gameplay. He also aimed to mix narrative and gameplay genres that might normally clash with one-another. The three main characters he created were the hero (the Prince), the villain (the Vizier) and the love interest and sidekick (Farah). Two non-playable authority figures (the Prince's father Shahraman and the Sultan of Azad) were included to add weight to the Prince's burden as they were transformed into monsters by the Sands. The three artefacts each character used (the Dagger, Farah's medallion and the Vizier's staff) were created to explain their survival of the Sands' release, with the Dagger also becoming integral to gameplay. The Prince's narration was both difficult and satisfying for Mechner. It needed to be written to work on two levels: first to be understandable for first-time players, and to gain greater significance upon future playthroughs. The narration also served to give gentle hints to the player, and expand upon the setting and add depth to the experience. Among his cited reference points for the narration were the 1940s version of The Thief of Bagdad, the works of Edgar Allan Poe, and films such as Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard. The Prince's interactions with Farah were also an important factor. As part of the character interaction, Farah was deliberately designed not to be a perfect archer, sometimes hitting the Prince if he strayed into her line of fire. Despite this, unspecified features planned for her needed to be cut. ### Audio The music for The Sands of Time was composed by Stuart Chatwood of the Canadian rock band The Tea Party. Chatwood was chosen for the role as Ubisoft wanted music that had Persian elements in it to fit the setting, while not being pure Persian music. When he was approached, Chatwood expanded his music library as part of his research. To achieve the desired effect, rock elements were mixed with Middle Eastern music and melodies, along with Indian elements. Chatwood used different instruments, including an Indian tabla and strings, along with vocal tracks by Cindy Gomez and Maryem Tollar. A soundtrack album for the game, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time Original Soundtrack, was released in Japan on 20 October 2004 by Scitron Digital Content. Tracks from the game were included in an album featuring music from both The Sands of Time and its two sequels Warrior Within and The Two Thrones. The album was released on 1 December 2005 as a pre-order bonus for the PS2 and Xbox versions of The Two Thrones. A larger compilation album featuring music from the three games was released digitally by Ubisoft on January 3, 2011. For the sound effects, the team worked with sound company Dane Tracks to create most of the game's sound effects, with the rest being done by Ubisoft Montreal. To make the enemies in the game stand out, the sound team mixed "organic and evil" sound effects with whispering sounds, rather than using sound effects associated with the undead. Mechner supervised the game's voice recording. The recorded took place at L. A. Vox and Ubisoft Montreal's sound studios. One of the unconventional choices made by the team was not to halt gameplay during in-game dialogue, meaning players could miss large portions of character interaction. In addition to story-based dialogue and banter, context-specific dialogue was written for certain situations. Over one thousand lines of dialogue were written, though over half of them were cut. To help with voice recording, the recording team created a graph to help the actors playing the Prince and Farah time their exchanges correctly. Aside from some exceptions which played in sequence, all comments made by Farah when the Prince did a specific thing were stand-alone responses. The actors were chosen for their roles based on how well their matched the characters. The Prince was voiced by Yuri Lowenthal, whose performance was proven popular and would return to voice the character in future games set after The Sands of Time. Speaking in a 2008 interview, Lowenthal felt "that [he] in a way originated that role". Farah was voiced by Joanna Wasick. Lowenthal and Wasick recorded their dialogue in separate studios. ## Reception ### Sales By the end of 2003, sales of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time had reached 2 million copies, and Ubisoft highlighted the game's success in Europe in a quarterly business report. Europe accounted for 1.1 million sales by February 2004; worldwide sales rose to 2.4 million units by the end of March. During its North American debut, the game suffered from poor sales: by December, the PS2 version had sold 218,000 copies, the Xbox version 128,000 copies, and the GameCube version 85,000 copies. Its combined sales since release at that time totaled 272,000 (PS2), 172,000 (Xbox), and 100,000 copies (GameCube). It was speculated that its sales were negatively affected by the concurrent release of Beyond Good & Evil, alongside other prominent releases at the time. In response to this, Ubisoft offered copies of their other games free with purchases of The Sands of Time, providing a boost to sales. By July 2006, the game's PlayStation 2 version alone had sold 700,000 copies in North America, bringing an estimated revenue of \$24 million. During its week of release in Japan, the game reached seventh place in the charts, selling 14,000 copies. This was noted as being high for a western game released in Japan. By the end of 2004, it had sold 26,116 copies. It received a "Gold" sales award from the Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association (ELSPA), indicating sales of at least 200,000 copies in the United Kingdom. As of 2014, the game has sold over 14 million copies worldwide, across all platforms. ### Critical reviews The Sands of Time received critical acclaim upon launch. Edge said that, despite difficulty spikes caused by respawning enemies, "the game cannot be commended highly enough". IGN's Matt Casamassina found the entire experience enjoyable, saying that "whether you're a diehard Prince of Persia fan or somebody with a mild interest in action-adventures, The Sands of Time is a must own -- a soon-to-be-classic worthy of a permanent place in your collection". 1UP.com, while pointing out the camera control as "tricky", said that the game "will make your chest explode if you've got a heart condition (in a good way, of course)". GameSpot's Greg Kasavin called it "a game that can be recommended wholeheartedly", and the publication named it the best game of November 2003 for GameCube, PlayStation 2 and Xbox. Both Eurogamer and Official PlayStation Magazine positively compared the game's aesthetics and presentation to Ico. Francesca Reyes of Official Xbox Magazine gave the game a good review, praising the story and general gameplay, but finding the combat difficult at times and lack of new skills. In closing, she praised the game's lasting appeal: "When the whole thing is over, it's perfectly timed to leave you wanting more. It's a stunning and rare achievement that makes you feel happy to be a gamer". Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu gave the PS2 version a good review, saying that the action was smooth and challenging, bearing similarities to the original Prince of Persia, and one reviewer found the Prince "colourful". The PC version shared much of the console version's praise, but the controls and responsiveness of the camera caused criticism. The Game Boy Advance version garnered lower scores than the console and PC versions due to its scaled-down gameplay and presentation, but was still generally praised as a competent port of the game. Nintendo Power said that "acrobatic moves and inventive traps have never been as free-flowing as they are in The Sands of Time". Reviewing the mobile version, IGN reviewer Levi Buchanan was impressed by the company's adaptation of the console game's basic actions and atmosphere, giving it a score of 9.5 out of 10. 1UP reviewer Corey Padnos was pleased with the Prince's acrobatic performance and the game's general performance, while lamenting the lack of the time-based mechanics of the main games and the lack of plot. At E3 2003, The Sands of Time was named as "Game of the Year". The game was named as Editor's Choice by GameSpot and IGN. At the 2003 Game Critics Awards, the game was awarded as "Best Action/Adventure Game". The Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences, at its awards ceremony in 2004, recognized Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time as "Console Game of the Year", "Platform Action/Adventure Game of the Year", and "Computer Action/Adventure Game of the Year"; it was also awarded for "Outstanding Innovation in Computer Gaming", as well as outstanding achievements in "Game Design", "Visual Engineering", "Animation", and "Gameplay Engineering". At the 2004 Game Developers Choice Awards, the game won the "Excellence in Game Design" and "Excellence in Programming" awards; it was also nominated in the "Game of the Year" and "Excellence in Visual Arts" categories. In 2009, Official Nintendo Magazine ranked it the 86th best game available on Nintendo platforms. The staff praised the developer's successful transition from 2D to 3D. IGN and Edge both named it among their 100 greatest games of all time in 2005 and 2007 respectively. Computer and Video Games placed it in its 2007 list of the 101 best PC games ever. In 2010, GamePro chose it as the 13th best PS2 game of all time. ## Legacy The year after the game's release, the game was featured in an episode of How It's Made, in a segment dedicated to video game production. The game has been cited as the reason why the Prince of Persia series, formerly ignored after Prince of Persia 3D, returned to prominence in the gaming world. In 2004, Mechner began work on a film adaptation, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer. The film was eventually released in 2010. The success of the game prompted immediate development on a sequel. Titled Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, the game was made aesthetically darker by the team. It was released in November 2004. Several further sequels set in the continuity of The Sands of Time followed. Aspects of its design, such as the relationship between the Prince and Farah, later provided inspiration for the 2008 series reboot. The Assassin's Creed series originated out of ideas for a sequel for Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. Its critical and financial success led Ubisoft to request Ubisoft Montreal to develop a sequel, aiming for the next console generation. The Ubisoft Montreal team decided on taking the gameplay from The Sands of Time into an open world approach, taking advantage of the improved processing power to render larger spaces and crowds. Narratively, the team wanted to move away from the Prince simply being someone next in line for the throne but to have to work for it; combined with research into secret societies led them to focus on the Assassins, heavily borrowing from the novel Alamut. They developed a narrative where the player would control an Assassin that served as a bodyguard for a non-playable Prince, leading them to call this game Prince of Persia: Assassin. The "Animus" device allowed them to explain certain facets of gameplay, such as accounting when the player fails a mission, in the same way they had done in The Sands of Time. ### Remake A remake of the game, developed by Indian studios Ubisoft Mumbai and Ubisoft Pune, was announced at Ubisoft Forward 2020 and was originally scheduled for release on 21 January 2021, for PlayStation 4, Windows, and Xbox One. Lowenthal returned to voice the Prince, while Farah was voiced by Supinder Wraich. The announcement trailer drew criticism from fans who considered the game's graphics to be lackluster, particularly as it was being developed using the newest iteration of Ubisoft Anvil. Ubisoft responded by stating that the visual style was an intentional choice, as they had wanted it to be "unique ... to make this game standout from other games" due to its fantasy elements. The release of the game was initially delayed by Ubisoft to 18 March, before being postponed indefinitely to "deliver a remake that feels fresh while remaining faithful to the original". In its quarterly financial report of 2021, Ubisoft stated the game was expected to be out during its 2022–2023 fiscal year. By May 2022, Ubisoft Montreal was taking over development of the remake. A month later Ubisoft once again delayed the game, this time stating that the company was no longer targeting a release during its 2022–2023 fiscal year.
46,410,103	Samuel Lightfoot Flournoy (lawyer)	1,092,536,989	American lawyer and politician	[ "1886 births", "1961 deaths", "20th-century American businesspeople", "20th-century American lawyers", "20th-century American politicians", "20th-century Presbyterians", "American people of English descent", "American people of French descent", "American people of Scottish descent", "American people of Swiss descent", "Burials at Spring Hill Cemetery (Charleston, West Virginia)", "Businesspeople from Charleston, West Virginia", "Fishburne Military School alumni", "Hampden–Sydney College alumni", "Lawyers from Charleston, West Virginia", "People from Romney, West Virginia", "Politicians from Charleston, West Virginia", "Presbyterians from West Virginia", "Robert White family of Virginia and West Virginia", "West Virginia Democrats", "West Virginia University College of Law alumni", "West Virginia lawyers" ]	Samuel Lightfoot Flournoy (January 17, 1886 – May 17, 1961) was an American lawyer and politician in the U.S. state of West Virginia. He was a prominent lawyer in Charleston, where he practiced law for over 50 years. Born in Romney in 1886, Flournoy was the son of West Virginia State Senator Samuel Lightfoot Flournoy. Flournoy was a grandson of Hampshire County Clerk of Court John Baker White and a nephew of West Virginia Attorney General Robert White and West Virginia Fish Commission President Christian Streit White. He was also a relative of Thomas Flournoy, United States Representative from Virginia. Flournoy relocated with his family to Charleston in 1890 during his father's second West Virginia Senate term. Flournoy was educated at Fishburne Military School, Hampden–Sydney College, and West Virginia University College of Law. He was admitted to the Kanawha County bar in 1911 and at various times during his law career, Flournoy was appointed special master, arbitrator, or commissioner for several high-profile court cases. In 1935, Flournoy was an unsuccessful Democratic candidate for an at-large seat on the Charleston City Council. In 1937, Flournoy was selected by Governor Homer A. Holt as a member of the Charleston Civil Service Board, which regulated the appointments of police and fire personnel. Flournoy served as an incorporator of the New Homes Corporation of Charleston in 1931 and was later president of the Mortgage Exchange Corporation. He was involved in the establishment of a local mortgage business association in 1952. Flournoy died in Charleston in 1961. ## Early life and education Samuel Lightfoot Flournoy was born on January 7, 1886, in Romney, West Virginia. He was the son of West Virginia State Senator Samuel Lightfoot Flournoy and his wife Frances "Fannie" Ann Armstrong White. Through his mother, Flournoy was a grandson of Hampshire County Clerk of Court John Baker White and a nephew of West Virginia Attorney General Robert White and West Virginia Fish Commission President Christian Streit White. Through his father, he was a relative of Thomas Flournoy, United States Representative from Virginia. Flournoy was of English and French ancestry through his father, and of Scottish and Swiss ancestry through his mother. In 1890, during his father's second term in the West Virginia Senate, Flournoy and his family relocated from Romney to Charleston, where his father continued practicing law after his resignation from the senate. Flournoy received his primary education at Fishburne Military School in Waynesboro, Virginia. Following his graduation from the military school, he received his secondary education at his father's alma mater Hampden–Sydney College in Hampden Sydney, Virginia, and went on to study jurisprudence at the West Virginia University College of Law in Morgantown, West Virginia. Flournoy was a member of the Chi Phi fraternity. ## Career ### Law career Flournoy became a member of the Kanawha County bar in 1911 and commenced the practice of law in Charleston. Flournoy was a partner in the Charleston law firm of Flournoy and Porter, where he practiced law for over 50 years. At various times during his law career, Flournoy was appointed special master, arbitrator, or commissioner for several high-profile court cases. In 1932, Flournoy was appointed special master in a suit involving the estate of Mercy J. Keller, the widow of Benjamin Franklin Keller, a judge for the United States District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia. Flournoy authored a report allowing for the distribution of funds to Keller's heirs and beneficiaries from Charleston National Bank. In December 1932, Flournoy provided mediation for several business and home owners who sued the city of Charleston over the widening of Virginia Street between Summers and Capitol Streets. He was unable to attend one of the lawsuit mediation conferences due to an ankle injury. In addition to his role as a special master and mediator, Flournoy was also selected to serve as a special commissioner in several Charleston lawsuits. Flournoy continued to expand his law practice by winning large contracts. In March 1933, he offered the lowest bid of \$3,745 for a contract that supplied certificates of land title in Kanawha and Fayette counties within the Huntington federal engineering district. The lands within the federal engineering district were to be utilized by the Federal government for river work. ### Political career In 1935, Flournoy was a West Virginia Democratic Party candidate for an at-large seat on the Charleston City Council. Flournoy actively campaigned for the at-large seat, and spoke to several local organizations, including the First Ward Negro Democratic Club and Beck's Mission on Charleston's West Side. Flournoy was ultimately unsuccessful in his bid for election to the at-large city council seat. During a controversial re-indexing of Kanawha County records by Works Progress Administration officials in 1935 and 1936, Flournoy served as chairman of the Charleston Bar Association's Re-Indexing Committee, which completed an independent investigation of the re-indexing progress, as ordered by the bar association's executive committee. Under Flournoy's leadership, the committee completed its review in January 1936. In 1937, Flournoy was appointed by West Virginia Governor Homer A. Holt as an at-large member of Charleston's Civil Service Board, which had been empowered by an act of the West Virginia Legislature to regulate the appointment of police and fire personnel in Charleston. While serving on the board, Flournoy was its president and spokesperson. ### Business career On July 14, 1931, Flournoy was an incorporator of the New Homes Corporation of Charleston, a building and construction firm, which was headquartered in the Davidson Building and was chartered with a capital stock value of \$50,000. Flournoy was later president of the Mortgage Exchange Corporation of Charleston. In his role as president of the Mortgage Exchange Corporation, Flournoy was involved in the establishment of a local association of mortgage businesspeople in February 1952. Flournoy was named by the association as one of three men appointed to the by-laws committee. ## Later life and death At the time of his appointment to the Charleston Civil Services Board, Flournoy resided at 8 California Avenue near the West Virginia Capitol Complex in Charleston. He later relocated to 4100 Kanawha Avenue SE in Charleston's Kanawha City neighborhood, where he resided at the time of his death. Flournoy died of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis at the age of 75 on May 17, 1961, at Kanawha Valley Memorial Hospital in Charleston following a prolonged illness. He was survived by his wife, his son, and his sister Frances Flournoy Preston. Flournoy's funeral services were held at the Barlow-Bonsall Funeral Home and his family requested that memorial donations be made to Marmet Hospital in his honor. He was interred at Spring Hill Cemetery in Charleston on May 19, 1961. At the opening of the September 1961 term of the Kanawha County Circuit Court, Flournoy was eulogized by Kanawha County Bar Association member Roy M. Sams. ## Personal life Flournoy married Sarah Katharine Cotton in Charleston in 1913. He and Katharine had two children, one son and one daughter: - Samuel Lightfoot Flournoy, Jr. (March 23, 1924 – December 27, 2014), married Virginia McManaway Cox of Thaxton, Virginia on June 14, 1964 - Nancy Margaret Cotton Flournoy Moore, married Webster Hamilton Moore of Greensboro, North Carolina, on December 3, 1949 Flournoy was a practicing Presbyterian and was a member of the Ruffner Memorial Presbyterian Church in Charleston.
35,893,183	Battle of the Baggage	1,165,842,590	737 Umayyad defeat in Transoxiana	[ "730s conflicts", "730s in the Umayyad Caliphate", "737", "Battles involving the Türgesh Khaganate", "Battles involving the Umayyad Caliphate", "Khurasan under the Umayyad Caliphate", "Muslim conquest of Transoxiana" ]	The Battle of the Baggage (Arabic: يوم الاثقال, romanized: Yawm al-athqāl) was fought between the forces of the Umayyad Caliphate and the Turkic Türgesh tribes in September/October 737. The Umayyads under the governor of Khurasan, Asad ibn Abdallah al-Qasri, had invaded the Principality of Khuttal in Transoxiana, and the local ruler called upon the Türgesh for aid. The Umayyad army retreated in haste before the Türgesh arrived, managing to cross the Oxus River just in time, while their rearguard engaged the pursuing Türgesh. The Türgesh crossed immediately after, and attacked the exposed Muslim baggage train, which had been sent ahead, and captured it. The main Umayyad army came to the rescue of the baggage train's escort, which suffered heavy casualties. The failure of the Umayyad campaign meant the complete collapse of the Arab control in the Upper Oxus valley, and opened Khurasan itself to the Türgesh. ## Background The region of Transoxiana had been conquered by the Arab Muslims under Qutayba ibn Muslim in 705–715, following the Muslim conquest of Persia and of Khurasan in the mid-7th century. The loyalty of Transoxiana's native Iranian and Turkic populations to the Umayyad Caliphate remained questionable, however, and in 719 the various Transoxianian princes sent a petition to the Chinese court and their Türgesh vassals for military aid against the Caliphate's governors. In response, from 720 on the Türgesh launched a series of attacks against the Muslims in Transoxiana, coupled with uprisings among the native Sogdians. The Umayyad governors initially managed to suppress the unrest, but control over the Ferghana Valley was lost and in 724 the Arabs suffered a major disaster (the "Day of Thirst") while trying to recapture it. Half-hearted efforts by the Umayyad government to placate the local population and win their support were soon reversed, and heavy-handed Arab actions further alienated the local elites. Consequently, in 728 a large-scale Transoxianan uprising broke out with Türgesh aid, which led to the Caliphate losing most of Transoxiana except for the region around Samarkand. The Muslims suffered in the Battle of the Defile in 731, in which they lost some 20,000men, crippling the native Khurasani Arab army and necessitating the transfer of new troops from Iraq. In the years after the Defile, Samarkand too was lost and the Sogdians under Ghurak regained their independence, while Muslim military activity north of the Oxus River was severely curtailed: what little campaigning is mentioned in the contemporary sources before 735 concerns operations to maintain the allegiance of the principalities of Tokharistan in the upper Oxus valley. In addition, the Umayyad authorities were preoccupied by the rebellion of al-Harith ibn Surayj, which broke out in early 734, spread quickly, and gathered the support of a large portion of the indigenous Iranian population. At one point, the rebel army even threatened the provincial capital, Marw. The arrival of the experienced Asad ibn Abdallah al-Qasri, who had already served as governor of Khurasan in 725–727, and who brought with him twenty thousand veteran and loyal Syrian troops, managed to reverse the tide and suppress Harith's revolt, although the rebel leader himself managed to escape to Badakhshan. During the year 736, Asad devoted himself to administrative matters in his province, the most important of which was the rebuilding of Balkh, to which he transferred his seat. In the meantime, Asad sent Junayd al-Kirmani against the remnants of Harith's followers, whom Junayd succeeded in evicting from their strongholds in Upper Tokharistan and Badakhshan. ## Battle In 737, Asad launched a campaign into the Principality of Khuttal, whose rulers had supported the Türgesh and Harith's rebellion. Asad was initially successful, but the Khuttalan regent, Ibn al-Sa'iji, called upon the Türgesh for aid. While the Muslim army was scattered pillaging, the Türgesh khagan Suluk brought his army, allegedly 50,000 strong, from his capital Tokmok into Khuttal within 17 days. Ibn al-Sa'iji, who tried to play both sides off against each other, informed Asad of the Türgesh expedition only shortly before its arrival. Asad had time enough to send ahead his heavy baggage train, laden with the plunder and captives from Khuttal, back south under the command of Ibrahim ibn Asim al-Uqayli, accompanied by the contingent from the allied principality of al-Saghaniyan. Asad with the main Muslim army remained behind, but at the arrival of the Türgesh host, Asad's troops broke into a headlong flight for the Oxus, which they managed to reach just ahead of the Türgesh. The crossing of the river was a confused affair, as Asad ordered each of his soldiers to carry across one of the sheep the army had brought with it as provisions. In the end, the sheep had to be abandoned as the pursuing Türgesh attacked the Arab rearguard, composed of the Azdi and Tamimi tribal contingents, on the north bank. As the rear guard was thrown back, Asad's army hurried to cross the river in panic. Once south of the river, Asad, believing himself to be safe from pursuit, ordered his men to set up camp and sent orders to Ibrahim to halt the baggage train and likewise set up camp. The Türgesh khaghan, after consulting the local rulers, followed the advice of the ruler of al-Ishtikhan and led his army to cross the river en masse. Faced with a full-scale charge of the Türgesh and their allies' cavalry, the Arabs withdrew to their camp. The Türgesh attacked the camp but were turned back after a fight in which, according to al-Tabari, the Arabs' servants put on pack-saddle cloths as armour and used the tent-poles to strike at the riders' faces.During the night the Türgesh departed, and rode south to overtake the Arab baggage train. Ibrahim ibn Asim had dug a trench around his encampment and his troops managed to beat off the first attacks by the khaghan's Sogdian allies. Then the khagan, after climbing a hill and scouting out the dispositions of the baggage escort, dispatched a portion of his men to attack the camp from behind, focusing on the allied Iranian troops from Saghaniyan, while the rest of the army attacked the Muslims from the front. The Türgesh attack almost annihilated the defenders: the greater part of the troops of Saghaniyan, along with their king, the Saghan Khudah, fell, and the Türgesh seized most of the baggage train. Only the timely arrival of Asad with the main Arab army saved the remnant of the baggage train escort from destruction. According to the account of al-Tabari, the Türgesh launched another unsuccessful attack on Asad's camp the following day, 1 October 737, and then departed. ## Aftermath While the Arab army returned to its base at Balkh, the Türgesh wintered in Tokharistan, where they were joined by Harith. The campaign had been a disaster for Asad and his now mainly Syrian army; Muslim control north of the Oxus had collapsed entirely, and while the Arab governor had been able to escape complete destruction, he had suffered considerable casualties. The losses suffered by the Syrians under Asad's command in the 737 campaign in Khuttal were of particularly grave importance in the long term, as the Syrian army was the main pillar of the Umayyad regime. Its numerical decline in Khurasan meant that the Khurasan-born Arabs could no longer be completely controlled by force; this opened the way for the appointment of a native Khurasani Arab governor, Nasr ibn Sayyar, to succeed Asad, and, eventually, for the outbreak of the Abbasid Revolution that toppled the Umayyad regime. As the Arabs customarily did not campaign during winter, Asad demobilized his men. On Harith's urging, on the other hand, the Türgesh khagan decided to launch a winter attack south of the Oxus, hoping to raise the local population in revolt against the Arabs. In this he was joined not only by Harith and his followers, but by the great majority of the native princes of Sogdiana and Tokharistan. Asad quickly mobilized his forces and managed to catch the khagan himself with a small part of his army and defeat them at Kharistan. Although both the khagan and Harith escaped capture, the Battle of Kharistan struck a blow to the khagan's prestige, and Suluk's murder by his rivals a short while afterwards saved the Muslims from worse. Under Asad's successor, Nasr ibn Sayyar, the Muslim armies recovered most of Transoxiana, and with the Battle of Talas in 751 and the turmoil of the An Shi Rebellion, which terminated Chinese influence in Central Asia, Muslim dominance in the region was secured.
60,258,346	Battle of Jinja	1,173,330,512	Battle of the Uganda–Tanzania War that took place on 22 April 1979	[ "1979 in Uganda", "April 1979 events in Africa", "Battles in Uganda", "Battles involving Tanzania", "Battles involving Uganda", "Conflicts in 1979", "Uganda–Tanzania War" ]	The Battle of Jinja was a battle of the Uganda–Tanzania War that took place on 22 April 1979 near and in the city of Jinja, Uganda between Tanzanian and allied Uganda National Liberation Front forces, and Ugandan troops loyal to Idi Amin. The Tanzanians and the UNLF men met slight resistance and captured Owen Falls Dam and the town of Jinja. Idi Amin had seized power in Uganda in 1971 and established a brutal dictatorship. Seven years later he attempted to invade neighbouring Tanzania to the south. The attack was repulsed, and the Tanzanians launched a counter-attack into Ugandan territory. After a number of battles, Amin's regime and military largely collapsed, and Kampala, the capital, was seized by the Tanzanians and the UNLF. Ugandan troops fled to the eastern city of Jinja, whose capture was entrusted to a force consisting of the Tanzanian 208th Brigade and members of the UNLF. The Tanzanian-UNLF force moved east out from Kampala on 15 April. Early in the morning on 22 April, the Tanzanians bombarded Jinja with artillery, and under the cover of darkness advanced towards the two bridges that crossed the Nile river west of the city. The column eliminated the resistance along the river and seized the Owen Falls Dam, which provided hydroelectric power to the entirety of Uganda. It entered Jinja largely unopposed and was met by cheering crowds, though sweeps through the city led to the capture of a few straggling Ugandan soldiers. ## Background In 1971 Idi Amin launched a military coup that overthrew the President of Uganda, Milton Obote, precipitating a deterioration of relations with the neighbouring state of Tanzania. Amin installed himself as President and ruled the country under a repressive dictatorship. In October 1978 Amin launched an invasion of Tanzania. Tanzania halted the assault, mobilised anti-Amin opposition groups, and launched a counter-offensive. In a matter of months, the Tanzania People's Defence Force (TPDF) and its Ugandan rebel allies—unified under the umbrella organisation Uganda National Liberation Front (UNLF)—defeated the Uganda Army in a number of battles, and occupied Kampala, Uganda's capital, on 11 April 1979. With his military disintegrating or already in open revolt, Amin's rule was collapsing. Amin and many of his forces fled to the eastern city of Jinja, which was home to approximately 50,000 people. Immediately after the fall of Kampala was announced, Ugandan troops already in Jinja began requisitioning vehicles and evacuating to Kenya. Amin addressed a crowd in the city, appealing to them to resist the Tanzanians and also vowing to make his "last stand" there and die in battle. According to journalist Nelson Bwire Kapo, Amin even declared Jinja the new capital of Uganda. He shortly thereafter fled to Arua, where he was picked up by a Libyan military plane and flown to Tripoli into exile. Nevertheless, some of his troops still garrisoned Jinja, which was the headquarters of the Eagle Colonel Gaddafi Battalion, and had control over the Owen Falls Dam at the source of the Nile River at Lake Victoria. The dam generated hydroelectric power which supplied electricity to all of Uganda and portions of Kenya. Observers were concerned that Amin's soldiers would sabotage or destroy the complex, and European newspapers spread rumors that Uganda Army troops were murdering civilians along the road to Jinja. The TPDF was under public pressure to immediately advance upon the city but took its time to reorganise and resupply in Kampala. Meanwhile, the soldiers of the Eagle Colonel Gaddafi Battalion changed into civilian clothes and withdrew into the bush with their weapons, from where they began harassing locals. The battalion's commanding officer, Hussein Mohammed, reportedly suggested to his men that they should surrender, prompting a riot by the soldiers who belonged to the West Nile tribes. As long-time partisans of Amin, many soldiers of West Nile origin feared that they would be murdered in case of surrender. A police officer later claimed that he had heard the Gaddafi Battalion soldiers shooting at each other over the dispute. With his men no longer following orders, Hussein fled to Kenya, accompanied by "many" other soldiers of battalion. After Hussein's flight, a refugee reported that "no one" was left in control of the town. The Uganda Army troops that remained in Jinja—many of whom were drunk—enforced a nightly curfew, looted some of the local shops and the hospital, and murdered civilians. Most of the Ugandan garrison gradually melted away before the arrival of the Tanzanian-led force at Jinja, confiscating vehicles to escape to the east. Historians Tom Cooper and Adrien Fontanellaz argued that "a few hundred soldiers could have easily defended" the town, but the Ugandan defences were completely disorganised. ## Prelude The Tanzanians eventually assigned the 208th Brigade under Brigadier Mwita Marwa, their unit with the most combat experience, to capture Jinja. A total of 4,000 Tanzanian and 1,000 UNLF troops were to partake in the operation. They were to be accompanied by three Tanzanian tanks. Initially, rumours spread about the UA troops mining the road from Kampala to Jinja as well as the dam, disquieting the TPDF leadership about the operation. However, the UNLF Minister of Energy, Paul Oryema Opobo, was in regular contact with those still working at the dam. He informed the TPDF that the Amin loyalists had not placed any mines, meaning that an operation to capture Jinja could go ahead. The TPDF also decided not to attempt to encircle Jinja, as this could force the local pro-Amin holdouts to engage in a last stand; by keeping possible routes of retreat open, the garrison would probably flee, allowing the Tanzanians to capture the local infrastructure intact. The combined force was able to requisition numerous vehicles in Kampala when it departed the city on 15 April, but had to share them among different groups of soldiers as it moved down the two-lane road toward Jinja. Intelligence reports indicated that there were few Uganda Army men along the route, easing worries about an ambush. Two days after the TPDF-UNLF advance began, British diplomat Richard Posnett told the Kampala press that the new Ugandan Minister of Power and Communications, Akena p'Ojok, had informed him that a team of commandos had secured Owen Falls Dam and was awaiting the arrival of the main force. The report was erroneous, but was quickly spread through the international media, and was even carried in a Tanzanian state-run newspaper, Daily News. According to Oryema Opobo, the report was a ploy by the Save Uganda Movement to cause confusion among the local garrison and try to mislead them into abandoning their positions. The British Broadcasting Corporation broadcast the story over radio, and many residents in the Jinja area, fearful of the Uganda Army soldiers stationed around the city, began heading for the dam in hope of safety. They encountered drunken, violent soldiers manning a roadblock at the dam who killed many of them. Towards the end of the week the TPDF-UNLF force came close to the installation and encountered dozens of battered civilians who had managed to pass by the Uganda Army soldiers. Oryema Opobo claimed that the story, alongside some guerrilla actions by local SUM members, did also cause more Amin loyalists to leave their positions and flee from Jinja. The TPDF-UNLF advance was relaxed and uneventful; no resistance was encountered during the march, and many soldiers ate sugar cane and listened to music from looted radios. The column met celebratory crowds in the towns it passed through along the Jinja road, and towards the end of the week hundreds of civilians were tailing the force, socialising with the soldiers, carrying their supplies and weapons, and fetching them water. The civilians that came from Jinja were questioned by Tanzanian intelligence officers about the status of Uganda Army forces in the Jinja area. They offered highly varied accounts of the situation; estimates of the garrison's strength ranged between 200 and 2,000 men, and there were rumors that Amin was still in the city. The Tanzanians were aware of the roadblock at the Owen Falls Dam, but were unsure if there were other troops along the Nile, or if most of Amin's forces had fled further east. There were only two passages across the Nile; a road bridge at the dam, and a railway bridge one kilometre upstream. Tanzanian planners assigned a main force of approximately 3,000 troops to secure Jinja and divided it into different groups to accomplish different tasks. One battalion was to secure the western side of the bridge, while another was then to quickly move across it and capture the eastern side. A third battalion, under Lieutenant Colonel Salim Hassan Boma, was to then proceed across and attack the Eagle Colonel Gaddafi Barracks. Two other battalions were tasked with seizing the rail bridge and waiting on the west bank, ready to flank Uganda Army forces should stiff opposition be put up near the dam. Tanzanian planners were worried that a few hundred soldiers could block their advance at the bridge, but were also afraid that heavy use of artillery would damage the dam and the bridges and create serious problems for the new Ugandan Government. ## Battle The Tanzanians initiated an artillery bombardment of Jinja at 03:00 on 22 April. In less than 15 minutes the TPDF-UNLF soldiers packed their gear and began their advance toward the river. Vehicles moved at the rear of the column without their headlights, as Tanzanian commanders hoped to surprise the Uganda Army troops under the cover of darkness. However, as the force progressed east, civilians from nearby villages came out to beat drums in celebration and cheer it on, and Tanzanian officers were unable to quiet them. The two battalions at the railway bridge found the passage undefended and secured it without incident. Approximately 200 metres from the crossing at the dam, the TPDF-UNLF force was targeted with machine gun fire. This was later described as the Uganda Army garrison's "half-hearted attempt at an ambush". Unsure of the exact origin of the fire, the lead battalion was forced to hold its position for 15 minutes while tanks were brought up from the rear to reinforce them. Once in position, they began spraying the surrounding fields with their own machine guns. They also fired their 100 mm guns high over the dam, and 70 mm recoilless rifles and rocket-propelled grenades were employed in a similar manner in an attempt to frighten the Uganda Army soldiers. One emerged with his hands raised above his head and was quickly captured and pulled into a ditch in which Tanzanian soldiers were taking cover. Questioned at gunpoint, he stated that the west side of the bridge was only defended by 19 soldiers and a tank under the command of a major. The Tanzanian tanks directed their main fire at the reported location of the Ugandan tank, while their machine guns and those of Tanzanian armoured personnel carriers raked the air ten feet above the ground. Tanzanian rockets destroyed a 106 mm Ugandan howitzer. An 800-strong Tanzanian battalion ran under the covering fire and secured the eastern side of the bridge. According to Tanzanian Lieutenant Colonel Ben Msuya, several Ugandan soldiers put up stiff resistance at the Nile Breweries Limited building near the bridge before they were cleared out. Several minutes later at about 08:00, the tanks and several thousand troops moved across the bridge and advanced towards Jinja. Around this time, the majority of the remaining Gaddafi Battalion soldiers fled the town. The western side of Jinja was quickly secured, but the TPDF-UNLF force took a cautious approach towards its advance into the downtown and the Eagle Colonel Gaddafi Barracks. Tanks bombarded the latter before Tanzanian infantry moved in to capture it. They found it deserted, and seized a dozen abandoned armoured vehicles, several buses and trucks, and large stocks of weapons. The TPDF-UNLF force met no opposition in the downtown, and were instead greeted by crowds of cheering civilians, which offered the soldiers sugar cane, oranges, and goats as gifts. Residents from villages on the western side of the Nile soon came into town to loot, but Tanzanian soldiers guarded the shops on the main street—the first time during the war they had made serious attempts to prevent pillaging. The civilians then took to stripping the unprotected shops and factories in outlying areas. Journalists who arrived in Jinja shortly before 09:00 found a dead Uganda Army sergeant and the bodies of two civilians. Throughout the remainder of the morning and into the late afternoon Tanzanian soldiers conducted sweeps of the residential areas. Lieutenant Colonel Boma reportedly brandished a spear, charging ahead of his men into buildings which were suspected to harbour Ugandan stragglers. The Tanzanians captured around half a dozen Uganda Army soldiers in civilian clothes, who were identified by civilians or by the military identification cards and pay stubs they carried. Some Tanzanian commanders felt that it was no longer necessary to take prisoners; the new Ugandan Government had successfully appealed the previous week to thousands of Uganda Army personnel to lay down their arms, so those who had not already surrendered did not deserve to be taken alive. At the behest of the crowds, several of the prisoners were shot. Tanzanian officers later told the press that most of the Uganda Army soldiers fled the town at the start of the bombardment in the morning. The only reported Tanzanian casualty of the battle was a young soldier who had accidentally shot himself in the foot. ## Aftermath An hour after Jinja was occupied, Marwa began walking around the city, gloating, "Idi Amin was the conqueror of the British Empire and I am the conqueror of Idi Amin! I am the conqueror of the conqueror of the British Empire!" Meanwhile, more journalists—some equipped with video cameras—arrived from the west. Marwa boasted to them that his forces had killed and captured many Uganda Army soldiers and that he would proceed to Arua, saying, "Amin is in Arua and we're going there to get him." Reporter Carey Winfrey wrote that "With the fall of Jinja, where the Nile River begins its 3,000‐mile journey north to the sea, the five‐and‐a‐half‐month war is all but over: By choosing not to stand at Jinja, Field Marshal Amin forfeited his best chance to oppose the Tanzanian forces." Cooper and Fontanellaz stated that Jinja's capture meant that "the war in Uganda was effectively over". On the day following Jinja's capture, Mohammed Sebbi, a Uganda Army commander who had ordered the execution of numerous residents in the town, tried to flee the area while disguised as a civilian. He was caught and beaten to death by townspeople. On 25 April, the TPDF's 208th Brigade—bolstered by the vehicles seized from the Eagle Colonel Gaddafi Barracks—advanced out of Jinja for the Kenyan border. Boma's battalion was left behind to maintain law and order in the city. At a road junction near Mbale, the brigade split into three battalions; one went to Mbale, one went to Moroto, and one went to Tororo. Arua was captured by the TPDF on 30 May. Combat operations in Uganda continued until 3 June, when Tanzanian forces reached the Sudanese border and eliminated the last resistance. Following the end of hostilities, Tanzanian officers reportedly used Jinja as hub to transport their loot from Uganda to Mwanza, including cars, tons of coffee, large amounts of gasoline, and war materiel. The TPDF withdrew from the country in 1981.
1,434,910	Don't Panic (Coldplay song)	1,158,783,407	2001 single by Coldplay	[ "1999 songs", "2001 singles", "Coldplay songs", "Parlophone singles", "Song recordings produced by Ken Nelson (British record producer)", "Songs written by Chris Martin", "Songs written by Guy Berryman", "Songs written by Jonny Buckland", "Songs written by Will Champion" ]	"Don't Panic" is a song by the British rock band Coldplay. Originally titled "Panic", the earliest known version of the song existed in 1998, performed live during the band's first gig in the same year. It had a different melody, and was included in the band's third EP, The Blue Room. The track was reproduced by Coldplay and British producer Ken Nelson for the band's debut album, Parachutes. Following their successful releases in 2000, Coldplay and their record label Parlophone thought there was enough exposure of the album in the United Kingdom. Thus, the decision of releasing a fourth single would be for regions that had not been overdosed by the hit singles "Yellow" and "Trouble". They settled on "Don't Panic", which at the time was an audience favourite. It was released in some European regions, and the United Kingdom only received a promo edition. The critical reception of the song was generally positive. ## Origins and production "Don't Panic" came into existence while Coldplay was still in its infancy, written and composed by singer Chris Martin. In the time, the band had written 10 songs including an early version of "Don't Panic", and used it in recruiting the band's drummer. It was originally called "Panic", and was one of six songs played at Coldplay's first gig in 1998 at Camden's Laurel Tree. This version has a different melody, and the lyrics are an account of a "slightly disastrous evening Chris had spent entertaining a young lady called Alice Hill". Eventually, the title became "Don't Panic." The original version of "Don't Panic" was recorded in 1999, different from the version featured in Parachutes. First, lead singer Chris Martin plays the piano during the bridge. As well, there is a feedback-distorted introduction. This version was included in The Blue Room EP, released in October 1999. For Coldplay's debut album Parachutes (2000), British record producer Ken Nelson re-produced "Don't Panic". The track was recorded live, like many other tracks featured in the album. Guitarist Jonny Buckland recorded twice his overdubbed guitars, and used parts of the two during the mixing. The band subtly used the acoustic guitar, drums and bass, and also a pump organ. Buckland also provides vocals for the second verse of the song. The song was recorded in Rockfield Studios, Wales and Parr Street Studio, Liverpool. "Don't Panic" is the opening track to Parachutes. A guitar-based song, it begins with strummed acoustic guitar riffs, then followed by the vocals of Chris Martin. A review claims that Coldplay's indie rock inclination is obvious in the song. The verse melody is similar to "Things" by Split Enz (1979). ## Release and reception Originally, the band planned to release "Don't Panic" as Parachutes' fourth single. However, it was abandoned after they deemed three singles were enough for an album. Following the successful single releases of the album in 2000, the band thought that Parachutes had gained enough exposure in significant regions in the United Kingdom. When they decided to release a fourth single, it would be for countries yet not "overdosed" by the hit singles "Yellow" and "Trouble". Coldplay and their record label, Parlophone, settled on "Don't Panic", which at the time was an audience favourite. The single was eventually released on 19 March 2001 in some European regions. The single is accompanied by the live tracks "You Only Live Twice", a theme song for the James Bond film of the same name, and "Bigger Stronger", a song taken from the band's first EP release; these live tracks were recorded during their performance at the Rockefeller Music Hall in Norway. Like their other songs, Coldplay has refused several offers to use "Don't Panic" for promotional tools. In 2004, the band rejected a multi-million Euro offer from Diet Coke and Gap to use "Don't Panic" and "Trouble", another song featured in the album. The band asked then-manager Phil Harvey to not refer them to such offers because "a discussion might lead to compromise". Despite this, the song has been used in many promotional tools and featured in several films and television series. In 2002, the song was featured in the comedy-drama film Igby Goes Down, and later appeared on the film's soundtrack album, released on 25 February 2003 by Spun Records. Also in 2003, the song was also featured on Coldplay's live album Live 2003. In 2004, it was on the romantic comedy film Garden State; director Zach Braff handpicked songs, including "Don't Panic", for the film's Grammy Award-winning compilation album, Garden State: Music From The Motion Picture. The song was also featured on the debut episode of the FX television series Rescue Me as well as the pilot episode of the short-lived show Odyssey 5. Additionally, the song was featured in episode nine of the first series on the British TV series Sugar Rush in 2005. On 19 July 2011, the song was played as a wake-up call to STS-135 Space Shuttle Atlantis Pilot Doug Hurley as a tribute from his wife and family, marking the last ever wake-up call for a crew visiting the International Space Station from the Space Shuttle fleet. It was also referenced in the 2016 movie The 5th Wave as a lullaby to the main character's little brother. In February 2016, a cover of the song by Clairity was used in the trailer for the 2016 film X-Men: Apocalypse, as well as the film's TV spot for the Super Bowl 50. This same cover was used in the seventh season finale of The CW series The Vampire Diaries ("Gods and Monsters"). During the band's 2003 A Rush of Blood to the Head Tour, "Don't Panic" contained an entirely different introduction. In addition, Martin played the electric guitar and Buckland in harmonica solo during the bridge. He regularly threw the harmonica into the crowd after the solo. In 2001, a dance cover version of "Don't Panic" was released by Logo featuring Dawn Joseph. During performances of "Don't Panic", Martin would stop the song after Buckland performs his verse and make him perform it a second time. Buckland jokingly stated in an interview with Business Times that he wanted the practice dropped, saying, "I don't think I would dread it so much if he didn't (sometimes) make me do it twice." Performances during 2017 legs of A Head Full of Dreams Tour would feature drummer Will Champion as lead vocalist. ### Critical reviews Upon release, critics gave the song generally positive reviews. MacKenzie Wilson, in his review from Allmusic, notes, "Coldplay's indie rock inclinations are also obvious, especially on songs such as 'Don't Panic' and 'Shiver'." In the Pitchfork Media review, Spencer Owen writes, "This subdued, dreamy opener contains Martin's falsetto chorus of 'We live in a beautiful world,' which seems to sum up the overall sentiment of the record." Robert Christgau alleged that, along with "Yellow", the song was one of only two good ones on all of Parachutes. Critic Adrian Denning, in his review of the album, compliments, "Both the vocals and guitar are utterly beautiful. It's a song to take solace from, draw comfort from, be quietly awed by." David DeVoe of Hybridmagazine.com wrote: "It is a wonderful song that echoes the promise of what is to come on the rest of the record. 'Don't Panic' is filled with excellent guitar tones and a nice grooving back beat, and I love the way the song ends." ## Music video The music video for "Don't Panic" was directed by Tim Hope. The video starts off with an animated diagram of the water cycle, then portrays the band as two-dimensional paper cutouts doing household chores, when suddenly disaster strikes the earth in the forms of floods, volcanoes and electric shocks. Like the music video for "Shiver", "Don't Panic" also features the yellow globe on the cover of Parachutes. ## Track listing Main single 1. "Don't Panic" – 2:20 2. "You Only Live Twice" (live from Norway) – 4:06 3. "Bigger Stronger" (live from Norway) – 4:55 Denmark version 1. "Don't Panic" – 2:19 2. "Trouble" (live Fra Vega I Danmark) – 4:36 3. "Shiver" (live Fra Vega I Danmark) – 5:25 4. "Sparks" (live Fra Vega I Danmark) – 4:05 Netherlands version 1. "Don't Panic" – 2:20 2. "Spies" (live at Lowlands 2000) – 6:12 3. "Bigger Stronger" (live at Lowlands 2000) – 4:51 4. "Yellow" (live at Lowlands 2000) – 4:32 French version 1. "Don't Panic" - 2:20 2. "You Only Live Twice" (live from Norway) – 4:08 3. "Don't Panic" (OUI FM Session Acoustique 102.3 FM) - 2:33 ## Credits and personnel - Chris Martin - lead vocals, acoustic guitar, piano - Jonny Buckland - lead guitar, vocals, slide guitar - Guy Berryman - bass guitar - Will Champion - drums, shaker ## Charts ## Certifications
4,740,559	Syd Barrett	1,169,877,239	English musician (1946–2006), co-founder of Pink Floyd	[ "1946 births", "2006 deaths", "20th-century British guitarists", "20th-century English composers", "20th-century English male singers", "20th-century English painters", "20th-century English singers", "21st-century English painters", "Alumni of Anglia Ruskin University", "Alumni of Camberwell College of Arts", "Blues rock musicians", "Capitol Records artists", "Deaths from cancer in England", "Deaths from pancreatic cancer", "EMI Records artists", "English experimental musicians", "English male guitarists", "English male painters", "English male singer-songwriters", "English people with disabilities", "English rock guitarists", "English rock singers", "English singer-songwriters", "Experimental composers", "Experimental guitarists", "Harvest Records artists", "Lead guitarists", "Musicians from Cambridgeshire", "Outsider musicians", "People with schizophrenia", "Pink Floyd members", "Protopunk musicians", "Psychedelic folk musicians", "Psychedelic rock musicians", "Rhythm guitarists", "Slide guitarists", "Syd Barrett" ]	Roger Keith "Syd" Barrett (6 January 1946 – 7 July 2006) was an English singer, guitarist and songwriter who co-founded the rock band Pink Floyd in 1965. Barrett was the band's frontman and primary songwriter, known for his whimsical style of psychedelia, English-accented singing, and stream-of-consciousness writing style. As a guitarist, he was influential for his free-form playing and for employing effects such as dissonance, distortion, echo and feedback. Originally trained as a painter, Barrett was musically active for less than ten years. With Pink Floyd, he recorded four singles, their debut album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967), portions of their second album A Saucerful of Secrets (1968), and several songs that were not released until years later. In April 1968, Barrett was ousted from the band amid speculation of mental illness and his excessive use of psychedelic drugs. He began a brief solo career in 1969 with the single "Octopus", followed by albums The Madcap Laughs (1970) and Barrett (1970), recorded with the aid of three other members of Pink Floyd. In 1972, Barrett left the music industry, retired from public life and strictly guarded his privacy until his death. He continued painting and dedicated himself to gardening. Pink Floyd recorded several tributes and homages to him, including the 1975 song suite "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" and parts of the 1979 rock opera The Wall. In 1988, EMI released an album of unreleased tracks and outtakes, Opel, with Barrett's approval. In 1996, Barrett was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Pink Floyd. He died of pancreatic cancer in 2006. ## Life and career ### Early years Roger Keith Barrett was born on 6 January 1946 in Cambridge to a middle-class family living at 60 Glisson Road. He was the fourth of five children. His father, Arthur Max Barrett, was a prominent pathologist and was said to be related to Elizabeth Garrett Anderson through Max's maternal grandmother Ellen Garrett. In 1951, his family moved to 183 Hills Road. Barrett played piano occasionally but usually preferred writing and drawing. He bought a ukulele aged 10, a banjo at 11 and a Höfner acoustic guitar at 14. A year after he purchased his first acoustic guitar, he bought his first electric guitar and built his own amplifier. He was a Scout with the 7th Cambridge troop and went on to be a patrol leader. According to one story, at the age of 14, Barrett acquired the nickname Syd after an old Cambridge jazz bassist, Sid "the Beat" Barrett; Barrett changed the spelling to differentiate himself. By another account, when Barrett was 13, his schoolmates nicknamed him Syd after he came to a field day at Abington Scout site wearing a flat cap instead of his scout beret, because "Syd" was a "working-class" name. He used both names interchangeably for several years. His sister Rosemary said: "He was never Syd at home. He would never have allowed it." At one point at Morley Memorial Junior School, Barrett was taught by the mother of future Pink Floyd bassist Roger Waters. Later, in 1957, he attended Cambridgeshire High School for Boys with Waters. His father died of cancer on 11 December 1961, less than a month before Barrett's 16th birthday. On this date, Barrett left the entry in his diary blank. By this time, his siblings had left home and his mother rented out rooms to lodgers. Eager to help her son recover from his grief, Barrett's mother encouraged the band in which he played, Geoff Mott and the Mottoes, a band which Barrett formed, to perform in their front room. Waters and Barrett were childhood friends, and Waters often visited such gigs. At one point, Waters organised a gig, a CND benefit at Friends Meeting House on 11 March 1962, but shortly afterwards Geoff Mott joined the Boston Crabs, and the Mottoes broke up. In September 1962, Barrett had taken a place at the art department of the Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology, where he met David Gilmour. In late 1962 and early 1963, the Beatles made an impact on Barrett, and he began to play Beatles songs at parties and at picnics. In 1963, Barrett became a Rolling Stones fan and, with then-girlfriend Libby Gausden, saw them perform at a village hall in Cambridgeshire. He would cite Jimmy Reed as an influence; however, he remarked that Bo Diddley was his greatest influence. At this point, Barrett started writing songs; one friend recalls hearing "Effervescing Elephant" (later to be recorded on his solo album Barrett). Also around this time, Barrett and Gilmour occasionally played acoustic gigs together. Barrett had played bass guitar with Those Without in mid-1963 and bass and guitar with the Hollerin' Blues the next summer. In 1964, Barrett and Gausden saw Bob Dylan perform. After this performance, Barrett was inspired to write "Bob Dylan Blues". Barrett, now thinking about his future, decided to apply for Camberwell College of Arts in London. He enrolled in the college in the summer of 1964 to study painting. ### Pink Floyd years (1965–1968) Starting in 1964, the band that would become Pink Floyd evolved through various line-up and name changes including the Abdabs, the Screaming Abdabs, Sigma 6 and the Meggadeaths. In 1965, Barrett joined them as the Tea Set (sometimes spelled T-Set). When they found themselves playing a concert with another band of the same name, Barrett came up with the Pink Floyd Sound (also known as the Pink Floyd Blues Band, later the Pink Floyd). During 1965, they went into a studio for the first time, when a friend of Richard Wright's gave the band free time to record. During this summer Barrett had his first LSD trip in the garden of friend Dave Gale, with Ian Moore and Storm Thorgerson. During one trip, Barrett and another friend, Paul Charrier, ended up naked in the bath, reciting: "No rules, no rules". That summer, as a result of the continued drug use, the band became absorbed in Sant Mat, a Sikh sect. Storm Thorgerson (then living on Earlham Street) and Barrett went to a London hotel to meet the sect's guru; Thorgerson managed to join the sect; Barrett, however, was deemed too young to join. Thorgerson saw this as a deeply important event in Barrett's life, as he was extremely upset by the rejection. While living near his friends, Barrett decided to write more songs ("Bike" was written around this time). #### London Underground, Blackhill Enterprises and gigs While Pink Floyd began by playing cover versions of American R&B songs, by 1966 they had carved out their own style of improvised rock and roll, which drew as much from improvised jazz. After Bob Klose departed from the band, the band's direction changed. However, the change was not instantaneous, with more improvising on the guitars and keyboards. Drummer Nick Mason reflected, "It always felt to me that most of the ideas were emanating from Syd at the time." At this time, Barrett's reading reputedly included Grimm's Fairy Tales, Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and The I-Ching. During this period, Barrett wrote most of the songs for Pink Floyd's first album, and also songs that would later appear on his solo albums. In 1966, a new rock concert venue, the UFO, opened in London and quickly became a haven for British psychedelic music. Pink Floyd, the house band, was its most popular attraction and after making appearances at the rival Roundhouse, became the most popular musical group of the London underground psychedelic music scene. By the end of 1966, Pink Floyd had gained a reliable management team in Andrew King and Peter Jenner. Towards the end of October 1966, Pink Floyd, with King and Jenner, set up Blackhill Enterprises, to manage the group's finances. Blackhill was staffed by lodgers Jenner found in his Edbrooke Road house, and among others, Barrett's flatmate, Peter Wynne Wilson (who became road manager, however, since he had more experience in lighting, he was also lighting assistant). King and Jenner wanted to prepare some demo recordings for a possible record deal, so at the end of October, they booked a session at Thompson Private Recording Studio, in Hemel Hempstead. King said of the demos: "That was the first time I realised they were going to write all their own material, Syd just turned into a songwriter, it seemed like overnight." King and Jenner befriended American expatriate Joe Boyd, the promoter of the UFO Club, who was making a name for himself as one of the more important entrepreneurs on the British music scene. The newly hired booking agent, Bryan Morrison, and Boyd had proposed sending in better quality recordings. From Morrison's agency the band played a gig outside London for the first time. In November, the band performed the first (of many) strangely named concerts: Philadelic Music for Simian Hominids, a multimedia event arranged by the group's former landlord, Mike Leonard, at Hornsey College of Art. They performed at the Free School for the following two weeks, before performing at the Psychodelphia Versus Ian Smith event at the Roundhouse in December, arranged by the Majority Rule for Rhodesia Campaign, and an Oxfam benefit at the Albert Hall (the band's biggest venue up to this point). #### Tonite Let's All Make Love in London At the beginning of 1967, Barrett was dating Jenny Spires. However, unknown to Barrett, Spires had an affair with Peter Whitehead. Spires convinced Whitehead (who thought the band sounded like "bad Schoenberg") to use Pink Floyd in a film about the swinging London scene. At the cost of £80 (), in January, Whitehead took the band into John Wood's Sound Techniques in Chelsea, with the promoter Joe Boyd. They recorded a 16-minute version of "Interstellar Overdrive" and another composition, "Nick's Boogie". Whitehead had filmed this recording, which was used in the film Tonite Let's All Make Love in London and later on the video release of London '66–'67. Whitehead later said the band "were just completely welded together, just like a jazz group". #### The Piper at the Gates of Dawn Boyd attempted to sign the band with Polydor Records. However, Morrison had convinced King and Jenner to try to start a bidding war between Polydor and EMI. In late January, Boyd produced a recording session for the group, with them returning to Sound Techniques in Chelsea again. After the bidding war idea was finished, Pink Floyd signed with EMI. Unusual for the time, the deal included recording an album, which meant the band had unlimited studio time at EMI Studios in return for a smaller royalty percentage. The band then attempted to re-record "Arnold Layne", but the Boyd version from January was released instead. The band's first studio album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, was recorded intermittently between February and July 1967 in Studio 3 at Abbey Road Studios, and produced by former Beatles engineer Norman Smith. By the time the album was released on 4 August, "Arnold Layne" (which was released months earlier, on 11 March) had reached number 20 on the British singles charts, despite being banned by Radio London, and the follow-up single, "See Emily Play", had peaked at number 5. The album was successful in the UK, hitting number 6 on the British album charts. Their first three singles (including their third, "Apples and Oranges"), were written by Barrett, who also was the principal visionary/author of their critically acclaimed 1967 debut album. Of the eleven songs on Piper, Barrett wrote eight and co-wrote another two. #### Health problems Through late 1967 and early 1968, Barrett became increasingly erratic, partly as a consequence of his heavy use of psychedelic drugs such as LSD. Once described as joyful, friendly, and extroverted, he became increasingly depressed and withdrawn, and experienced hallucinations, disorganised speech, memory lapses, intense mood swings and periods of catatonia. Although the changes began gradually, he went missing for a long weekend and, according to several friends, including Wright, came back "a completely different person". One of the striking features of his change was the development of a blank, dead-eyed stare. Barrett did not recognise friends, and often did not know where he was. While Pink Floyd were recording "See Emily Play" at the Sound Techniques studio, Gilmour stopped by on his return visit from Europe to say hello to Barrett. According to Gilmour, he "just looked straight through me, barely acknowledged me that I was there". Boyd encountered Barrett and the rest of the Floyd at the UFO Club in mid-1967, which he described in his memoir: "I had exchanged pleasantries with the first three when Syd emerged from the crush. His sparkling eyes had always been his most attractive feature but that night they were vacant, as if someone had reached inside his head and turned off a switch. During their set he hardly sang, standing motionless for long passages, arms by his sides, staring into space." On a tour of Los Angeles, Barrett is said to have exclaimed, "Gee, it sure is nice to be in Las Vegas!" Many reports described him on stage, strumming one chord through the entire concert, or not playing at all. At a show in Santa Monica, Barrett slowly detuned his guitar. Interviewed on The Pat Boone in Hollywood television program during the tour, Barrett replied with a "blank and totally mute stare"; according to Mason, "Syd wasn't into moving his lips that day." Barrett exhibited similar behaviour during the band's first appearance on Dick Clark's television show American Bandstand. Surviving footage of this appearance shows Barrett miming his parts competently; however, during a group interview afterwards, Barrett gave terse answers. During their appearance on the Perry Como show, Rick Wright had to mime all the vocals on "Matilda Mother" because of Barrett's condition. During this time, Barrett would often forget to bring his guitar to sessions, damage equipment and was occasionally unable to hold his plectrum. Before a performance in late 1967, Barrett reportedly crushed Mandrax tranquilliser tablets and a tube of Brylcreem into his hair, which melted down his face under the heat of the stage lighting, making him look like "a guttered candle". Mason disputed the Mandrax portion of this story, saying that "Syd would never waste good mandies". #### Departure from Pink Floyd During Pink Floyd's UK tour with Jimi Hendrix in November 1967, guitarist David O'List from The Nice (who were fifth on the bill) substituted for Barrett on several occasions when he was unable to perform or failed to appear. Around Christmas, Pink Floyd asked Gilmour to join as a second guitarist to cover for Barrett. For a handful of shows, Gilmour played and sang while Barrett wandered around on stage, occasionally joining the performance. The other band members grew tired of Barrett's antics and, on 26 January 1968, when Waters was driving on the way to a show at Southampton University, they elected not to pick Barrett up. One person in the car said, "Shall we pick Syd up?" and another said, "Let's not bother." As Barrett had written the bulk of the band's material, the plan was to retain him as a non-touring member, as the Beach Boys had done with Brian Wilson, but this proved impractical. According to Waters, Barrett came to what was to be their last practice session with a new song he had dubbed "Have You Got It Yet?" The song seemed simple when he first presented it, but it soon became impossibly difficult to learn; the band eventually realised that Barrett was changing the arrangement as they played, and that Barrett was playing a joke on them. According to David Gilmour, it "was really just a twelve-bar, but the responses were always in the wrong places according to Syd. Some parts of his brain were perfectly intact—his sense of humour being one of them." Waters called it "a real act of mad genius". Of the songs Barrett wrote for Pink Floyd after The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, only "Jugband Blues" was included on their album, A Saucerful of Secrets (1968). "Apples and Oranges" became an unsuccessful single, and "Scream Thy Last Scream" and "Vegetable Man" remained unreleased until 2016 in The Early Years 1965–1972 box set, as they were deemed too dark and unsettling. Barrett played guitar on the Saucerful of Secrets tracks "Remember a Day" and "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun". Feeling guilty, the members of Pink Floyd did not tell Barrett that he was no longer in the band. According to Wright, who lived with Barrett at the time, he told Barrett he was going out to buy cigarettes when leaving to play a show. He would return hours later to find Barrett in the same position, sometimes with a cigarette burned completely down between his fingers. The incident was later referenced in the film Pink Floyd – The Wall. Emerging from catatonia and unaware that a long period had elapsed, Barrett would ask, "Have you got the cigarettes?" Barrett spent time outside the recording studio, in the reception area, waiting to be invited in. He also came to a few performances and glared at Gilmour. On 6 April 1968, Pink Floyd officially announced that Barrett was no longer a member, the same day their contract with Blackhill Enterprises was terminated. Considering him the band's musical leader, Blackhill Enterprises retained Barrett. ### Solo years (1968–1972) After leaving Pink Floyd, Barrett was out of the public eye for a year. In 1969, at the behest of EMI and Harvest Records, he embarked on a brief solo career, releasing two solo albums, The Madcap Laughs and Barrett (both 1970), and a single, "Octopus". Some songs, "Terrapin", "Maisie" and "Bob Dylan Blues", reflected Barrett's early interest in the blues. #### The Madcap Laughs (1970) After Barrett left Pink Floyd, Jenner quit as their manager. He led Barrett into EMI Studios to record tracks in May that were released on Barrett's first solo album, The Madcap Laughs. However, Jenner said: "I had seriously underestimated the difficulties of working with him." By the sessions of June and July, most of the tracks were in better shape; however, shortly after the July sessions, Barrett broke up with his girlfriend Lindsay Corner and went on a drive around Britain, ending up in psychiatric care in Cambridge. During New Year 1969, Barrett, somewhat recovered, had taken up tenancy in a flat on Egerton Gardens, South Kensington, London, with the postmodernist artist Duggie Fields. Barrett's flat was so close to Gilmour's that Gilmour could look right into Barrett's kitchen. Deciding to return to music, Barrett contacted EMI and was passed to Malcolm Jones, the head of EMI's new prog rock label, Harvest. After Norman Smith and Jenner declined to produce Barrett's record, Jones produced it. Barrett wanted to recover the recordings made with Jenner; several of the tracks were improved upon. The sessions with Jones started in April 1969 at EMI Studios. After the first, Barrett brought in friends to help: the Humble Pie drummer Jerry Shirley, and the Willie Wilson, the drummer of Gilmour's old band Jokers Wild. For the sessions, Gilmour played bass. Jones said that communicating with Barrett was difficult: "It was a case of following him, not playing with him. They were seeing and then playing so they were always a note behind." A few tracks on the album feature overdubs by members of Soft Machine. During this time, Barrett also played guitar on the sessions for the Soft Machine founder Kevin Ayers' debut LP Joy of a Toy, although his performance on "Religious Experience", later titled "Singing a Song in the Morning", was not released until the album was reissued in 2003. At one point, Barrett told his flatmate that he was going for an afternoon drive, but followed Pink Floyd to Ibiza; according to legend, he skipped check-ins and customs, ran onto the runway and attempted to flag down a jet. One of his friends, J. Ryan Eaves, the bass player for the short-lived but influential Manchester band York's Ensemble, spotted him on a beach wearing dirty clothes and with a carrier bag full of money. During the trip, Barrett asked Gilmour for help in the recording sessions. After two of the Gilmour/Waters-produced sessions, they remade one track from the Soft Machine overdubs and recorded three tracks. These sessions came to a minor halt when Gilmour and Waters were mixing Pink Floyd's newly recorded album, Ummagumma. However, through the end of July, they managed to record three more tracks. The problem with the recording was that the songs were recorded as Barrett played them "live" in studio. On the released versions a number of them have false starts and commentaries from Barrett. Despite the track being closer to complete and better produced, Gilmour and Waters left the Jones-produced track "Opel" off Madcap. Gilmour later said of the sessions for The Madcap Laughs: > [The sessions] were pretty tortuous and very rushed. We had very little time, particularly with The Madcap Laughs. Syd was very difficult, we got that very frustrated feeling: Look, it's your fucking career, mate. Why don't you get your finger out and do something? The guy was in trouble, and was a close friend for many years before then, so it really was the least one could do. Upon the album's release in January 1970, Jones was shocked by the substandard musicianship on the songs produced by Gilmour and Waters: "I felt angry. It's like dirty linen in public and very unnecessary and unkind." Gilmour said: "Perhaps we were trying to show what Syd was really like. But perhaps we were trying to punish him." Waters was more positive: "Syd is a genius." Barrett said: "It's quite nice but I'd be very surprised if it did anything if I were to drop dead. I don't think it would stand as my last statement." #### Barrett (1970) The second album, Barrett, was recorded more sporadically, the sessions taking place between February and July 1970. The album was produced by Gilmour, and featured Gilmour on bass guitar, Richard Wright on keyboard and Humble Pie drummer Jerry Shirley. The first two songs attempted were for Barrett to play and/or sing to an existing backing track. However, Gilmour thought they were losing the "Barrett-ness". One track ("Rats") was originally recorded with Barrett on his own. That would later be overdubbed by musicians, despite the changing tempos. Shirley said of Barrett's playing: "He would never play the same tune twice. Sometimes Syd couldn't play anything that made sense; other times what he'd play was absolute magic." At times Barrett, who experienced synaesthesia, would say: "Perhaps we could make the middle darker and maybe the end a bit middle afternoonish. At the moment it's too windy and icy." These sessions were happening while Pink Floyd had just begun to work on Atom Heart Mother. On various occasions, Barrett went to "spy" on the band as they recorded their album. Wright said of the Barrett sessions: > Doing Syd's record was interesting, but extremely difficult. Dave [Gilmour] and Roger did the first one (The Madcap Laughs) and Dave and myself did the second one. But by then it was just trying to help Syd any way we could, rather than worrying about getting the best guitar sound. You could forget about that! It was just going into the studio and trying to get him to sing. #### Performances Despite the numerous recording dates for his solo albums, Barrett undertook very little musical activity between 1968 and 1972 outside the studio. On 24 February 1970, he appeared on John Peel's BBC radio programme Top Gear playing five songs—only one of which had been previously released. Three would be re-recorded for the Barrett album, while the song "Two of a Kind" was a one-off performance (possibly written by Richard Wright). Barrett was accompanied on this session by Gilmour and Shirley who played bass and percussion, respectively. Gilmour and Shirley also backed Barrett for his one and only live concert during this period. The gig took place on 6 June 1970 at the Olympia Exhibition Hall as part of a Music and Fashion Festival. The trio performed four songs, "Terrapin", "Gigolo Aunt", "Effervescing Elephant" and "Octopus". Poor mixing left the vocals barely audible until part-way through the last number. At the end of the fourth song, Barrett unexpectedly but politely put down his guitar and walked off the stage. The performance has been bootlegged. Barrett made one last appearance on BBC Radio, recording three songs at their studios on 16 February 1971. All three came from the Barrett album. After this session, he took a hiatus from his music career that lasted more than a year, although in an extensive interview with Mick Rock and Rolling Stone in December, he discussed himself at length, showed off his new 12-string guitar, talked about touring with Jimi Hendrix and stated that he was frustrated in terms of his musical work because of his inability to find anyone good to play with. ### Later years (1972–2006) #### Stars and final recordings In February 1972, after a few guest spots in Cambridge with ex-Pink Fairies member Twink on drums and Jack Monck on bass using the name The Last Minute Put Together Boogie Band (backing visiting blues musician Eddie "Guitar" Burns and also featuring Henry Cow guitarist Fred Frith), the trio formed a short-lived band called Stars. Though they were initially well received at gigs in the Dandelion coffee bar and the town's Market Square, one of their gigs at the Corn Exchange in Cambridge with MC5 proved to be disastrous. A few days after this final show, Twink recalled that Barrett stopped him on the street, showed him a scathing review of the gig they had played, and quit on the spot, despite having played at least one subsequent gig at the same venue supporting Nektar. In a 1975 interview Barrett mentions listening to Taj Mahal and Captain Beefheart. Free from his EMI contract on 9 May 1972, Barrett signed a document that ended his association with Pink Floyd, and any financial interest in future recordings. He attended an informal jazz and poetry performance by Pete Brown and former Cream bassist Jack Bruce in October 1973. Brown arrived at the show late, and saw that Bruce was already onstage, along with "a guitarist I vaguely recognised", playing the Horace Silver tune "Doodlin'". Later in the show, Brown read out a poem, which he dedicated to Syd, because, "he's here in Cambridge, and he's one of the best songwriters in the country" when, to his surprise, the guitar player from earlier in the show stood up and said, "No I'm not". By the end of 1973, Barrett had returned to live in London, staying at various hotels and, in December of that year, settling in at Chelsea Cloisters. He had little contact with others, apart from his regular visits to his management's offices to collect his royalties, and the occasional visit from his sister Rosemary. In August 1974, Jenner persuaded Barrett to return to Abbey Road Studios in hope of recording another album. According to John Leckie, who engineered these sessions, even at this point Syd still "looked like he did when he was younger ... long haired". The sessions lasted three days and consisted of blues rhythm tracks with tentative and disjointed guitar overdubs. Barrett recorded eleven tracks, the only one of which to be titled was "If You Go, Don't Be Slow". Once again, Barrett withdrew from the music industry, but this time for good. He sold the rights to his solo albums back to the record label and moved into a London hotel. During this period, several attempts to employ him as a record producer (including one by Jamie Reid on behalf of the Sex Pistols, and another by the Damned, who wanted him to produce their second album) were fruitless. #### Wish You Were Here sessions Barrett visited the members of Pink Floyd in 1975 during the recording sessions for their ninth album, Wish You Were Here. He attended the Abbey Road session unannounced, and watched the band working on the final mix of "Shine On You Crazy Diamond"—a song about him. Barrett, then 29, was overweight and had shaved off all of his hair (including his eyebrows), and his former bandmates did not initially recognise him. Barrett spent part of the session brushing his teeth. Waters asked him what he thought of the song to which Barrett responded "sounds a bit old". He is reported to have briefly attended the reception for Gilmour's wedding to Ginger that immediately followed the recording sessions, but Gilmour said he had no recollection of this. A few years later, Waters saw Barrett in the department store Harrods; Barrett ran away, dropping his bags, which Waters said were filled with candy. It was the last time any member of Pink Floyd saw him. #### Withdrawal to Cambridge In 1978, when Barrett's money ran out, he moved back to Cambridge to live with his mother. He returned to live in London for a few weeks in 1982, but soon returned to Cambridge permanently. Barrett walked the 50 miles (80 km) from London to Cambridge. Until his death, he received royalties from his work with Pink Floyd; Gilmour said, "I made sure the money got to him." In 1996, Barrett was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Pink Floyd. He did not attend the ceremony. According to the biographer and journalist Tim Willis, Barrett, who had reverted to using his birth name Roger, continued to live in his late mother's semi-detached home, and returned to painting, creating large abstract canvases. He was also an avid gardener. His main point of contact with the outside world was his sister, Rosemary, who lived nearby. He was reclusive, and his physical health declined, as he had stomach ulcers and type 2 diabetes. Although Barrett had not appeared or spoken in public since the mid-1970s, reporters and fans travelled to Cambridge seeking him, despite public appeals from his family to stop. Apparently, Barrett did not like being reminded about his musical career and the other members of Pink Floyd had no direct contact with him. However, he did visit his sister's house in November 2001 to watch the BBC Omnibus documentary made about him; reportedly he found some of it "a bit noisy", enjoyed seeing Mike Leonard again, calling him his "teacher", and enjoyed hearing "See Emily Play". Barrett made a final public acknowledgement of his musical past in 2002, his first since the 1970s, when he autographed 320 copies of Psychedelic Renegades, a book by the photographer Mick Rock which contained a number of photos of Barrett. Rock had conducted Barrett's final interview in 1971 before his retirement from the music industry, and Barrett visited Rock in London several times for tea and conversation in 1978. They had not spoken in more than 20 years when Rock approached Barrett to autograph his book, and Barrett uncharacteristically agreed. Having reverted to his birth name, he autographed the book "Barrett". ## Death and tributes Barrett died at home in Cambridge on 7 July 2006 aged 60, from pancreatic cancer. He was cremated at a funeral held at Cambridge Crematorium on 18 July 2006; no Pink Floyd members attended. In a statement, Wright said: "The band are very naturally upset and sad to hear of Syd Barrett's death. Syd was the guiding light of the early band lineup and leaves a legacy which continues to inspire." Gilmour said: "Do find time to play some of Syd's songs and to remember him as the madcap genius who made us all smile with his wonderfully eccentric songs about bikes, gnomes, and scarecrows. His career was painfully short, yet he touched more people than he could ever know." NME produced a tribute issue to Barrett a week later with a photo of him on the cover. In an interview with The Sunday Times, Barrett's sister, Rosemary Breen, said that he had written an unpublished book about the history of art. According to local newspapers, Barrett left approximately £1.7 million to his four siblings, largely acquired from royalties from Pink Floyd compilations and live recordings featuring Barrett's songs. A tribute concert, "Madcap's Last Laugh", was held at the Barbican Centre, London, on 10 May 2007 with Barrett's bandmates and Robyn Hitchcock, Captain Sensible, Damon Albarn, Chrissie Hynde and Kevin Ayers. Gilmour, Wright and Mason performed the Barrett compositions "Bike" and "Arnold Layne", and Waters performed a solo version of his song "Flickering Flame". In 2006, Barrett's home in St. Margaret's Square, Cambridge, was put on the market and attracted considerable interest. After over 100 showings, many to fans, it was sold to a French couple who knew nothing about Barrett. On 28 November 2006, Barrett's other possessions were sold at an auction at Cheffins auction house in Cambridge, raising £120,000 for charity. Items sold included paintings, scrapbooks and everyday items that Barrett had decorated. A series of events called The City Wakes was held in Cambridge in October 2008 to celebrate Barrett's life, art, and music. Breen supported this, the first series of official events in memory of her brother. After the festival's success, arts charity Escape Artists announced plans to create a centre in Cambridge, using art to help people with mental health problems. A memorial bench was placed in the Botanic Gardens in Cambridge and a more prominent tribute was planned in the city. ## Legacy ### Compilations In 1988, EMI Records (after constant pressure from Malcolm Jones) released an album of Barrett's studio out-takes and previously unreleased material recorded from 1968 to 1970 under the title Opel. The disc was originally set to include the unreleased Barrett Pink Floyd songs "Scream Thy Last Scream" and "Vegetable Man", which had been remixed for the album by Jones, but the band pulled the two songs before Opel was finalised. In 1993 EMI issued another release, Crazy Diamond, a boxed set of all three albums, each with further out-takes from his solo sessions that illustrated Barrett's inability or refusal to play a song the same way twice. EMI also released The Best of Syd Barrett: Wouldn't You Miss Me? in the UK on 16 April 2001 and in the US on 11 September 2001. This was the first time his song "Bob Dylan Blues" was officially released, taken from a demo tape that Gilmour had kept after an early 1970s session. Gilmour kept the tape, which also contains the unreleased "Living Alone" from the Barrett sessions. In October 2010 Harvest/EMI and Capitol Records released An Introduction to Syd Barrett—a collection of both his Pink Floyd and remastered solo work. The 2010 compilation An Introduction to Syd Barrett includes the downloadable bonus track "Rhamadan", a 20-minute track recorded at one of Syd's earliest solo sessions, in May 1968. In 2011, it was announced that a vinyl double album version would be issued for Record Store Day. Bootleg editions of Barrett's live and solo material exist. For years the "off air" recordings of the BBC sessions with Barrett's Pink Floyd circulated, until an engineer who had taken a tape of the early Pink Floyd gave it back to the BBC—which played it during a tribute to John Peel on their website. During this tribute, the first Peel programme (Top Gear) was aired in its entirety. This show featured the 1967 live versions of "Flaming", "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun", and a brief 90-second snippet of the instrumental "Reaction in G". In 2012, engineer Andy Jackson said he had found "a huge box of assorted tapes", in Mason's possession, containing versions of R&B songs that (the Barrett-era) Pink Floyd played in their early years. ### Creative impact Barrett wrote most of Pink Floyd's early material, and their producer, Norman Smith compared him favourably with John Lennon in his memoir: "Syd Barrett could write like John. I've said it before. He wasn't quite as good as John, and I am talking about a Syd on top form with 'See Emily Play'. But he would have developed. Definitely! In time he would have got even better." Jimmy Page never saw Barrett play with the Floyd, but was a fan of the early group's music, telling an interviewer, "Syd Barrett's writing with the early Pink Floyd was inspirational. Nothing sounded like Barrett before Pink Floyd's first album. There were so many ideas and so many positive statements. You can really feel the genius there, and it was tragic that he fell apart. Both he and Jimi Hendrix had a futuristic vision in a sense." According to critic Steven Hyden, even after Barrett left the band, Barrett's spirit "haunted" their records, and their most popular work "drew on the power of what Barrett signified". Barrett was an innovative guitarist, using extended techniques and exploring the musical and sonic possibilities of dissonance, distortion, feedback, the echo machine, tapes and other effects; his experimentation was partly inspired by free improvisation guitarist Keith Rowe of the group AMM, active at the time in London. Rowe would lay the guitar flat on a table and, among other things, would run ball bearings, metal rulers, coins, or knives along the strings. AMM and Pink Floyd played several gigs together from early 1966 to early 1967, and Barrett even attended the recording session for the group's debut album, "AMMMusic", in June 1966. One of Barrett's trademarks was playing his guitar through an old echo box while sliding a Zippo lighter up and down the fret-board to create the mysterious, otherworldly sounds that became associated with the group. Barrett was known to have used Binson delay units to achieve his trademark echo sounds. Daevid Allen, founder member of Soft Machine and Gong, cited Barrett's use of slide guitar with echo as a key inspiration for his own "glissando guitar" style. Barrett's recordings both with Pink Floyd and in later solo albums were delivered with a strongly British-accented vocal delivery, specifically that of southern England. He was described by Guardian writer Nick Kent as having a "quintessential English style of vocal projection". David Bowie said that Barrett, along with Anthony Newley, was the first person he had heard sing rock or pop music with a British accent. Barrett's free-form sequences of "sonic carpets" pioneered a new way to play the rock guitar. He played several different guitars during his tenure, including an old Harmony hollowbody electric, a Harmony acoustic, a Fender acoustic, a single-coil Danelectro 59 DC, several different Fender Telecasters and a white Fender Stratocaster in late 1967. A silver Fender Esquire with mirrored discs glued to the body was the guitar he was most often associated with and the guitar he "felt most close to". The mirrored Esquire was traded for a black Telecaster Custom, in 1968. Its whereabouts are currently unknown. ### Influence Many artists have acknowledged Barrett's influence on their work. Paul McCartney, Pete Townshend, Blur, Kevin Ayers, Gong, Marc Bolan, Tangerine Dream, Genesis P-Orridge, Julian Cope, Pere Ubu, Jeff Mangum, The Olivia Tremor Control, The Flaming Lips, Animal Collective, John Maus, Paul Weller, Roger Miller, East Bay Ray, Cedric Bixler-Zavala, and David Bowie were inspired by Barrett; Jimmy Page, Brian Eno, Sex Pistols, and The Damned all expressed interest in working with him at some point during the 1970s. Bowie recorded a cover of "See Emily Play" on his 1973 album Pin Ups. The track "Grass", from XTC's album Skylarking was influenced when Andy Partridge let fellow band member Colin Moulding borrow his Barrett records. Robyn Hitchcock's career was dedicated to being Barrett-esque; he even played "Dominoes" for the 2001 BBC documentary The Pink Floyd and Syd Barrett Story. Barrett also had an influence on alternative and punk music in general. According to critic John Harris: > To understand his place in modern music you probably have to first go back to punk rock and its misguided attempt to kick aside what remained of the psychedelic 1960s. Given that the Clash and Sex Pistols had made brutal social commentary obligatory, there seemed little room for any of the creative exotica that had defined the Love Decade—until, slowly but surely, singing about dead-end lives and dole queues began to pall, and at least some of the previous generation were rehabilitated. Barrett was the best example: having crashed out of Pink Floyd before the advent of indulgent "progressive" rock, and succumbed to a fate that appealed to the punk generation's nihilism, he underwent a revival. Barrett's decline had a profound effect on Waters' songwriting, and the theme of mental illness permeated the later Pink Floyd albums The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), Wish You Were Here (1975) and The Wall (1979). The reference to a "steel rail" in the song "Wish You Were Here"—"can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail?"—references a recurring theme in Barrett's song "If It's In You" from The Madcap Laughs. The song suite "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" from Wish You Were Here is also a tribute to Barrett. In 1987, an album of Barrett cover songs called Beyond the Wildwood was released. The album was a collection of cover songs from Barrett's tenure with Pink Floyd and from his solo career. Artists appearing were UK and US indie bands including The Shamen, Opal, The Soup Dragons, and Plasticland. Other artists who have written tributes to Barrett include his contemporary Kevin Ayers, who wrote "O Wot a Dream" in his honour (Barrett provided guitar to an early version of Ayers' song "Religious Experience: Singing a Song in the Morning"). Robyn Hitchcock has covered many of his songs live and on record and paid homage to his forebear with the song "(Feels Like) 1974". Phish covered "Bike", "No Good Trying", "Love You", "Baby Lemonade" and "Terrapin". The Television Personalities' single "I Know Where Syd Barrett Lives" from their 1981 album And Don't the Kids Love It is another tribute. In 2008, The Trash Can Sinatras released a single in tribute to the life and work of Syd Barrett called "Oranges and Apples", from their 2009 album In the Music. Proceeds from the single go to the Syd Barrett Trust in support of arts in mental health. Johnny Depp showed interest in a biographical film based on Barrett's life. Barrett is portrayed briefly in the opening scene of Tom Stoppard's play Rock 'n' Roll (2006), performing "Golden Hair". His life and music, including the disastrous Cambridge Corn Exchange concert and his later reclusive lifestyle, are a recurring motif in the work. Barrett died during the play's run in London. In 2016, in correspondence with the 70th anniversary birthday, The Theatre of the Absurd, an Italian independent artists group, published a short movie in honour of Barrett named Eclipse, with actor-director Edgar Blake in the role of Barrett. Some footage from this movie was also shown at Syd Barrett – A Celebration during Men on the Border's tribute: the show took place at the Cambridge Corn Exchange, with the participation of Barrett's family and old friends. For 2017 TV series Legion creator Noah Hawley named one of the characters after Barrett, whose music was an important influence on the series. In The X-Files season nine episode, "Lord of the Flies" (2001), a powerful mutant, Dylan Lokensgard (Hank Harris), has several posters of Syd Barrett on his bedroom wall, and listens to "It's No Good Trying" and "Terrapin" from The Madcap Laughs. He recites the line, "A dream in a mist of gray", from Barrett's song "Opel", saying of the singer, "He was, like, this brilliant guy that no-one understood". Barrett's influence on the genesis of psychedelia was considered in a chapter entitled "Astronauts of Inner Space: Syd Barrett, Nick Drake and the Birth of Psychedelia" in Guy Mankowski's book Albion's Secret History: Snapshots of England's Pop Rebels and Outsiders. The 2023 documentary film Have You Got It Yet? The Story of Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd features interviews with Roger Waters, Nick Mason, David Gilmour, Barrett's sister Rosemary Breen, and Pink Floyd managers Peter Jenner and Andrew King. It is directed by Roddy Bogawa and Storm Thorgerson, and narrated by Jason Isaacs. ## Health Members of Barrett's family denied that he was mentally ill. Asked if Barrett may have had Asperger's syndrome, his sister Rosemary Breen said that he and his siblings were "all on the spectrum". She also stated that, contrary to common misconception, Barrett neither suffered from mental illness nor had he received treatment for it since they had resumed regular contact in the 1980s. Breen said he had spent some time in a private "home for lost souls"—Greenwoods in Essex—but that there was no formal therapy programme there. Some years later, Barrett agreed to sessions with a psychiatrist at Fulbourn psychiatric hospital in Cambridge, but Breen said that neither medication nor therapy was considered appropriate. Breen also denied Barrett was a recluse or that he was vague about his past: "Roger may have been a bit selfish—or rather self-absorbed—but when people called him a recluse they were really only projecting their own disappointment. He knew what they wanted, but he wasn't willing to give it to them." In 1996, Wright said that Barrett's mother told the members of Pink Floyd not to contact him because being reminded of the band would make him depressed for weeks. In the 1960s, Barrett used psychedelic drugs, especially LSD, and there are theories he subsequently had schizophrenia. Wright asserted that Barrett's problems stemmed from a massive overdose of acid, as the change in his personality and behaviour came on suddenly. However, Waters maintains that Barrett suffered "without a doubt" from schizophrenia. In an article published in 2006, Gilmour was quoted as saying: "In my opinion, his nervous breakdown would have happened anyway. It was a deep-rooted thing. But I'll say the psychedelic experience might well have acted as a catalyst. Still, I just don't think he could deal with the vision of success and all the things that went with it." According to Gilmour in a 1974 interview, the other members of Pink Floyd approached psychiatrist R. D. Laing with the "Barrett problem". After hearing a tape of a Barrett conversation, Laing declared him "incurable". In Saucerful of Secrets: The Pink Floyd Odyssey, author Nicholas Schaffner interviewed people who knew Barrett before and during his Pink Floyd days, including friends Peter and Susan Wynne-Wilson, artist Duggie Fields (with whom Barrett shared a flat during the late 1960s), June Bolan, and Storm Thorgerson. Bolan became concerned when Syd "kept his girlfriend under lock and key for three days, occasionally shoving a ration of biscuits under the door". A claim of cruelty against Barrett committed by the groupies and hangers-on who frequented his apartment during this period was described by writer and critic Jonathan Meades. "I went [to Barrett's flat] to see Harry and there was this terrible noise. It sounded like heating pipes shaking. I said, 'What's up?' and he sort of giggled and said, 'That's Syd having a bad trip. We put him in the linen cupboard'". Storm Thorgerson responded to this claim by stating "I do not remember locking Syd up in a cupboard. It sounds to me like pure fantasy, like Jonathan Meades was on dope himself." Other friends state that Barrett's flatmates, who had also taken LSD, thought of Barrett as a genius or a deity, and were spiking his morning coffee every day without his knowledge, leaving him in a never-ending trip. He was later rescued from that flat by friends and moved elsewhere, but his erratic behaviour continued. According to Thorgerson, "On one occasion, I had to pull him [Barrett] off [his girlfriend] Lindsay because he was beating her over the head with a mandolin". On one occasion, Barrett threw a woman called Gilly across the room, because she refused to go to Gilmour's house. ## Personal life According to his sister, Rosemary, Barrett took up photography and sometimes they went to the seaside together. She also said he took a keen interest in art and horticulture and continued to devote himself to painting: > Quite often he took the train on his own to London to look at the major art collections—and he loved flowers. He made regular trips to the Botanic Gardens and to the dahlias at Anglesey Abbey, near Lode. But of course, his passion was his painting. Barrett had relationships with various women, such as Libby Gausden; Lindsay Korner; Jenny Spires; and Pakistani-born Evelyn "Iggy" Rose (1947–2017) (aka "Iggy the Eskimo", "Iggy the Inuit"), who appeared on the back cover of The Madcap Laughs. He never married or had children, though he was briefly engaged to marry Gayla Pinion and planned to relocate to Oxford. ## Discography Solo albums - The Madcap Laughs (1970) - Barrett (1970) with Pink Floyd - The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967) - A Saucerful of Secrets (1968) - 1965: Their First Recordings (2015) - The Early Years 1965–1972 (2016) ## Filmography - Syd Barrett's First Trip (1966) directed by Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon - London '66–'67 (1967) - Tonite Let's All Make Love in London (1967) - The Pink Floyd and Syd Barrett Story (2003) - Have You Got It Yet? The Story of Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd (2023) ## See also - List of songs recorded by Syd Barrett - List of songs about or referencing Syd Barrett
12,630,702	St Mary's Church, Nether Alderley	1,002,442,947	null	[ "Church of England church buildings in Cheshire", "Diocese of Chester", "English Gothic architecture in Cheshire", "Grade I listed churches in Cheshire", "Paley and Austin buildings" ]	St Mary's Church is an Anglican church at the end of a lane to the south of the village of Nether Alderley, Cheshire, England. It dates from the 14th century, with later additions and a major restoration in the late-19th century. The church is recorded in the National Heritage List for England as a designated Grade I listed building. The church was built in the Gothic style, and has historically been associated with the Stanley family of Alderley. Its major features include a fine tower, the Stanley pew which is entered by an outside staircase, a 14th-century font, the western gallery, and monuments to the Lords Stanley of Alderley. The grounds contain a 17th-century former schoolhouse, now used as a parish hall, a medieval church cross, and the Stanley Mausoleum, which dates from 1909. An ancient yew tree stands in the churchyard. St Mary's is an active parish church in the diocese of Chester, the archdeaconry of Macclesfield, and the deanery of Knutsford. Its benefice is combined with that of St Catherine's, Birtles. ## History The oldest parts of the church date from around 1300, but it is likely that a timber-framed church existed on the site before then. The church's original dedication was to Saint Lawrence, but that was later changed to Saint Mary. A clerestory was added in the 15th century. The tower was built in 1530, and the Stanley pew was added in about 1600. The west gallery, which contained an organ, was installed in 1803. In 1856, the chancel was completely rebuilt, to a design by Cuffley and Starkey, paid for by the Stanley family. The vestry was constructed in 1860. The church was restored between 1877 and 1878 by Paley and Austin; the nave floor was lowered, the pulpit was replaced, plaster was removed from the roof and the walls, and the box pews were replaced by new oak pews. The tower clock, made in 1743, was renovated in 1997. In 2000, the 16th-century wooden bell-frame was strengthened by the addition of a steel frame, and the Stanley pew was restored. ## Architecture ### Exterior St Mary's is built of ashlar buff and red sandstone quarried locally at Alderley Edge, and the roof is of Kerridge stone slates. Its plan consists of a tower at the west end, a four-bay nave with north and south aisles, a chancel with a vestry to its north, and a south porch. Over the north aisle is a dormer window. The tower has diagonal buttresses. Its west door has 14th-century mouldings and above the door is a three-light window. The stage above this contains ringers' windows on the north and west faces and a diamond-shaped clock on the south face. Above these the belfry windows on all faces have two lights. The top of the tower is embattled and contains the bases of eight pinnacles. Below the parapet is a string course with large grotesque gargoyles. At the west end of the nave roof is a bellcote. The Stanley pew projects to the east of the south porch. In the porch are grooves which were cut where arrows were sharpened. ### Interior The barrel-shaped nave roof dates possibly from the early 16th century. The early 17th-century Stanley pew at the eastern end of the south aisle is at the level of an upper storey, and is entered by a flight of steps from outside the church. Its front is richly carved and displays six panels with coats of arms. Richards states that it is one of the finest of its kind in the country and that it is unique in Cheshire. At the west end of the church is a late-18th-century musicians' gallery, whose front panel has painted coats of arms. The gallery contains the organ which replaces an earlier organ. This was presented by Lady Fabia Stanley in 1875 and was made by Hill and Company of London at a cost of £350 (), An oak document chest in the tower has been dated to 1686. The 14th-century font was buried in the churchyard during the Commonwealth, dug up in 1821 and restored to use in the church in 1924. It consists of a plain circular bowl on four short cylindrical columns with moulded bases. Richards considers it to be one of the finest examples of 14th-century work in Cheshire. The church has two old Bibles, a Vinegar Bible and a Breeches Bible. The chancel contains memorials to the Lords Stanley of Alderley. The memorial to John Stanley, 1st Baron Stanley of Alderley contains his effigy dressed in peer's robes lying under a canopy with his hand on a book, dated 1856 and by Richard Westmacott. On the other side of the chancel is a memorial to his son Edward Stanley, his effigy holding a scroll in his hand and with a dog at his feet. Engraved in brass on the side of the memorial are the figures of his widow and children. Lady Stanley is seated in the middle with their four surviving sons on her right, five surviving daughters on her left and three children who had died at a young age at her knee and on her lap. A memorial tablet to John Constantine Stanley, who died in 1878, is by Joseph Boehm. The chancel contains a monument to Rev. Edward Shipton, rector of the church from 1625 to 1630. The stained glass in the east window, dated 1856, was made by William Wailes. The glass in a south window in the chancel of 1909 was made by Morris & Co. The east window in the north aisle, dated 1920 is by Irene Dunlop. The stained glass window to the left of the pulpit was donated by the Greg family of Styal Mill. The stained glass in the window at the west end of the north aisle is to the memory of the wife of Edward John Bell, rector from 1870 to 1907, and was made by Clayton and Bell in 1877. The tower holds a ring of six bells, hung for change ringing, five of which were cast in 1787 by Rudhall of Gloucester, and the sixth by Charles and George Mears at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in 1847. A seventh, unused, bell dates from 1686 and has been noted as being of historical importance by the Church Buildings Council of the Church of England. The parish registers begin in 1629, and the churchwardens' accounts in 1612. ## External features The sandstone schoolhouse in the churchyard was built in 1628; the school room was on the ground floor and the schoolmaster's accommodation was above. A large room was added to the rear in 1817, and in 1908 the building was restored and presented to the parish by Lord Stanley. It is now used as a parish hall and is listed Grade II\*. The medieval church cross in the churchyard, the Stanley Mausoleum, and the churchyard walls, gate piers and gates, are Grade II listed. The mausoleum was built in 1909 by Edward Lyulph, 4th Lord Stanley. He died in 1925 and it contains his ashes and those of his wife, Mary Katherine, who died in 1929. The mausoleum is built in ashlar buff and red sandstone with a Kerridge stone-slate roof. It was designed in the neo-Jacobean style by Paul Phipps, and is rectangular in shape, with two storeys and a three-bay north front. The central bay contains a door, above which is the Stanley crest, a three-light window and a date plaque in the gable. On the sides of the upper storey are three four-light windows. Inside the mausoleum is a white marble sarcophagus. The yew tree in the churchyard is 1,200 years old. ## Rediscovery of the crypt It had been known that under the church was a vault containing the remains of some members of the Stanley family but its whereabouts were not known until they were discovered by an architect in 2007. A stone slab was removed exposing steps leading to a crypt under the chancel. This contained six coffins, four of which contained the bodies of the first and second Lords Stanley and their wives. Once the details had been recorded, the crypt was resealed. ## Present activities St Mary's holds a variety of Anglican services on Sundays and offers a range of church activities. The church is open to visitors at advertised times and guided tours are available. A parish magazine is published monthly. ## See also - Grade I listed buildings in Cheshire East - Grade I listed churches in Cheshire - Listed buildings in Nether Alderley - List of ecclesiastical works by Paley and Austin
554,818	Killing Mr. Griffin	1,173,812,404	Book by Lois Duncan	[ "1978 American novels", "American novels adapted into films", "American novels adapted into television shows", "American young adult novels", "Little, Brown and Company books", "Novels by Lois Duncan" ]	Killing Mr. Griffin is a 1978 suspense novel by Lois Duncan about a group of teenaged students at a New Mexico high school, who plan to kidnap their strict English teacher, Mr. Griffin. Duncan developed the story from the character of Mark, who is involved in the kidnapping plan and is based on the first boyfriend of Duncan's oldest daughter. Mr. Griffin was based on the personality of a teacher one of Duncan's daughters had in high school. In 2010, the novel was reissued with changes to modernize the content, making it more age appropriate and appealing to readers. The book won several awards and honors, including the 1982 Massachusetts Children's Book Award and the 1982–1983 Alabama Camellia Children's Choice Book Award. Killing Mr. Griffin was adapted into a television film of the same name that aired on NBC on April 7, 1997. The film starred Jay Thomas, Amy Jo Johnson, Mario Lopez, and Scott Bairstow, and was first released on DVD and VHS on March 7, 2000. ## Plot Brian Griffin is a strict high-school English teacher at Del Norte High School in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who never accepts late homework and is demanding of his students. When Mark Kinney, one of the students in his class, plagiarizes a paper, Mr. Griffin makes him beg to be allowed back into the class. Instead of allowing him back in, though, Mr. Griffin decides to make him repeat the class next semester. Fellow students in the class he is repeating include David Ruggles, Jeff Garrett, and Betsy Cline. Susan McConell is an A+ student on average, but is constantly receiving below-average B's in his class. Mark suggests kidnapping Mr. Griffin, and convinces David, Jeff, and Betsy to join in on the plan as a way of scaring him and getting revenge because they feel he has treated them poorly. The group decides to use Susan, who is least willing to participate in the plot, to distract Mr. Griffin by requesting a conference with him after school. Since Susan is one of his better-performing students with a serious approach to her studies, Mr. Griffin willingly does so, allowing her to walk him to his car afterwards. Jeff, David, and Mark forcibly place a bag over Mr. Griffin's head and tie him up, replacing the bag with a blindfold as they take him to a remote spot in the mountains. Betsy, due to a speeding ticket, arrives in the parking lot after the boys have left with Mr. Griffin. Susan was supposed to ride with Betsy, but does not want any further part in the scheme, and Betsy leaves without her. Mark tells Mr. Griffin to beg, but he refuses, so the students decide to leave him alone there until midnight. Susan and David defy the group and go check on Mr. Griffin. The two find him dead as a result of coronary arrest after being unable to take his medication for angina. Mark convinces the rest of the group to cover up the death. He instructs Susan, who was the last one known to the police to see Mr. Griffin, to tell them Mr. Griffin kept looking at his watch during the conference and left with a pretty woman. Jeff, Mark, and David bury the body in the mountains. Betsy and David also drive Mr. Griffin's car to the airport, but the officer who gave Betsy a ticket sees her there. Worried that the officer might later identify the car as Mr. Griffin's, Jeff and Betsy move the car into Jeff's garage, so he can repaint it before they hide it elsewhere. Mark's ex-girlfriend, Lana Turnboldt, has a picnic with her fiancé at the secluded place in the mountains, where they discover Mr. Griffin's medicine bottle. The police investigate, and find Mr. Griffin's body buried nearby. However, police do not find the ring Mr. Griffin was wearing when he died, as David had taken it. Irma Ruggles, David's paternal grandmother who lives with him, discovers the ring and refuses to give it back to him, believing the ring to be that of David's father, who had left him. David tells Susan he took the ring and his grandmother found it, but they are unsuccessful at retrieving it from her, so Susan tells Mark about the situation because she feels he would know what to do. Irma Ruggles is later murdered, and a neighbor refers to the suspect as a boy in a brown sweater. Susan makes the connection, knowing that Mark has a brown sweater he wears all the time, and that Mark would stop at nothing to get what he needed – in this case, the ring. Susan plans to tell the police all that the group has done. Before she can inform the police, Mark, Jeff, and Betsy tie Susan up, and Jeff and Betsy leave to hide Mr. Griffin's car. Mark sets her curtains on fire, but Susan is saved by Kathy Griffin, Mr. Griffin's wife, who came over to her house with a detective for an interview. The detective catches Mark as he attempts to leave the house through a window. Several days later, Susan's mother tells her that all of those involved will face varying criminal charges, with her lawyer attempting to get Susan off with no charges in exchange for testimony. Mark will face three trials, one each for the deaths of Mr. Griffin and David's grandmother, and one for the attempted murder of Susan. Mrs. Griffin leaves Susan a note that her husband had written before his death, praising Susan for her work and recognizing her potential. ## Characters - Mr. Griffin – A former assistant professor of the University of Albuquerque, he obtained his master's degree in English from Stanford University. He became a high-school English teacher because he felt high schools were lacking good teachers. He is married to Kathy Griffin, who is expecting their first child. - Susan "Sue" McConnell – A junior, she was a straight-A student before taking Mr. Griffin's class, where she is earning Bs. She has a crush on David. - Mark Kinney – A mentally unstable teen, he exhibits many of the signs of psychopathy. He was adopted by his aunt and uncle after his father was killed in a fire. - Jeff Garrett – A basketball player at Del Norte High School, he is dating Betsy. - Betsy Cline – The head cheerleader, she is Jeff's girlfriend, and the only child of the county commissioner, Harold Cline and his wife Liz. She is in love with Mark, yet he is uninterested in her. - David "Davy" Ruggles – The senior class president, he lives with his mother and grandmother. Many readers have asked Duncan whether he is Mr. Griffin's son, which is not stated in the book, and Duncan confirmed this is not true. ## Background The story developed from the character of Mark, who is based on the first boyfriend of Duncan's oldest daughter. Duncan says he "was a very sick young man, and he was the most charming young man you could ever meet", but that it "wasn't until things got very bad that we discovered he was the kind of guy who would swerve in the road to run over a dog." She began to wonder what might happen if a charismatic teenaged psychopath were placed in a high-school setting and the young people he would attract as followers. 'Then I thought "What could he make them do?" The book moved from there.' Mr. Griffin was based on the personality of a drama teacher one of Duncan's daughters had in high school, who "was very strict and demanded that her students do the best work they were capable of doing", but for whom Duncan's daughter was later grateful. Duncan wanted the character to be symbolic of a teacher who is not appreciated at the time, but later is. Killing Mr. Griffin was first published in April 1978 by Little, Brown and Company in hardcover. In October 2010, Little, Brown reissued the novel in paperback with updates to modernize some of the content. Killing Mr. Griffin, along with I Know What You Did Last Summer and Don't Look Behind You, were the first group of 10 different titles that were updated and reissued with these changes. An audiobook was released by Listening Library in 1986, and another, read by Ed Sala, was released by Recorded Books in 1998. A reviewer from AudioFile felt that Sala's narration was effective, although occasionally, he "seems to lose concentration and expression." A 2010 audiobook, narrated by Dennis Holland, was published by Hachette Audio, and features the modernized text. ## Major themes In the letter Mr. Griffin wrote for Susan, he comments, "It is indeed the little deaths, the small daily rejections of our well-meant offerings that render the soul lifeless." Duncan refers to this as one of the main themes in the novel, adding that the students "were killing [Mr. Griffin]'s soul before they killed him physically." Killing Mr. Griffin also explores the downsides of peer pressure. Due to Susan's desire for peer acceptance, she becomes involved in the plan to kidnap Mr. Griffin. The group has to deal with a result they did not anticipate for the kidnapping – Mr. Griffin's death. They have to cover up the crime, while preventing Susan from revealing to the police what they have done. ## Reception Killing Mr. Griffin has received several honors and awards. In 1978, it was selected as an American Library Association (ALA) Best Book for Young Adults. It was nominated for the 1981 California Young Reader Medal in the Young Adult category and in 1982, it won the Massachusetts Children's Book Award. It was also given the 1982–1983 Alabama Camellia Children's Choice Book Award in the grade 7–9 category. However, some people have objected to including Killing Mr. Griffin in schools and libraries; the novel was 64th in ALA's list of most frequently challenged books from 1990–1999, and 25th in its list of most challenged/banned books from 2000–2009. According to the ALA, Killing Mr. Griffin was the fourth most challenged book of 2000 for "violence and sexual content". Drew Stevenson, writing for School Library Journal, stated, "skillful plotting builds layers of tension that draws readers into the eye of the conflict" and the ending "is nicely handled in a manner which provides relief without removing any of the chilling implications." Zena Sutherland from Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books commented that the "end is logical, the construction of the plot and the relationships among the well-drawn characters is solid, and the story has pace and suspense." The New York Times's Richard Peck felt that the book's value "lies in the twisted logic of the teenagers and how easily they can justify anything", but that "the plot descends into unadulterated melodrama." He stated, "Killing Mr. Griffin 'becomes "an easy read when it shouldn't'," although "there's veracity unto the end: the parents are the last to lose their innocence." ## Adaptation The book was adapted into a television film of the same title, which first aired April 7, 1997, on NBC. It received a Nielsen rating of 10.7 and was viewed in 10.4 million households. The film starred Scott Bairstow as Mark Kinney, Amy Jo Johnson as Susan McConnell, Mario Lopez as David Ruggles, and Jay Thomas as Mr. Griffin, and was directed by Jack Bender. Maitland McDonagh from TV Guide gave the film two stars out of four, stating, "this tale wraps serious issues — peer pressure and the desire for social acceptance — in an entertaining crime-thriller tale that never seems entirely outlandish." She thought the story's rhythm was "disrupted by commercial-television pacing", but felt the cast, especially Johnson, delivered a strong performance. Killing Mr. Griffin was first released on VHS and DVD on March 7, 2000. ## See also - Teaching Mrs. Tingle – a film with a similar plot released in 1999
55,496,877	1958 FIFA World Cup qualification (AFC/CAF–UEFA play-off)	1,157,465,650	null	[ "1950s in Cardiff", "1950s in Tel Aviv", "1957–58 in Israeli football", "1957–58 in Welsh football", "1958 FIFA World Cup qualification", "FIFA World Cup qualification inter-confederation play-offs", "February 1958 sports events in Asia", "February 1958 sports events in the United Kingdom", "International association football competitions hosted by Israel", "International association football competitions hosted by Wales", "Israel national football team matches", "January 1958 sports events in Asia", "January 1958 sports events in the United Kingdom", "Sports competitions in Cardiff", "Sports competitions in Tel Aviv", "Wales at the 1958 FIFA World Cup", "Wales national football team matches" ]	The AFC/CAF–UEFA qualification play-off for the 1958 FIFA World Cup was a two-legged home-and-away association football match between the winners of the African/Asian region, Israel, and a randomly drawn group runner-up from Europe, Wales. The matches were played on 15 January and 5 February 1958 in Ramat Gan and Cardiff, respectively. Wales had finished second in their qualifying group to Czechoslovakia. Israel had advanced from the AFC/CAF qualification zone without playing a match after several teams withdrew from the competition for political reasons. FIFA introduced a rule that a team could not qualify for a World Cup without playing and organised a play-off match to decide on qualification. Wales were drawn as the opponents and the two sides met in Ramat Gan for the first leg. Wales won the first match 2–0, following goals from Ivor Allchurch and Dave Bowen. The second leg ended with the same result with Allchurch scoring again and Cliff Jones adding a second. With Wales qualifying, this remains the only time that a country played at the World Cup finals after having been eliminated in the regular qualifiers. This also remains the only time that all four British Home Nations qualified for the World Cup finals. Wales went on to reach the quarter-finals at the 1958 World Cup, before being eliminated by Brazil. ## Background Wales were drawn into group 4 of the European qualifying zone for the 1958 FIFA World Cup, where they faced Czechoslovakia and East Germany. Wales manager Jimmy Murphy was leading the side in World Cup qualifying for the first time and his side won their first match after defeating Czechoslovakia 1–0 in Cardiff following a goal from Roy Vernon, despite missing several players due to injury and withdrawals. Wales travelled to East Germany for their next fixture, but chose to take only twelve players, eleven starters and one substitute, to save money. One of the players, Derek Tapscott, was ruled out of the tie with injury shortly beforehand and John Charles arrived late due to club commitments. The match was East Germany's first competitive fixture in the nation's history and they claimed a 2–1 victory in a match attended by around 110,000. Wales continued to Czechoslovakia for their next match six days later. The squad had only ten fit players following the match against East Germany and an outcry from the Welsh media prompted Ray Daniel and Des Palmer to be called up as replacements. During the game, Daniel inadvertently gave the opposition the lead after scoring an own goal following a corner kick. The Czechs added a second goal after an hour to secure a 2–0 victory. Wales' hopes of qualification were ended when Czechoslovakia recorded consecutive victories over East Germany. In their final group game, Wales defeated East Germany 4–1 following a hat-trick from Palmer and an own goal from the opposition goalkeeper. As a result, Wales finished second in the group behind Czechoslovakia, and were therefore eliminated from the European qualification zone. For the qualifying stages of the 1958 FIFA World Cup, Israel were regarded as an Asian team and took part in the African and Asian qualification zone. A total of 11 teams were competing for one direct qualification spot to the 1958 FIFA World Cup finals. Israel were drawn into group 2 of the first round against Turkey. However, their opponents refused to compete in the Asian group, claiming that they should be included in the European qualifying section. The world football governing body, FIFA, subsequently allowed Israel to advance to the second round automatically where they were drawn against Indonesia. However, with ongoing political upheavel in Indonesia, the nation applied to FIFA to play against Israel on neutral ground. Their approach was rejected and Indonesia subsequently withdrew, allowing Israel to advance to the final round. Israel were paired with Sudan in the last round, with the winner advancing to the World Cup. Sudan had also advanced from the previous round without playing a fixture after Egypt had withdrawn due to Israel's presence owing to tensions between the two nations following the Suez Crisis. Sudan refused to play against Israel for political reasons, so Israel were therefore named the African and Asian qualification zone winners without playing a match. This would have granted Israel qualification to the World Cup, but FIFA decided to introduce a rule that no team would qualify without playing at least one match, except for the defending champions and the hosts. This was because many teams had qualified for previous World Cups without playing due to withdrawals of their opponents. As Israel had advanced automatically through all three rounds under these circumstances, they still had to face another team before they could qualify. Therefore, a play-off match was created by FIFA between Israel and the runner-up of a group from one of the other qualifying regions, UEFA, CONMEBOL and NAFC/CCCF, where the teams would play against each other on a home-and-away basis. The winner of this play-off would then directly qualify for the 1958 World Cup in Sweden. Therefore, effectively, only 0.5 places were granted to Africa and Asia for the finals. A drawing of lots took place in December 1957 to determine which team would face Israel in the play-offs. Ahead of the draw, Uruguay withdrew, while Italy and Northern Ireland had not finished their qualification group, leaving nine teams in the draw. Belgium were selected first but rejected the opportunity so the draw was made again and Wales were selected and would therefore take part in the play-off against Israel. Therefore, the play-off winners would make their World Cup finals debut, as both Israel and Wales had never previously qualified. ## Summary ## Matches ### First leg #### Summary Wales travelled to Israel with little support, although 90 Welsh servicemen did secure a flight from a military base in Cyprus to attend the match. An error in preparation meant the side arrived in Israel without a ball. As a result, the team were limited to physical training beforehand. Wales were heavy favourites ahead of the tie with their only other weakness believed to be the heat, with temperatures expected to be around 80 °F (27 °C). Murphy banned his players from using the hotel pool during their stay. The match was attended by around 55,000 spectators, including the British ambassador to Israel. Wales had an early goal ruled out after Ivor Allchurch was caught offside before he found the net again after 38 minutes to open the scoring. After receiving a pass from Terry Medwin, Allchurch found space on the edge of the penalty area and scored from 20 yards (18 m) out. Allchurch continued to cause problems for the opposition defence, shooting wide after collecting a Stuart Williams free-kick and drawing a save from Israeli goalkeeper Ya'akov Hodorov. Wales eventually scored a second through Dave Bowen midway through the second half, also from 20 yards out. Wales received a blow late in the game when John Charles went down injured. He returned to the field to finish the game but struggled for the final minutes of the game. The victory was the first time Wales had won a match outside the United Kingdom. #### Details ### Second leg #### Summary Wales remained heavy favourites to advance following the first leg. They made minor changes to the side, Medwin and John Charles switched positions to allow the latter to play centre-forward. The only other change saw Ron Hewitt make his international debut in place of Len Allchurch. Israel made one change to their starting eleven from the first leg, Boshos Gegosian replaced Zebaria Tetzabi. Yosef Goldstein had been a doubt with an ankle injury but recovered to play. Already trailing by two goals from the first leg, Israel struggled to impose themselves on the second leg as Wales again dominated the tie. Israeli goalkeeper Hodorov won plaudits for his performance in the match, making several saves to deny Wales a goal. His efforts also included using his body to stop advancing players; one collision with an opposition player left him with a broken nose and concussion but he continued playing. Israel adopted a more physical style of play in the second leg and were cited by the referee on several occasions for "frequent use ... of the late tackle, of body checking and other obstructionist methods." Charles, who had recovered from his injury in the first leg, was the main target of these methods and they proved effective as he struggled to gain a foothold in the game. The impetus of the Welsh attack was instead provided by Cliff Jones and Medwin. Israel struggled to create many attacking opportunities, their best chance of the game fell to Yehoshua Glazer who was denied by Wales goalkeeper Jack Kelsey, who saved with his knee. Wales were frustrated in front of goal for much of the match despite the Israeli defence being "beset by wave after wave of red shirts". Wales scored their first goal after 76 minutes through Allchurch who held off several tackles before shooting into the roof of the net from a narrow angle. Mewdin's forward play continued to excel and he created the second goal after breaking into the Israeli penalty area before pulling the ball back across the box. Charles missed the first attempt but the ball fell to Jones who added a second for Wales. #### Details ## Aftermath As of March 2023, Wales' victory remains the only time a team have qualified for a World Cup having been eliminated from the normal qualifying process. It also remains the only time that all four Home Nations have qualified for a World Cup. Despite the clear margin of victory, newspaper reports after the game were scathing of Wales' performance with The Times remarking that Wales would "do little more than make the journey to Scandinavia". At the World Cup, Wales advanced from their group after winning a play-off match against Hungary. In the quarter-finals, they were eliminated by Brazil after losing 1–0. Murphy's attendance at the second leg meant he was forced to miss a match in his other role as assistant manager to Matt Busby at Manchester United. The following night, United played Red Star Belgrade in the European Cup and were travelling back to Manchester via Munich when the team's airplane crashed on the runway at Munich-Riem Airport, resulting in the Munich air disaster which caused 23 fatalities. Israel would eventually qualify for their first and only World Cup in 1970, where they were eliminated in the group stage.
16,719,281	Perry the Platypus	1,164,009,013	Fictional character from Phineas and Ferb	[ "Animal superheroes", "Animated characters introduced in 2007", "Anthropomorphic mammals", "Fictional asexuals", "Fictional monotremes", "Fictional secret agents and spies in television", "Fictional vigilantes", "Male characters in animated series", "Milo Murphy's Law", "Phineas and Ferb characters", "Television characters introduced in 2007" ]	Perry the Platypus (also known as Agent P or Perry) is a fictional bipedal platypus from the American animated series Phineas and Ferb and Milo Murphy's Law. Perry was created by Dan Povenmire and Jeff "Swampy" Marsh. Perry is featured as the star of the B-plot for every episode of the series, alongside his nemesis Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz. A mostly silent character, his lone vocal characteristic (a rattling of his beak) is provided by Dee Bradley Baker. Perry is the pet of the Flynn-Fletcher family and is perceived by his owners as mindless and domesticated. In secret, however, he lives a double life as a member of an all-animal espionage organization referred to as the O.W.C.A. (Organization Without a Cool Acronym). Many secret entrances to his underground lair exist all around the Flynn-Fletcher residence, such as the side of the house, most notably the tree that his owners sit under in the backyard, and several other everyday objects that seem to elude the family's attention. Perry has also been shown to have entrances in Hawaii, London, and South Dakota. He engages in daily battles with Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz, an evil scientist who desires to take over the tri-state area with obscure contraptions, or "-inators", that work perfectly according to his intended function but fail in his application of them every time. Perry was made a platypus because of the animal's striking appearance and the lack of public knowledge of the animal, which allowed the writers to make things up about the species. Critical reception for the character from both professionals and fans have been considerably positive. Merchandising of the character include plush toys, t-shirts, wooden toys, glasses, and coloring books, along with appearances in literature and multiple video games. ## Role in Phineas and Ferb Perry is the docile pet platypus of the blended Flynn-Fletcher family, who adopted him because his unfocused gaze made it seem as if he were looking at both Phineas and Ferb at the same time, as shown in the 2011 movie, Phineas and Ferb the Movie: Across the 2nd Dimension. Unbeknownst to them, Perry lives a double life as a crime-fighting spy working for the "Organization Without a Cool Acronym"/The O.W.C.A, going by the codename "Agent P." He reports to his superior, Major Monogram, via telecast in his large, high-tech, underground hideout. Every day, he engages in battles with the evil scientist Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz, who tries using inventions to take over the tri-state area. Perry is always able to foil Doofenshmirtz's plans in a way that accidentally causes the destruction of whatever form of contraption his owners, Phineas Flynn and Ferb Fletcher, are building in order to make summer better. Phineas and Ferb are aware that something happens to get rid of their scheme for the day, but do not know that Perry is the cause behind it and are largely dismissive of it. Their sister, Candace, also does not know that Perry is behind the destruction and is driven to near insanity trying to figure it out. Perry and Doofenshmirtz at first seem to loathe each other in the beginning of the series, and have been arch-nemeses since the day they met. However, they are often cordial and friendly towards one another and it is said by Doofenshmirtz that Perry is his best friend in the episode "The Chronicles of Meap", and Perry will often act to save Doofenshmirtz's life when his plot inevitably blows up in his face. Doofenshmirtz also went out of his way in one episode to become closer to Perry after he is assigned to a new villain. Habitually, their daily brawls involve Doofenshmirtz devising a scheme, which Perry goes to stop after being briefed by Major Monogram. He is trapped by Doofenshmirtz while trying to do so and is told of the doctor's scheme, usually pertaining to some backstory or pet peeve. He then escapes and the two fight, Perry coming out victorious with Doofenshmirtz yelling "Curse you, Perry the Platypus!". The two rely on this daily structure, Doofenshmirtz even specifically mentioning it in "Journey to the Center of Candace" and in episodes such as "It's About Time!" in which Doofenshmirtz temporarily replaces Perry with secret agent Peter The Panda and they become depressed about not having each other to fight. When this happens, Perry realizes he misses Doofenshmirtz too. When Perry does not arrive on the scene of Doofenshmirtz's evil plan, the doctor hesitates to execute his plans and fears for where Perry has gone, though he notes that he "hopes something terrible has happened to him.". Sometimes, they decided not to fight and have fun, as shown in "Happy New Year!" and "Candace Disconnected". In Phineas and Ferb the Movie: Across the 2nd Dimension, an alternate reality (yet more evil and ruthless) version of Perry (known as Platyborg) appears. Platyborg would later return in the episode sequel, Tales from the Resistance: Back to the 2nd Dimension. Perry's secret would be revealed to Phineas, Ferb, their friends, and Dr. Doofenshmirtz and got their memories erased in order for Phineas and Ferb to keep Perry as a pet. In Milo Murphy's Law, Perry becomes a recurring character. Over the course of the second season, he is tasked with watching over Dr. Doofenshmirtz as he attempts (and fails) to do good around Danville. Doofenshmirtz is at first oblivious to this mission and assumes Perry is being his friend, and so pushes him away upon finding out. They eventually reconcile and Perry reveals his intentions to donate his earnings towards Doofenshmirtz's cause. He also appears in Phineas and Ferb the Movie: Candace Against the Universe. ### In other media In addition to the main television series, Perry has appeared in several pieces of Phineas and Ferb merchandise. To date, he has appeared in all Phineas and Ferb novelizations, published by Disney Press. The character has been adapted into a 20-inch plush toy, released by The Walt Disney Company. The plush has a button on its hand that allows it to emit Perry's signature chattering noise. Certain t-shirts based on the series released by both Disney and the online retail website Zazzle also display Perry and the phrase "Hey, where's Perry?" which most characters like Phineas, Isabella, Stacy, Irving, Ferb, and Lawrence utter when Perry goes to Major Monogram in his secret lair in almost every episode. There also is a T-shirt with Perry's face. Perry appears in the Nintendo DS video game based on the series, simply titled Phineas and Ferb, where a mini-game involves Perry stopping Doofenshmirtz's latest evil scheme. As of June 28, 2012, Perry appeared in the video game Where's My Perry?. On April 1, 2014, Perry is also a playable character in the video game Disney Infinity. ## Character ### Creation and conception `While working on the animated television series Rocko's Modern Life, Phineas and Ferb co-creators Dan Povenmire and Jeff "Swampy" Marsh utilized several recurring elements in the episodes that they wrote. Among these were actions sequences and chase scenes. Povenmire and Marsh wanted to reuse these elements in their series and chose Perry to execute it. The pair gave him a consistent and continuous nemesis in the form of Doofenshmirtz as a means of allowing viewers to get to know him.` While choosing a species for Perry, Povenmire and Marsh wanted to keep in mind selecting one that was uncommon, an animal that kids could not "pick out at a pet store and beg [their parents] for." They chose a platypus because of the animal's obscure and striking appearance. The animal was scarcely used in American animated programs, so the pair opined that Perry "would not have to compete with preconceived notions that viewers might bring to a more conventional critter." The blank storyboard they were given allowed them to "make stuff up" since "no one knows very much about [them]." Perry has a theme song tentatively entitled "Perry," performed by Randy Crenshaw and Laura Dickinson, and written by Povenmire and Marsh, who write the majority of songs in the series. The song, along with the number "Gitchee Gitchee Goo" from the episode "Flop Starz," was the first musical composition Povenmire and Marsh pitched to The Walt Disney Company. They were nervous doing so, because, as Povenmire explained, "Disney has a big history of music -- what if they hate it?" Their reaction, however, was considerably positive and the pair was asked to write a song for each episode, which they vehemently agreed to. The opening lyrics for the song describe Perry as a standard textbook definition of a platypus: "He's a semi-aquatic, egg-laying mammal of action!" ### Design Like the other characters of the series, Perry was structured in a simple style to allow young viewers to easily draw him. In keeping with the show's general design scheme, Perry is constructed of geometric shapes in a style reminiscent of Tex Avery's. Povenmire uses different design styles for drawing Perry depending on how he is portrayed. When Perry is portrayed as a domesticated and mindless pet, Povenmire begins with a square shaped like a loaf of bread. He then draws his front legs and feet before drawing his bill, which is set at a certain angle. Povenmire then draws his eyeballs, which are never focused and look in opposing directions in a daze. He concludes the figure by adding his hind legs, tail, hair, and finally color. When designing Perry, Povenmire stated that he chose to color Perry teal because he thought "it looked cool", though it was discovered in 2020 that platypuses coincidentally glow a very similar color when under ultraviolet light. When portrayed as a secret agent, Povenmire starts with a similar bread loaf square design but draws it standing up vertically and places a fedora on the top of his head, which is combined with the square torso. In contrast to his mindless and wild-eyed expression as a pet, the secret agent version of Perry is detailed with eyes "full of steely blue resolve." Povenmire proceeds by drawing his arms, with bare hands that are open and prepared for fighting or any danger. His legs are bent, as well prepared for an act of danger or action needed. Povenmire finishes the design by adding his beaver tail and color. ### Personality Perry's undercover identity as a pet leads to characters throughout the series to deem him as a "mindless domestic pet" that "doesn't do much". This definition of the character led to Phineas and Ferb spearheading production of a new toyline based on Perry called "Perry the Inaction Figure," whose tagline revolved around it not doing anything but allowing the customer to make it whatever they desire it to be. In all actuality, Perry is a skilled fighter who is able to perform several implausible judo fighting moves and escapes. He has access to several different types of technology and inventions provided to him by The O.W.C.A., including a hover craft dubbed the "Platypusmobile," a jet ski, and a whistle set that allows him to summon different types of animals. His favorite color is perry-winkle. Although his appearance as a domestic pet is mostly a cover, Perry has nonetheless expressed care and devotion for the Flynn-Fletcher family. In the episode "The Ballad of Bad Beard", Perry managed to drag Candace out of the Dark Cave before it caved in because of Dr. Doofenshmirtz's "self-destruction button" which Candace had accidentally pressed while under the orange moss hallucination, thinking it was a vending machine. He did this even though he knew that Candace saw that Perry was a secret agent talking to Agent E (Eagle) and to Major Monogram in a cracked egg. Candace thought she was just hallucinating because of the orange moss she accidentally touched earlier in the episode. Also, when an invention of Doofenshmirtz's in the episode "Journey to the Center of Candace" might cause severe harm to Phineas and Ferb, Perry thoroughly beats up Doofenshmirtz and quickly handcuffs him. He then ties him to a pipe and, instead of just leaving him like he usually does in the series, calls for special forces from the O.W.C.A. to come and arrest the doctor, though they never show up. In "Oh, There You Are, Perry," Doofenshmirtz is downgraded to a low threat level and Perry is reassigned to a new nemesis. This causes him to have to leave his home with the Flynn-Fletchers, which makes him sad and he does not enjoy his new villain. Phineas and Ferb are fearful about where Perry could have gone to and put up several flyers around town for people to find him. They decide to throw a concert on the roof of a building, singing a song about how much they love Perry and want him to come home. Concurrently, Perry is reassigned to Doofenshmirtz again and returns to the brothers once more. Though Perry is anthropomorphic, he cannot speak; only communicating through an "aggravated purr" type of noise made by flapping his bill. This noise is provided by actor Dee Bradley Baker; to this day, Povenmire and Marsh do not understand how Baker produces the noise. Thomas Sangster, who voices Ferb, is good at making the noise and is considered second only to Baker himself. When in his "Agent P" persona, Perry is almost completely silent and communicates only by body language, facial expressions, hand gestures and occasionally pantomime. Povenmire also revealed that he did not actually know what a platypus sounded like when choosing the noise Baker would make, and that its resemblance to an actual platypus's noises were coincidental. ## Reception As a character, Perry has been well received by both fans and critics. As Cynthia Littleton of Variety magazine wrote, "Perry the platypus is a breakout star from the Disney Channel toon 'Phineas and Ferb.'" The New York Times writer Susan Stewart called him "intrepid." Jean Yoo, a press member for Disney Channel, said that Perry is "suave" and "makes James Bond look like a rank amateur." Aaron H. Bynum of Animator Insider opined that he is "indubitably confident." Carly H. of Scholastic, Inc. declared Perry "pretty darn awesome." Josh Jackson, editor of Paste, described Perry and Doofenshmirtz's relationship as "pitch-perfect." The Daily Star claimed that Perry was an "amazing mammal" and stated that everyone can be like him. Certain reviewers have also commented negatively about Perry and his subplot, which Sherry Robinson of the St. Petersburg Times considers "pretty trippy." Kevin McDonough of Sun Coast Today described it as "complicated" and "loosely connected" to the rest of the series, writing that he is "not sure what this accomplishes except to add the noise of explosions to the already constant din of singing and screaming." Ed Liu of Toon Zone feels it is "truly puzzling what Perry the secret agent is doing in this show in the first place." Liu considers his subplot to be a type of "throw everything against the wall and see what sticks" element and writes that "many of the earlier episodes of the show don't manage to do a very good job of balancing the subplot and the main one." Perry was nominated for a Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Award in 2014 under the category of Favorite Animated Animal Sidekick.
45,329,468	Masonic Hall, Taunton	1,123,249,921	Grade II listed building in Taunton, UK	[ "1822 establishments in England", "Buildings and structures in Taunton", "Former churches in Somerset", "Freemasonry in England", "Grade II* listed buildings in Taunton Deane", "Masonic buildings in the United Kingdom", "Roman Catholic churches completed in 1822" ]	The Masonic Hall in Taunton, Somerset, is designated by Historic England as a Grade II\* listed building. It was originally built in the early 19th century as St George's Chapel, the first Roman Catholic chapel open for public worship in Taunton since the Reformation. The building, which forms the end of a terrace, features a series of prominent Ionic pilasters along the front and southern end. Opened in 1822, St George's Chapel served Taunton's growing Catholic community for over 35 years, before they moved to a larger church which was completed in 1860. After being rented out for a time, when it was known as St George's Hall, the building was then sold in 1878 to a company acting on behalf of a group of Freemasons, who purchased it to provide a home for the Unanimity & Sincerity Lodge. It now hosts nine different Lodges of the Freemasons. ## History ### Catholic chapel Prior to the Reformation, Taunton had three Catholic churches; the Church of St Peter and St Paul, which was part of Taunton Priory, and was destroyed during the Dissolution; and the Churches of St Mary Magdalene and St James, which both became Anglican. The Roman Catholic Church all but died in Taunton; one book records that prior to the 19th century, "there were no Papists in Taunton". In 1787, a Mission Rector was sent to Taunton. Four years later, Catholic chapels were legalised, and the rector registered a chapel in a house on Canon Street. Upon his death in 1818, a new rector was appointed; Rev. Samuel Fisher. The new rector immediately began raising money for a permanent church, which was opened on 3 July 1822. The building was located on The Crescent, and was dedicated to Saint George. The church seated 200; greater than the estimated 120 Catholic resident in Taunton. This new church, known as St George's Chapel, was the first public Roman Catholic church in Taunton since the Reformation. Within 35 years, the congregation had swelled, and St George's Chapel was no longer large enough to serve the Catholics of Taunton. The nearby Franciscan Convent purchased a plot of land adjacent to their own in 1858, and St George's Church was opened in April 1860, to replace the chapel of the same dedication. ### Masonic Hall The chapel building was subsequently let out for various uses, and known as "St George's Hall". In 1878, the hall was purchased by members of the Unanimity & Sincerity Lodge of the Freemasons, and named the Masonic Hall; it was consecrated by Henry Herbert, 4th Earl of Carnarvon, the Provincial Grand Master of Somerset Freemasons in January the following year. The Unanimity & Sincerity Lodge had originally met in Ilminster after their constitution in 1788, and moved to Taunton in 1797, meeting at the London Inn. The owners of the building, though members of the Freemasons had purchased the property as a limited company, and also rented the building to other users: Richard Huish's School taught their girl's classes from there, and the cellars were used by a wine merchant. After purchasing the building, the Masonic Hall Company, in addition to the necessary decorating, also commissioned a builder, William Templemen to carry out a number of structural changes; the lobby was split into three rooms, to provide a "robing chamber" on one side, and a small waiting room on the other. Beyond the large main hall, what had been the vestry had a temporary partition removed, and a toilet added. The staircase down to the kitchen was moved, and in the kitchen itself a cooking range was installed. In the mid-1880s, an extension was made to the hall by the same builder; a two-storey building, of which the ground floor served as a warehouse. The extension replaced a previous building that had been deemed "unfit for repair". The extension was completed at a cost of £337 and 10 shillings, slightly more than the initial estimate. By 1892, the hall was no longer being used by the school, now known as Bishop Fox's, for their girl's lessons. Further renovations were carried out around that time at a cost of just over £180. The hall continued to be let out for various social functions, and is currently home to nine lodges of the Freemasons; Unanimity & Sincerity Lodge, Lodge of St George, Taunton Deane Lodge, Queens College Lodge, Old Aluredian Lodge, Taunton School Lodge, Richard Huish Lodge, Vivary Lodge and the Emergency Services Lodge. ## Architecture The Masonic Hall sits at the southern end of a terrace. It has a stucco front, with two pairs of Ionic pilasters; the larger ones frame the building, and appear to support an overhanging cornice with a decorative dentil finish. The smaller pilasters are either side of a large doorway, and are topped by a pediment. The double wooden doors have six panels, and are fronted by six steps which are almost the same width as the building. On the southern side of the building, more Ionic pilasters rise the height of the building, spread between four large windows. The hall is designated by Historic England as a Grade II\* listed building, and is considered to form a group with Numbers 1–11 and 15–20 The Crescent, which are both similarly Grade II\* listed, and with the Grade II listed properties; 21 and 22 The Crescent, Somerset County Club, Dragon Book Shop and Number 14 Bath Place.
35,924,350	No. 4 Service Flying Training School RAAF	1,117,592,521	null	[ "Military units and formations disestablished in 1945", "Military units and formations established in 1941", "RAAF training units" ]	No. 4 Service Flying Training School (No. 4 SFTS) was a flying training school of the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) during World War II. It was formed in February 1941, and commenced flying the following month. Responsible for intermediate and advanced instruction of pilots under the Empire Air Training Scheme (EATS), the school was based at Geraldton, Western Australia, and operated Avro Anson aircraft. Two reserve squadrons were formed in response to the outbreak of war in the Pacific, though they never saw action. Flying activity was reduced towards the end of 1943, and the school was disbanded in May 1945, having graduated over 1,000 pilots. It re-formed as No. 87 Operational Base Unit, which was renamed Care and Maintenance Unit (CMU) Geraldton in May 1946. CMU Geraldton was disbanded in September 1947. ## History Flying instruction in the RAAF underwent major changes following the outbreak of World War II, in response to a dramatic increase in the number of aircrew volunteers and the commencement of Australia's participation in the Empire Air Training Scheme (EATS). The Air Force's pre-war pilot training facility, No. 1 Flying Training School at RAAF Station Point Cook, Victoria, was supplanted in 1940–41 by twelve elementary flying training schools (EFTS) and eight service flying training schools (SFTS). The EFTS provided basic flying training to prospective pilots who, if successful, would go on to SFTS for further instruction that focussed on operational (or "service") flying. The course at SFTS typically consisted of two streams, intermediate and advanced, and included such techniques as instrument flying, night flying, advanced aerobatics, formation flying, dive bombing, and aerial gunnery. The total duration of training varied during the war as demand for aircrew rose and fell. Initially running for sixteen weeks, the course was cut to ten weeks (which included seventy-five hours flying time) in October 1940. A year later it was raised to twelve weeks (including 100 hours flying time), and again to sixteen weeks two months later. It continued to increase after this, peaking at twenty-eight weeks in June 1944. No. 4 Service Flying Training School (No. 4 SFTS) was formed at Geraldton, Western Australia, on 10 February 1941, and came under the control of Western Area Command. Its inaugural commanding officer was Wing Commander P.G. Heffernan. Geraldton's civil airport already had extensive runways, taxiways, hangars and barracks, but more buildings were required to house the RAAF trainees and unit personnel. Facilities were still under construction when the first course of flying training commenced on 10 March. A further challenge the school faced related to equipment. All its Avro Anson aircraft were transferred from other units that, according to the RAAF Historical Section, "happily disposed of their oldest air frames". Coupled with a shortage of the spare parts needed to keep such aircraft operational, the result was that flying hours remained low for some time. No. 4 SFTS received students who had graduated from No. 9 Elementary Flying Training School at Cunderdin, Western Australia. Approximately sixty new entrants, of whom around fifty were expected to graduate, arrived at No. 4 SFTS every twenty-eight days. Discipline was strict, the aim being to cut down on the accidents that were typical of service flying training establishments. In the event, the school did not suffer a fatal flying accident for over a year-and-a-half after it commenced operations. In November 1941, eight of its Ansons took part in the search for survivors from HMAS Sydney. By this time, No. 4 SFTS was operating just over a hundred aircraft, including two Fairey Battles and two de Havilland Fox Moths, the remainder being Ansons. Personnel totalled 1,475, including 197 students. Following the outbreak of the Pacific War in December, the school's aircraft were classified as Second Line (Reserve) aircraft in the defence of Australia. Nos. 68 and 69 Reserve Squadrons were formed at Geraldton, but they were only used for maritime search-and-rescue, and saw no action before their disbandment in February 1943. On 30 September 1942, a No. 4 SFTS Anson operated by No. 68 Squadron crash-landed in a marsh 140 miles (230 km) north of Carnarvon; one crewman was killed and two injured. From October 1942 to March 1944, the school was commanded by World War I veteran and pioneer civil aviator Norman Brearley. Two men were killed and three injured when one of No. 4 SFTS's Ansons crashed after colliding with trees after takeoff at a satellite airfield on 21 July 1943; one of the injured died later without regaining consciousness. Four occupants of an Anson were killed on 1 November, when a wing disintegrated after the pilot apparently became disorientated in cloud and the plane went into a high-speed dive. By the end of the year, flying at No. 4 SFTS had begun to taper off, and it was reduced still further in 1944. Training at the school concluded in December that year, under a reorganisation of EATS establishments in Australia. No. 4 SFTS began disbanding in January 1945, as part of a general reduction in RAAF flight instruction owing to a surplus of trained aircrew, and the task was complete by May. It had graduated over 1,000 pilots—among them Dave Shannon, awarded the Distinguished Service Order for his part in the Dambuster raid by No. 617 Squadron RAF in May 1943—and established, according to the RAAF Historical Section, "an enviable safety record". No. 87 Operational Base Unit (No. 87 OBU) was formed with No. 4 SFTS staff on 1 June 1945 to administer Geraldton's facilities and maintain its aircraft following the flying school's disbandment. On 20 May 1946, No. 87 OBU was disbanded and re-formed as Care and Maintenance Unit (CMU) Geraldton. CMU Geraldton was one of many such units that the RAAF raised for the storage and maintenance of surplus aircraft prior to their disposal after the war. It was disbanded on 5 September 1947. Most of the buildings constructed for the RAAF during the war were auctioned and removed around the same time. A commemorative sundial in the form of an Anson wing is located at Geraldton Airport. ## Commanding officers No. 4 SFTS was commanded by the following officers:
194,561	Rocket to Russia	1,169,419,761	null	[ "1977 albums", "Albums produced by Tommy Ramone", "Albums produced by Tony Bongiovi", "Ramones albums", "Rhino Records albums", "Sire Records albums" ]	Rocket to Russia is the third studio album by the American punk rock band Ramones, and was released on November 4, 1977, through Sire Records. Its origins date back to the summer of 1977, when "Sheena Is a Punk Rocker" was released as a single. That summer was known as the peak of the punk rock genre since many punk bands were offered recording contracts. The album's recording began in August 1977, and the band had a considerably larger budget with Sire allowing them between \$25,000 and \$30,000; much of this money went toward the album's production rather than recording. The album's cover art was directed by John Gillespie. John Holmstrom and guitarist Johnny Ramone both worked on illustration, with the entire back cover contemplating a military theme, while the inner sleeve artwork depicted many of the themes portrayed in songs. The subject matter of songs varied throughout the album, though nearly all the tracks on the album incorporated humor into the lyrics. The musical style showed more of a surf rock influence, and many songs had minimal structuring. The album received positive reviews, with many critics appreciating the matured production and sound quality as compared to Rocket to Russia's predecessors. Music critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine called it his favorite Ramones album as it contained several hooks and featured more variety of tempos. The album was not as commercially successful as the band had hoped, peaking at number 49 on the Billboard 200. Band members blamed the Sex Pistols for their lack of sales, saying that they changed the punk image for the worse. This is the last album to be recorded with all four original members as credited performers, as drummer Tommy Ramone left the band in 1978 to work solely on production. The album was ranked at number 106 in Rolling Stones "500 Greatest Albums of All Time" in 2012, and was ranked number 385 in the 2020 edition. ## Background In the summer of 1977, the single "Sheena Is a Punk Rocker" was released shortly after the release of the band's second album, Leave Home. This period was extremely significant to the punk rock genre, as it was the initial wave of New York City's underground punk bands receiving recording contracts. New York-based clubs CBGB and Max's Kansas City began to see bigger audiences crowd in to hear these bands. Punk fans commonly believed that this musical style would soon top the market, to which author Tom Carson explains: "To be in New York that summer was to have some sense of what it might have been like to live in San Francisco in 1966 or '67, or in London when the Beatles and the [Rolling] Stones first hit." ## Recording and production Sire Records allowed the band between \$25,000 and \$30,000 to fully record and produce the album, which is a considerably larger budget compared to the band's previous albums. The band spent most of the money Sire had given them on the album's production value. The studio rent was \$150 per hour, usually using the first take of a song as its final recording. Johnny explained that "it's best to do it quickly ... You do not wanna sit there and bullshit. It's your money they're spending." The recording began on August 21, 1977 and took place in Midtown Manhattan at Mediasound Studios, a premises of a former Episcopalian Church. On the first day of sessions, guitarist Johnny Ramone brought a copy of the Sex Pistols' single "God Save the Queen" with him, remarking that their type of music "robbed" the band. He emphasized that the album's sound engineer Ed Stasium needed to incorporate better production than that of the Sex Pistols, to which Stasium replied "no problem." Johnny relates: "These guys ripped us off and I want to sound better than this." Although the album cites Tony Bongiovi and Tommy Ramone (credited as T. Erdelyi) as the head producers, much of the album's production was done by Stasium; Johnny went so far as to insist that Bongiovi was "not even there" during the band's recording sessions. Rocket to Russia's final mastering was mainly done in Bongiovi's Power Station studio. Infamous record producer Phil Spector offered to fabricate Rocket to Russia, but the band declined, feeling as though the album would not be the same without Tommy and Bongiovi. ## Title and packaging The album was released on November 4, 1977, under the name Rocket to Russia, although it had a working title of Get Well. John Gillespie directed the artwork on the album, and the cover photo was taken by Danny Fields. Arturo Vega is credited as Artistic Coordinator, and Punk magazine editor John Holmstrom illustrated for the album. Holmstrom and Johnny collaborated on the back cover's concept, eventually conceiving a military theme with an anti-communist cartoon drawing. The back cover art depicts a "pinhead" riding a rocket from the United States to Russia. The drawing features many landmarks which pertain to their global position, including The Empire State Building and Capitol Building, and Saint Basil's Cathedral in Moscow. The original artwork is now featured in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. The inside sleeve features cartoon illustrations of each song's basic concept. ## Lyrics and composition Compared to the band's previous albums, the songs from Rocket to Russia were more surf music and bubblegum pop influenced. But similar to their previous releases, the lyrics integrated humor, specifically black comedy with themes circling mental disorders and psychiatry. The album opens with "Cretin Hop", which pays homage to Ramones fans, and was inspired by Cretin Avenue of St. Paul, Minnesota, named after former bishop Joseph Crétin. When the piece was performed at concerts, the band would pogo dance on stage. "Rockaway Beach" was written by bassist Dee Dee Ramone, and was inspired by the Beach Boys along with other surf music bands. The title refers to a neighborhood and beach in Queens which Dee Dee was a fan of, as confirmed by Tommy and Joey. "I Don't Care" is composed of three chords and features minimal text composition. The song is among the first pieces written by the band and was originally recorded as a demo that was released on the 2001 expanded edition of the Ramones debut album. "Sheena Is a Punk Rocker" was written by Joey, who explains that the lyrics are about a young female outsider named Sheena who strayed away from the popular disco and surf music and instead visited nightclubs and listened to punk rock. The mid-tempo song deviates from a three-chord pattern and starts off with Dee Dee shouting "Four!", which, according to engineer Ed Stasium, was the result of Dee Dee starting his iconic countdown before the tape started rolling. This is followed by guitar riffs deemed to have a "raucous" texture by author Tom Carson. The author also suggests that these chords "bump[ed]" into each other until the song's fade-out ending. "We're a Happy Family" is a caricature of the conditions which 20th-century middle-class American families lived in. The song's lyrics depict a dysfunctional family where the father is a lying homosexual, the mother is addicted to prescription drugs, the infant has chills. The writing also tells of how the family are friends with the President of the United States and the Pope and indicate that the family sells "dope". The song fades out with various different lines taken from fake dialogue, which illustrate a side of Joey's personality according to his brother Mickey Leigh. Side B of the album begins with "Teenage Lobotomy", which deals with the brain surgical operation lobotomy. The lyrics outline how this procedure can cause serious consequences to the brain, with the line "Gonna get my Ph.D, I'm a teenage lobotomy." The composition features more complex melodies than that of other songs from the album, with Stasium proclaiming it to be a "mini-Ramones Symphony". Rocket to Russia is the first album to feature two cover songs: "Do You Wanna Dance?" (originally performed by Bobby Freeman) and "Surfin' Bird" (originally performed by the Trashmen). ## Critical reception Rocket to Russia was well received by critics, and was often given a positive review. Many critics appreciated the band's progression of sound quality and production value, as opposed to the album's predecessors. Stephen Thomas Erlewine, a music critic at AllMusic said that the production "only gives the Ramones' music more force." He rewarded the album five out of five stars, stating that although it lacks the revolutionary impact that their debut had, Rocket to Russia is the band's "most listenable and enjoyable album" because of its surplus of hooks and varying tempo. Critic Robert Christgau reaffirms that the album's content evolved significantly since previous releases. Writing in Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies (1981), he noted that the album had "something for everyone" and called it a "ready-made punk-rock classic." Rolling Stone critic Dave Marsh began his review of the album by stating: "Rocket to Russia is the best American rock & roll of the year and possibly the funniest rock album ever made." Like other critics, Marsh recognized the advanced sound quality, explaining that "the guitars still riff relentlessly, but they are freer within the murky sound, and the songs give them much more to work with." John Rockwell of The New York Times deemed Rocket to Russia the band's best album "because the humor and the role-playing have become more overt than ever." ## Commercial performance Although the band expected the album to spawn a few hit songs, Rocket to Russia sold few records. The album charted on the US Billboard 200 at number 49, making this album one of the most successful of the Ramones' releases. It also debuted at number 31 on the Swedish charts, 36 on the Canadian charts, and 60 on the UK Albums Chart. The lack of record sales was largely due to the fellow punk band Sex Pistols turning people off the genre "with their antisocial behavior," as put by author Brian J. Bowe. Rock music historian Legs McNeil relates: "Safety pins, razor blades, chopped haircuts, snarling, vomiting—everything that had nothing to do with the Ramones was suddenly in vogue, and it killed any chance Rocket to Russia had of getting any airplay." Joey also insisted that the Sex Pistols were partially responsible for the low sale numbers, concluding that before 60 Minutes focused on the Sex Pistols, Rocket to Russia had decent airplay. After this, Joey asserted that "everyone flipped out and then things changed radically. It really kind of screwed things up for ourselves." ## Tommy's departure Drummer Tommy, who had also worked to co-produce the album, was troubled by the lack of sales and began debating on continuing with the Ramones. He also considered touring to be "depressing", and that the audience at unfamiliar gigs were "a bunch of very eccentric, high-strung, crazy people, from one shit-hole club to another." The drummer left the band in 1978 but continued as producer on their next album Road to Ruin. He said: > I was thinking, 'What's best for the Ramones?' There was all this tension between me and Johnny. I was trying to release the pressure, to keep the band going. I told Dee Dee and Joey first that I was leaving the band. They said, 'Oh no, don't go, don't go, blah, blah, blah.' I told them we had to do something because I was losing my mind. ## Track listing ### Original release All tracks originally credited to the Ramones (except "Do You Wanna Dance?" and "Surfin' Bird"). Actual writers are listed alongside the tracks. - Track 15 previously unissued. - Track 16 produced and arranged by Dan Kessel and David Kessel. Recorded at Gold Star Studios, Los Angeles, December 1978. First issued on All the Stuff (And More) Volume Two (1991). ### 2017 40th anniversary deluxe edition (Sire/Rhino) Adapted from the album's liner notes. Disc 1 Remastered original mixes - Tracks 1–14 (original mixes) as per original album - Tracks 15-28 mixed by Ed Stasium at Eight Palms Ranchero, Poway, California, 2017. Disc 2 - Tracks 1-12 mixed by Ed Stasium at Mediasound and the Power Station, New York, 1977. - Tracks 13-19 and 24 mixed by Ed Stasium, 2017. - Track 21 produced by Tony Bongiovi and T. Erdelyi, engineered by Ed Stasium. Recorded at Sundragon, New York, 1976. Mixed by Ed Stasium at Mediasound, New York, 1977. - Track 22 produced by Tony Bongiovi and T. Erdelyi, engineered by Ed Stasium, assisted by Don Berman. Recorded at Mediasound, New York, 1977. Mixed by Ed Stasium. - Track 23: Joey's voice recorded at Sire Records' basement studio, October 1977. - All tracks, except 21 and 22, previously unissued. Disc 3 - Recorded by the Basing Street Studios Mobile. Engineered by Frank Owen, assisted by Greg Cobb. Mixed by Ed Stasium at Eight Palms Ranch, Poway, California, 2017. LP 40th anniversary tracking mix - Track listing as disc 1, tracks 15–28 ## Personnel Adapted from AllMusic and the album's liner notes, except where noted. Ramones - Joey Ramone – lead vocals - Johnny Ramone – guitar - Dee Dee Ramone – bass guitar, backing vocals - Tommy Ramone – drums Additional musicians - Ed Stasium – additional guitar, backing vocals - Kathie Baillie – backing vocals on "Sheena Is a Punk Rocker" - Alan LeBoeuf – backing vocals on "Sheena Is a Punk Rocker" - Michael Bonagura – backing vocals on "Sheena Is a Punk Rocker" Production' - Tony Bongiovi – producer - Tommy Ramone – producer (credited as T. Erdelyi) - Ed Stasium – engineer, mixing - Don Berman – assistant engineer - Greg Calbi – mastering - Danny Fields – photography (front cover) - John Gillespie – art direction - John Holmstrom – artwork (back cover and inside drawings) - Arturo Vega – artistic coordination ## Charts
48,990,008	Elizabeth Rona	1,136,056,755	Hungarian chemist (1890–1981)	[ "1890 births", "1981 deaths", "20th-century women scientists", "Eötvös Loránd University alumni", "Hungarian chemists", "Hungarian educators", "Hungarian women chemists", "Hungarian women educators", "Jewish women scientists", "Manhattan Project people", "Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies faculty", "Trinity Washington University faculty", "University of Miami faculty" ]	Elizabeth Rona (20 March 1890 – 27 July 1981) was a Hungarian nuclear chemist, known for her work with radioactive isotopes. After developing an enhanced method of preparing polonium samples, she was recognized internationally as the leading expert in isotope separation and polonium preparation. Between 1914 and 1918, during her postdoctoral study with George de Hevesy, she developed a theory that the velocity of diffusion depended on the mass of the nuclides. As only a few atomic elements had been identified, her confirmation of the existence of "Uranium-Y" (now known as thorium-231) was a major contribution to nuclear chemistry. She was awarded the Haitinger Prize by the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 1933. After immigrating to the United States in 1941, she was granted a Carnegie Fellowship to continue her research and provided technical information on her polonium extraction methods to the Manhattan Project. Later in her career, she became a nuclear chemistry professor at the Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies and after 15 years there transferred to the Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of Miami. At both Oak Ridge and Miami, she continued her work on the geochronology of seabed elements and radiometric dating. She was posthumously inducted into the Tennessee Women's Hall of Fame in 2015. ## Early life and education Elizabeth Rona was born on 20 March 1890 in Budapest, Hungary, to Ida, (née Mahler) and Samuel Róna. Her father was a prosperous Jewish physician who worked with Louis Wickham and Henri-August Dominici, founders of radium therapy, to introduce the techniques to Budapest, and installed one of the first x-ray machines there. Elizabeth wanted to become a physician like her father, but Samuel believed that it would be too difficult for a woman to attain. Though he died when she was in her second year of university, Rona's father had encouraged her and spurred her interest in science from a young age. She enrolled in the Philosophy Faculty at the University of Budapest, studying chemistry, geochemistry, and physics, receiving her PhD in 1912. ## Early career Rona began her postdoctoral training in 1912 at the Animal Physiology Institute in Berlin and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, studying yeast as a reagent. In 1913 she transferred to Karlsruhe University, working under the direction of Kasimir Fajans, the discoverer of isotopes, for the next eight months. During the summer of 1914, she studied at University College London, but returned to Budapest at the outbreak of World War I. Taking a position at Budapest's Chemical Institute, she completed a scientific paper on the "diffusion constant of radon in water". Working with George de Hevesy, she was asked to verify a new element — at the time was termed Uranium-Y, now known as Th-231. Though others had failed to confirm the element, Rona was able to separate the Uranium-Y from interfering elements, proving it was a beta emitter (β-emission) with a half-life of 25 hours. The Hungarian Academy of Sciences published her findings. Rona first coined the terms "isotope labels" and "tracers" during this study, noting that the velocity of diffusion depended on the mass of the nuclides. Though contained in a footnote, this was the basis for the development of the mass spectrographic and heavy water studies later performed by other scientists. In addition to her scientific proficiency, Rona spoke English, French, German, and Hungarian. When Hevesy left Budapest, in 1918 Franz Tangl, a noted biochemist and physiologist of the University of Budapest, offered Rona a teaching position. She taught chemistry to selected students whom Tangl felt had insufficient knowledge to complete the course work, becoming the first woman to teach chemistry at university level in Hungary. The apartment in which Rona and her mother were living was seized when the communists invaded Hungary in 1919. Owing to political instability and the persecution of those with communist sympathies during the countering White Terror, an increasing amount of work at the Institute fell to Rona. When offered a position in 1921 to return to Dahlem and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, by Otto Hahn, Rona resigned. She joined Hahn's staff in Berlin to separate ionium (now known as Th-230) from uranium. Hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic forced her transfer to the Textile Fiber Institute of Kaiser Wilhelm, as practical research was the only work permitted at the time. Theoretical research with no essential application was not a priority. Her training allowed her to return to a more stable Hungary and accept a position in a textile factory there in 1923. She did not care for the work and soon left, joining the staff of the Institute for Radium Research of Vienna in 1924 at the request of Stefan Meyer. Her research there focused on measuring the absorption and range of hydrogen rays, as well as on developing polonium as an alternative radioactive material to radium. ## Austria As early as 1926, Meyer had written to Irène Joliot-Curie suggesting that Rona work with her to learn how his laboratory could make their own polonium samples. Once Hans Pettersson was able to secure funds to pay Rona's expenses, Joliot-Curie allowed her to come and study polonium separation at the Curie Institute in Paris. Rona developed an enhanced method of preparing polonium sources and producing alpha-emissions.(α-emission). Gaining recognition as an expert in the field, she took those skills back to the Radium Institute along with a small disc of polonium. This disc allowed her to create lab specimens of polonium, which were used in much of the Institute's subsequent research. Her skills were in high demand and she formed many collaborations in Vienna, working with Ewald Schmidt on the modification of Paul Bonét-Maury's method of vaporizing polonium; with Marietta Blau on photographic emulsions of hydrogen rays; and with Hans Pettersson. In 1928, Pettersson asked her to analyze a sample of sea bottom sediment to determine its radium content. Because the lab she was working in was contaminated, she took the samples to the oceanographic laboratory at Bornö Marine Research Station on Stora Bornö in Gullmarsfjorden, Sweden, which would become her summer research destination for the next 12 years. Her analyses with Berta Karlik on the half-lives of uranium, thorium, and actinium decay identified radiometric dating and elemental alpha particle ranges. In 1933, Rona and Karlik won the Austrian Academy of Sciences Haitinger Prize. In 1934, Rona was back in Paris studying with Joliot-Curie, who had discovered artificial radioactivity. Soon after, Curie died and Rona became ill, but she was able to return to Vienna late the following year to share what had been learned with a group of researchers made up of Pettersson, Elizabeth Kara-Michailova, and Ernst Føyn, who was serving as an assistant to Ellen Gleditsch at that time. Their studies centered on research of the effect caused by bombarding radionuclides with neutrons. In 1935 Rona consolidated some of these relationships, working on Stora Bornö, then visiting Gleditsch in Oslo, then traveling to Copenhagen to see Hevesy, and later to Kålhuvudet, Sweden to meet with Karlik and Pettersson. One of the projects the group had been working on for several years was to determine if there was any correlation between water depth and radium content, and their seawater research evaluated the concentration of elements in seawater collected from different locations. After the 1938 Anschluss, Rona and Marietta Blau left the Radium Institute because of their Jewish heritage and the antisemitic persecution they experienced in the laboratory. Rona first returned to Budapest and worked in an industrial laboratory, but within a few months, the position was eliminated. She worked from October to December 1938 in Sweden, and then accepted a temporary position for one year at the University of Oslo, which had been offered by Gleditsch. Reluctant to leave her home, at the end of her year in Oslo, Rona returned to Hungary. She was appointed to a position at the Radium-Cancer Hospital in Budapest, preparing radium for medicinal purposes. ## Emigration Faced with encroaching Russians on one side and the Nazi involvement in Hungary during World War II on the other, in early 1941 Rona obtained a visitor's visa and fled to the United States. For three months she was unemployed and suspected of being a spy, though she sought help from scientists she had worked with in Europe to find employment. At a meeting of the American Physical Society, she met Austrian physicist Karl Herzfeld, who helped her secure a teaching post at Trinity College in Washington, D.C. During this period, she was awarded a Carnegie Fellowship to research at the Geophysical Laboratory of the Carnegie Institute, working on analysis of seawater and sediments. Between 1941 and 1942, she conducted work at Carnegie in conjunction with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, measuring the amount of radium in seawater and river water. Her study, completed in 1942, showed that the ratio of radium to uranium was lower in seawater and higher in river water. After returning from a summer visit to Los Altos, California, Rona received a vague telegram from the Institute of Optics at the University of Rochester referencing war work and polonium, but no details of an assignment. When Rona responded that she would be interested in helping with the war effort but had immigration issues, Brian O'Brien appeared in her office and explained the nature of the confidential work for the Manhattan Project. They proposed buying her method of polonium extraction and gave specific instructions for the type of assistants she might use – someone unfamiliar with chemistry or physics. Her non-citizen status did not preclude her from working for the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), to which she gave her methods without compensation. Before the Manhattan Project, polonium had been used only in small samples, but the project proposed to use both polonium and beryllium to create a reaction forcing neutrons to be ejected and ignite the fission reaction required for the atom bomb. Plutonium plants, based on her specifications for what was needed to process element, were built in the New Mexico desert at Los Alamos National Laboratory, but Rona was given no details. Rona's methods were also used as part of the experiments conducted by the Office of Human Radiation Experiments to determine the effects of human exposure to radiation. Early in her career, she had been exposed to the dangers of radium. Rona's requests for protective gas masks were denied, as Stefan Meyer downplayed the hazards of exposure. She purchased protective gear with her own money, not believing there was no danger. When vials of radioactive material exploded and the laboratory became contaminated, Rona was convinced her mask had saved her. Gleditsch had also warned her of the dangers the year Rona was sick and living in Paris, when Joliot-Curie died, emphasizing the risk of radium-related anemia. In her 1978 book about her experiences, Rona wrote about the damage to bones, hands, and lungs of the scientists studying radioactivity. Since they wore no gloves and frequently poured substances between vials without protection, she noted that their thumbs, forefingers, and ring fingers were often damaged. The secrecy surrounding the project makes it difficult to know if any of the scientists not directly working on any project knew specifically what their contributions were being used for. ## Later career Rona continued teaching until 1946 at Trinity. In 1947, she began working at the Argonne National Laboratory. Her work there focused on ion exchange reactions and she published several works for the United States Atomic Energy Commission. In 1948, she became a naturalized U.S. citizen. In 1950, she began research work at the Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies as a chemist and senior scientist in nuclear studies. During this period, she collaborated with Texas A&M University on the geochronology of seabed sediments, dating core samples by estimating their radioactive decay. She retired from Oak Ridge in 1965 and then went to work at the University of Miami, teaching at the Institute of Marine Sciences where she worked for a decade. Rona retired for a second time in 1976 and returned to Tennessee in the late 1970s, publishing a book in 1978 on her radioactive tracer methods. Rona died on 27 July 1981 in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. ## Legacy Rona did not receive full acknowledgment for her accomplishments during her era. She was posthumously inducted into the Tennessee Women's Hall of Fame in 2015. In 2019 she finally received an obituary in the New York Times, as part of their "Overlooked (obituary feature) series. ## Selected works ## See also - Timeline of women in science
897,230	Pamela C. Rasmussen	1,169,949,157	American ornithologist	[ "1959 births", "21st-century American women", "American ornithological writers", "American ornithologists", "American women academics", "American women non-fiction writers", "Articles containing video clips", "Living people", "Michigan State University faculty", "University of Kansas alumni", "Walla Walla University alumni", "Women ornithologists" ]	Pamela Cecile Rasmussen (born October 16, 1959) is an American ornithologist and expert on Asian birds. She was formerly a research associate at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and is based at the Michigan State University. She is associated with other major centers of research in the United States and the United Kingdom. Rasmussen's early research investigated South American seabirds and fossil birds from North America. She later specialised in Asian birds describing several new species and clarifying the status of others, particularly white-eyes and owls. More recently, she has been involved in large scale collaborations looking at patterns of global biodiversity, and has assessed the taxonomic status of South Asian vultures. She was the main author of Birds of South Asia: The Ripley Guide, a landmark publication due to its greater geographical and species coverage compared to its predecessors. As a result of her study of museum bird specimens when researching for the book, she was instrumental in unveiling the extent of the theft from museums and fraudulent documentation perpetrated by eminent British ornithologist Richard Meinertzhagen. ## Early life and career Pamela Rasmussen is the daughter of Helen Rasmussen, a Seventh-Day Adventist, whose husband, Chester Murray Rasmussen, a doctor, had left the family when Pamela and her sisters were young. Her interest in birds started when her mother bought her the junior edition of Oliver Austin's Birds of the World, and Pamela subsequently always chose to receive bird books as presents. She took her M.S. in 1983 at Walla Walla University, an Adventist-affiliated university in southeast Washington, and her Ph.D. at the University of Kansas in 1990. At Kansas, she studied blue-eyed shags, and was introduced to evolutionary theory, which had not been taught at her alma mater. Rasmussen is a visiting assistant professor of zoology, and assistant museum curator of mammalogy and ornithology, at Michigan State University (MSU), having formerly been a research associate for the eminent American ornithologist S. Dillon Ripley at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. She is a member of the American Ornithological Society (AOS) North American Classification Committee (NACC), a scientific associate with the bird group of the British Natural History Museum zoology section at Tring, and an associate editor of The Ibis, the scientific journal of the British Ornithologists' Union. She is a scientific affiliate for the Field Museum of Natural History and the founder and editor of AVoCet, MSU's avian vocalizations center. In 2020 she replaced the ornithologist Frank Gill as an editor of the IOC World Bird List, an online list maintained on behalf of the International Ornithologists' Union. Rasmussen is married to Michael D. Gottfried, who is Curator of Paleontology, Associate Professor of Geology, and Director of the Center for Integrative Studies in General Science at MSU. ### Research highlights #### South American seabirds Rasmussen's early work was largely focused on studies of the systematics, ecology and behaviour of Patagonian seabirds, notably cormorants. She studied plumage variations in juvenile blue-eyed, king and red-legged cormorants, and used plumage and behavioural patterns to establish relationships between king and blue-eyed shags. She also reviewed the fishing activity of olivaceous cormorants. #### Asian birds Rasmussen described four new Asian bird species from her study of museum specimens. The Nicobar scops owl Otus alius, the Sangihe scops owl Otus collari, and the cinnabar hawk owl Ninox ios, a Sulawesi endemic, all in 1998, and the Taiwan bush-warbler Bradypterus alishanensis in 2000. She rediscovered the forest owlet Athene blewitti, which had not been seen since 1884, in western India, previous searches by S. Dillon Ripley, Salim Ali and others having failed because they relied on fake documentation from Richard Meinertzhagen. In November 1997, Rasmussen and Ben King of the American Museum of Natural History spent ten days unsuccessfully searching two east Indian locations before driving west to the site of another old specimen, where King spotted a small, chunky owl with short, heavily white-feathered legs and huge claws, which Rasmussen confirmed as the target species whilst the owl was videotaped and photographed. With her colleagues, she clarified the taxonomy of Indonesian white-eyes, establishing the specific status of the Sangihe white-eye Zosterops nehrkorni and the Seram white-eye Z. stalkeri and confirmed the identity of the Serendib scops owl which had originally been discovered in Sri Lanka by local ornithologist Deepal Warakagoda. The imperial pheasant is a rare bird found in the forests of Vietnam and Laos. Rasmussen and her co-workers used morphology, hybridisation experiments, and DNA analysis to show that this pheasant, previously thought critically endangered, is actually a naturally occurring hybrid between the Vietnamese pheasant Lophura hatinhensis and the subspecies annamensis of the silver pheasant L. nycthemera. A 2008 paper saw a return to white-eye taxonomy with the formal description of the Togian white-eye Zosterops somadikartai, an endemic species of the Togian Islands of Indonesia, which, unlike most of its relatives, lacks the white ring around the eye which give this group of birds its name. Rasmussen noted that the Togian white-eye is distinctive not only in its appearance, but also in its lilting song, which sounds higher pitched and is less varied in frequency than the songs of its close relatives. Pamela Rasmussen's interest in Asian birds led to her involvement in more specifically conservation-directed projects. Two Gyps vultures, the Indian white-rumped vulture, Gyps bengalensis, and the "long-billed vulture" suffered a 99 percent population decrease in South Asia due to poisoning by diclofenac, a veterinary drug that causes kidney failure in birds that have eaten the carcasses of treated cattle. Rasmussen showed that there are two distinct species of long-billed vulture: the Indian vulture G. indicus and slender-billed vulture G. tenuirostris. This is important to conservation, since a captive-breeding program has been established to assist the recovery of at-risk vulture species. #### Biodiversity In 2005, Rasmussen was part of a large multi-institutional collaboration investigating biodiversity hotspots, which have a prominent role in conservation. The study assessed locations quantitatively for three criteria of bird diversity – species richness, the level of threat, and the number of endemic species. The results demonstrated that hotspots did not show the same geographical distribution for each factor. Only 2.5% of hotspot areas are common to all three aspects of diversity, with over 80% of hotspots registering on only one criterion. Each criterion explained less than 24% of the variation in the other factors, suggesting that even within a single taxonomic class, different mechanisms are responsible for the origin and maintenance of various aspects of diversity. Consequently, the different types of hotspots also vary greatly in their utility as conservation tools. Rasmussen's recent work has concentrated on further large-scale collaborations with the same group of institutions studying global patterns in biodiversity. A survey of species richness and geographical range size did not show the decrease in range size from temperate regions to the tropics that had been previously assumed; although that pattern was largely true in the northern hemisphere, it did not appear to apply in the southern hemisphere. Research evaluating the relationship between extinction and human impact showed that, after controlling for species richness, the best predictors of the global pattern of extinction risk are measures of human impact, with ecological factors being of secondary importance. An examination of the distribution of rare and threatened vertebrate species, showed differing patterns for bird, mammal and amphibian species, which has consequences for hotspot-based conservation strategies. Other studies by Rasmussen and her international colleagues looked at the importance of energy availability, and a 2007 paper showed that global patterns of spatial turnover are driven principally by widespread species rather than restricted ones. This complements other work, and helps to establish a unified model of how terrestrial biodiversity varies both within and between the Earth's major land masses. #### Paleo ornithology A fossil site at a borrow pit in near Cheswold, Delaware created during highway construction unearthed 11 specimens of fragmentary and unassociated avian fossils, which were identified by Rasmussen as including a small loon, a small gull-like species and five specimens of a gannet-like seabird, probably Morus loxostylus, a common species in the Miocene. All of these forms were already known from a site in Chesapeake Bay, Maryland. The finds suggests that the Delaware site was the near-shore area of a large bay at the time of deposition. Rasmussen was also involved in a review of fossil birds from Miocene and Pliocene deposits in North Carolina. Finds included an early Miocene loon Colymboides minutus, various ducks, a crested tern closely resembling the modern royal tern Sterna maxima, and a member of the crow genus, one of the few fossil passerine birds from that period. The review found that fossil birds from this period generally closely resemble a modern species or genus, and those that do not can usually be placed in a modern family with a fair degree of confidence. ### Birds of South Asia In 1992, Rasmussen took the position of assistant to S. Dillon Ripley, the former secretary of the Smithsonian, who was planning to produce a definitive guide to the birds of South Asia. When he became ill shortly after beginning the project, Rasmussen took over the project, and with artist John C. Anderton, produced Birds of South Asia: The Ripley Guide, a two-volume bird guide for the Indian subcontinent which was the first field guide for the area to include sonograms. Volume 1 contains the field guide with over 3400 illustrations in 180 plates, and more than 1450 colour maps. Volume 2 (Attributes and Status) gives specimen measurements, data about identification, status, distribution and habits. Vocalizations are described from recordings, and there are over 1000 sonograms. 1508 species that have occurred in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives, the Chagos archipelago and Afghanistan are covered, including 85 hypothetical and 67 'possible' species, which are given only short accounts. Notable aspects of Birds of South Asia are its distribution evidence-base – the book's authors based their distributional information almost completely on museum specimens – and its taxonomic approach, involving a large number of species-level splits. Its geographical range was also greater than that of older works, notably in the inclusion of Afghanistan. Many allopatric forms previously regarded as conspecific are treated by Rasmussen and Anderton as full species. Most of these had previously been proposed elsewhere, but the book introduced a number of innovations of its own. Experts on Asian birds, Nigel Collar and John Pilgrim, in 2008 analysed Rasmussen and Anderton's proposed changes, indicating which had previously been proposed by other authors, and which were novel, and required further justification. Although reviews in the birding and ornithological press have often been favourable, there have been criticisms. Peter Kennerley, author and Asian bird expert, considered that some of the illustrations are small and garish or technically inaccurate. He also believes that the over-reliance on sometimes very old museum specimens and dismissal of the wealth of observational data filed by amateur travelling birders is a mistake, and states that many of the taxonomic decisions appear to be random choices, unsupported by published research. Apart from the Meinertzhagen fraud, which is discussed in the next section, and the death of S. Dillon Ripley, other problems in the production of Birds of South Asia included the loss of the main map database during a trip to Burma, and poorly prepared specimen skins. There were also difficulties reconciling sources, delays in producing illustrations and maps, and in obtaining reliable data for "difficult" areas like Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. The Andaman and Nicobar Islands also presented serious challenges with regard to the status and taxonomy of their avifaunas. Rasmussen considered in a 2005 paper whether the revised taxonomy of the book, with its many species splits, had significant conservation implications, but felt that the effect on species richness in South Asia was limited, and would have only a moderate conservation impact, increasing the number of potentially threatened species in the region from 6% of the total avifauna to about 7%. ### Meinertzhagen fraud Rasmussen revealed the true extent of the major fraud perpetrated by the eminent British officer, ornithologist and expert on bird lice, Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen. Meinertzhagen, who died in 1967, was the author of numerous taxonomic and other works on birds, and possessed a vast collection of bird and bird lice specimens; he was considered one of Britain's greatest ornithologists. However, British ornithologist Alan Knox had analysed Meinertzhagen's bird collection at the Walter Rothschild Zoological Museum in Tring, UK in the early 1990s, and uncovered significant fraud involving theft of specimens from museums and falsification of the accompanying documentation. When researching for Birds of South Asia, Rasmussen examined tens of thousands of bird specimens, since the late S. Dillon Ripley had strongly favoured the use of museum specimens to determine which birds to include. With Robert Prys-Jones of the Natural History Museum, she showed that the decades-old Meinertzhagen fraud was far more extensive than first thought. Many of the 20,000 bird specimens in his collection had been relabelled with regard to where they were collected, and sometimes also remounted. The false documentation delayed the rediscovery of the forest owlet, since previous searches had relied on Meinertzagen's faked records. Rasmussen's successful expedition ignored these and looked in the areas identified by the remaining genuine specimens. Meinertzhargen had been banned from the Natural History Museum's Bird Room for 18 months for unauthorised removal of specimens, and suspicions that he was stealing specimens and library material were documented by staff for over 30 years, twice reaching the verge of prosecution. Falsified records identified by Rasmussen and Prys-Jones included high-altitude occurrences of coral-billed scimitar-babbler Pomatorhinus ferruginosus, out-of-range Kashmir flycatcher Ficedula subrubra and Himalayan winter records of ferruginous flycatcher Muscicapa ferruginea and large blue flycatcher Cyornis magnirostris (then treated as a subspecies of C. banyumas). However, some records such as those for Afghan snowfinch Montifringilla theresae, a species Meinertzhagen described, appear to be genuine. ## Exhibitions MSUM has regular exhibitions; those featuring Rasmussen's projects include "Land of the Feathered Dragons: China and the Origin of Birds" in 2015, “They Passed Like a Cloud: The Passenger Pigeon and Extinction” in 2014, “Echoes of Silent Spring: 50 Years of Environmental Awareness” (for the Silent Spring 50th anniversary in 2012), “Avelution: Birds in the Development of Darwin’s Theories of Evolution,” in 2010 and "Birds of South Asia: History vs. Mystery," in 2003–2004. The last was also shown at the Detroit Zoo Wildlife Interpretive Gallery in 2005–2006.
27,634,910	Yoani Sánchez	1,173,824,678	Cuban blogger, journalist (born 1975)	[ "1975 births", "Cuban bloggers", "Cuban human rights activists", "Cuban journalists", "Cuban people of Spanish descent", "Cuban women bloggers", "Cuban women journalists", "HuffPost writers and columnists", "Living people", "Maria Moors Cabot Prize winners", "Nonviolence advocates", "Opposition to Fidel Castro", "Philologists", "Recipients of the International Women of Courage Award", "Women human rights activists" ]	Yoani María Sánchez Cordero (born September 4, 1975) is a Cuban blogger who has achieved international fame and multiple international awards for her critical portrayal of life in Cuba under its current government. Sánchez attended primary school during the affluent time when the Soviet Union was providing considerable aid to Cuba. However, her high school and university education coincided with the loss of financial aid to Cuba following the Soviet Union's collapse, creating a highly public educational system and style of living that subsequently left Sánchez with a strong need for personal privacy. Sánchez's university education left her with two understandings; first, that she had acquired a disgust for "high culture", and second that she no longer had an interest in philology, her chosen field of university study. Sánchez, disillusioned with her home country, left Cuba for Switzerland in 2002, and it was during this time that she became interested in computer science. When she finally returned to Cuba, Sánchez helped to establish Contodos, a magazine that continues to act as a forum for Cuban free expression, and a vehicle for reporting news. Sánchez is best known for her blog, Generación Y (Generation Y); which, despite censorship in Cuba, she is able to publish by e-mailing the blog entries to friends outside the country who then post them online. The blog is translated and available in 17 languages. Time magazine listed her as one of the world's 100 most influential people in 2008, stating that "under the nose of a regime that has never tolerated dissent, Sánchez has practiced what paper-bound journalists in her country cannot; freedom of speech". In November 2009, U.S. President Barack Obama, wrote that her blog "provides the world a unique window into the realities of daily life in Cuba" and applauded her efforts to "empower fellow Cubans to express themselves through the use of technology". ## Biography Yoani Sánchez was born September 4, 1975, in central Havana, Cuba, one of two daughters, to William Sánchez and Maria Eumelia Cordero. Her father worked, as his father had before him, on the state railroad system, first as a laborer and later as an engineer. As the nation's railroad system fell apart after the collapse of communism in Europe, William Sánchez, out of work along with many of his colleagues, became a bicycle repairman. Sánchez grew up and attended school in central Havana during the years when the Soviet Union was supporting the island and its communist revolution with tangible aid, nearly \$9 billion in the final year. Sánchez's secondary and university years coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the loss of its subsidies to Cuba that had for nearly three decades provided about 80 percent of Cuba's international trade. During her high school years, she attended a "school in the countryside" about which she wrote: > I left high school in the countryside feeling that nothing belonged to me, not even my body. Living in shelters creates the sensation that your whole life, your privacy, your personal possessions and even your nakedness has become public property. "Sharing" is the obligatory word and it comes to seem normal not to be able—ever—to be alone. After years of mobilizations, agricultural camps, and a sad school in Alquízar, I needed an overdose of privacy. Sánchez studied for two years in the Instituto Pedagógico with a major in Spanish literature. She transferred to the Faculty of Arts and Letters in 1995, and gave birth to her son in August of that year. Sánchez graduated within five years with a degree in Hispanic philology and a specialty in contemporary Latin American literature. Her thesis was titled Words Under Pressure. A Study of the Literature of Dictatorship in Latin America. Sánchez says that by the end of her university studies she "understood two things: the first, that the world of intellectualism and high culture disgusted me and the saddest, that I no longer wanted to be a philologist." By September 2000, she had found a job with Editorial Gente Nueva, a publisher of children's literature. After a short period of employment with Gente Nueva, Sánchez asked to be released from her position, then focused on a higher paying job as a freelance Spanish instructor for German tourists visiting Havana. According to Sánchez, this was during a time "when engineers preferred to drive taxis, teachers worked as hotel desk clerks, and store counters were tended by neurosurgeons or nuclear physicists." In 2002, claiming disillusionment with her home country, Sánchez decided to leave Cuba and emigrated to Switzerland. She was eventually joined by her son and husband. Two years later she decided to return to Cuba citing "family reasons". However, since she had been out of the country for more than eleven months without special permission, Sánchez had lost the right to return. Sánchez states that she then flew home to Cuba "for a two-week family visit" on a round-trip ticket, and by destroying her passport was able to avoid being forced on a plane back to Switzerland. The Cuban government says that she was granted a waiver allowing her to recover her permanent resident status in Cuba. She finally resettled in Havana. During this time, Sánchez discovered her current profession, computer science. In 2004, she founded, together with a group of Cubans – all based on the island – a magazine, Consenso, based on reflection and debate. She also helped establish the web portal Desde Cuba (From Cuba), an on-line magazine and collection of individual blogs, of which Sánchez's was the first. Sánchez began to sign her posts in 2008, abandoning anonymous blogging. That year, she requested permission to travel to Spain to receive the Ortega y Gasset Journalism Award but permission was denied. Her request for permission to travel to an international documentary film festival in Prague, of which she was a member of the jury, was also denied. In October 2009, Sánchez was awarded Columbia University's "Maria Moors Cabot prize" and was invited to New York to accept the award. The Cuban government denied her permission to attend. Nicholas Lemann, dean of Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, criticized the decision, stating that "The Cuban government ought to value Ms. Sánchez's work as a sign that young Cubans are ready to take Cuba into a better future – one that will have the free press the Cuban people deserve." ### A journey to South America and Europe Sánchez flew to Prague in the Czech Republic, where she was received by the Minister of Foreign Affairs and former presidential candidate Karel Schwarzenberg who was particularly interested in discussing the reforms that took place in Cuba during 2012 and the state of civil society there. Schwarzenberg remarked that he was not as enthusiastic regarding the reforms as representatives of some other countries, as he could still remember reforms from the communist era in former Czechoslovakia that "changed nothing, but to the West looked amazing". Sánchez was also a guest of the One World human rights festival, organized by a non-profit humanitarian organization People In Need. A film by a Swiss director Barbara Miller Forbidden Voices: How to Start a Revolution with a Laptop was among the films shown during the festival. The film presents three women - one of them being Sánchez – who use blogs and social networks to spread information from their countries living under authoritarian regimes, thus fighting for women rights or human rights in general. Sánchez was also invited to a discussion at the Charles University about independent journalism in Cuba. ## Blogging and digital publishing Sánchez established the magazine, Consenso (later named Contodos), on her return from Switzerland. The magazine continues to be published today as a "forum for free expression" from the island, and as a vehicle for the reporting of news such as Father Jose Conrado's February 2009 letter to Raúl Castro Ruz. The magazine's editorial board consists of Dimas Castellanos, Miriam Celaya, Marta Cortízas, Reinaldo Escobar, Eugenio Leal, and Yoani Sánchez. Sánchez is also involved with the digital magazine Convivencia. In January–February 2007, Sánchez participated in an event referred to as the "debate of the intellectuals", described as a "discussion among intellectuals and writers on Cuba's repressive cultural policies". She, along with several others, was not allowed into the formal conference being held in the House of The Americas. The debate of those who were excluded, and included, in the formal sessions, was captured in several hundred pages of emails exchanged between the participants. These emails—exchanged by over one hundred participants—are preserved in the digital magazine Contodos, under the title: Polémica Intellectual 2007. According to Sánchez, what pushed her to write a blog was the bad taste left at the end of the controversy of the intellectuals in January 2007. The meeting in the House of the Americas would try to channel and institutionalize a debate that had been raising the temperature of Cuban emails for a couple of weeks already. A select list of guests began entering the "Che Guevara Room", while our "group of impertinents" watched, from outside, as midnight arrived. The protesters were blocked from entering by the custodians in order to keep them from debating and discussing their encounters with "censorship and dogmatism". The protesters chanted "Desiderio, Desiderio, hear my criteria", but this had no effect, while inside, the voice of the Minister of Culture repeated the idea that in a place under siege, dissent is treason. Sánchez believed that the "debate was hijacked by the institutions, jailed by an academic world full of concepts and fancy words, and condemned to take the course of the imminent conference of the UNEAC [Cuban Writers and Artists Union]. In the end the protesters left with the conviction that they couldn't wait to be allowed inside for the next debate. For Sánchez, this added a push to start what she terms "this exorcism called Generation Y". Sánchez launched her blog, Generation Y, on April 9, 2007. The national baseball playoffs were underway, and the first post used the baseball fever to compare what Cubans are allowed to shout, and display on homemade posters, "Santiago, Go Santiago!" and what they are not: "Internet for all!" The blog was hosted in Germany on an Internet domain by Cronon AG, and was designed by Sánchez. Later, the blog was transferred to WordPress, and was eventually upgraded to allow comments by readers. When the blog had been active for six months, Sánchez expressed her reason for blogging, saying that her initial inspiration had been to create an aid to help her deal with the frustrations she felt with the situation in Cuba, and of trying to go along with the advice of friends who suggested she be cautious and wait, rather than more "noble motives". She tried "silence and evasion", yoga, Tai Chi, going to the gym, all with no results. She finally found a means to express these frustrations, by blogging. Even so, she admits "I can both get discouraged have sudden starts. I alternate between "It's working!" to "It's not worth the pain"; alerting her readers to not be "surprised if the catharsis rises in tone, if I become incendiary, or show a streak of pessimism". According to Sánchez, when she began blogging, Cubans, by law, were not allowed into tourist hotels, but with her "European" appearance, and ability to speak German, she routinely managed to get past the gatekeepers to work on her blog. Due to the difficulties in accessing the Internet, her access speed is determined by the speed of the bus that connects to La Víbora at Línea and G. "Each post depends on a countless chain of events that normally don't go well. From my isolated PC to a flash memory and then to the public space of a cybercafé or a hotel. For this, without detailing all the complications, the elevator does not work, the gatekeeper asks me to show my passport to sit at the computer, or there are frustrations to sign on, plus the slow-speeds imposed by proxies, filters and keylogger." ### The Huffington Post blog In November 2008, Sánchez was invited to post her blog entries on The Huffington Post, and she began writing occasional posts that described life in Cuba. Sánchez says she has strived to maintain a respectful tone, and she asks that those who leave comments on her blog do so as well. In an interview with journalist Ted Henken published in Poder360, she explained this view, saying: > I refuse to use incendiary language, defamation, or harangues, because that only exacerbates the cycle of intolerance that is an obstacle to reasoned debate. Cuba is a very diverse country. You walk out into the street, and you not only find diversity of races but also of opinions. The official press spends all its time trying to make us believe that this is a very monolithic country, that we all think the same, and it does so with a dose of revolutionary violence and ideological aggressiveness that is paralyzing. We have to find a way to put a stop to this never-ending cycle, to this spiral of aggression that is very characteristic of Cuban journalism. ### International attention On October 9, 2007, Reuters published an article about bloggers in Cuba: "Cubans go to unusual lengths to post blogs"; Sánchez featured prominently in the article. The article was republished by media around the world, and was followed by a Wall Street Journal article on December 22, 2007, called "Cuban Revolution: Yoani Sánchez fights tropical totalitarianism, one blog post at a time". Sánchez has also appeared in interviews by Spain's El País newspaper; in an article in Germany's Die Zeit; and in The New York Times. ### Generation Y blocked On March 26, 2008, Sánchez announced to her readers that the recent problems accessing her blog appeared to be a deliberate action on the part of government censors to block access to her blog and the other blogs on the desdecuba.com website. While debate swirled back and forth on the web about whether the site was actually blocked, Sánchez stated that Generation Y could not be accessed in Cuba for the past several years. The debate about whether this was a year-long plus "fluke" or some "glitch" in the software, seemed to be resolved about a year after the site became unavailable. Comments made by a Cuban State Security agent in an interview published on March 19, 2009, in the digital magazine Kaos en la Red, where "Agent Miguel" stated, "I know State Security officials who literally prophesied that blocking the blog Generation Y within the country would, in a short time, cause the launching of Madame Sánchez into the stardom of the manipulative media campaign against Cuba. Regardless of these prophesies, they did it and now they're paying the price." Sánchez was well known by this time and the attempt to censor her by the sudden government shutdown of her blog attracted more international attention than ever. On April 2, 2008, The Washington Post devoted a long column to her, just one of hundreds of articles and blog posts appearing around the world. On June 23, 2008, Cuba's daily newspaper, Granma, published a lengthy prologue, written by Fidel Castro, to the book Fidel, Bolivia y algo más, which had been re-issued fifteen years after its initial publication. In a prologue to this new edition of a book commemorating his visit to Bolivia in 1993, Fidel Castro took the opportunity to quote a long excerpt from Sánchez's blog and, although he did not mention her name, expressed his disappointment that there are young persons in Cuba today who think as she does. Castro describes Sánchez's statements as a generalization used as a slogan. Sánchez responded to Castro's comments by saying in her blog that she would allow her husband, journalist Reinaldo Escobar, to respond to Castro's statements because she felt it best to leave the fighting at the "macho-man-male" level, and instead continue with her "womanly" labor of weaving together the "frayed tapestry" of their society. Sánchez's husband responded with: > The ex-president disapproves of the fact that Yoani accepted this year's Ortega y Gasset Prize for Digital Journalism, arguing that the prize is something that imperialism favours to blow its own horn. I recognize the right of this gentleman to make this comment, but I allow myself to observe that the responsibility implied in receiving a prize is never comparable to that of bestowing one, and Yoani, at least, has never awarded a medal to a corrupt person, a traitor, a dictator or a murderer. Escobar went on to enumerate a list of names he says are "terrible and undeserving" recipients who were awarded the Order of José Marti by Castro, including names such as Leonid Brezhnev, Nicolae Ceaușescu, Gustáv Husák, and Robert Mugabe, among others. ### Blogging blind Since her blog was blocked from public Internet sites in Cuba, Sánchez has relied on Cuban friends abroad to post her texts for her, which she sends to them by email, along with the accompanying photographs. In a 2009 interview with Ted Henken published in Poder360, Sánchez commented on being a "blind blogger" by saying that the Cuban government "filtered" the DesdeCuba.com website from the Internet, including access from hotels in order to prevent Sánchez from updating her site. To combat this, Sánchez developed what she terms a "citizen network", consisting of people outside Cuba who help distribute her posts. As of January 2009, Generation Y (all languages) was getting about 14 million 'hits' a month. On the Spanish language site, each entry receives hundreds, if not thousands, of comments. ### 14ymedio On May 21, 2014, Sánchez launched 14ymedio, the first independent digital media outlet in Cuba. `Shortly after the launch, the website was blocked by the Cuban government but was later unblocked again.` ## Books In 2011, Sánchez published her first book Havana Real: One Woman Fights to Tell the Truth About Cuba Today, four years' worth of her translated blog collected in book form, and which describes her views on everyday life in Cuba under the rule of both Fidel and Raúl Castro. She was not able to leave Cuba to promote her book, but smuggled flash drives out of Cuba containing videotaped book readings. She has written a second book, Word Press: A Blog for Speaking To The World. Sánchez has been described as a talented writer. ## Growing the Cuban blogosphere Given the challenges of blogging in Cuba, the number of blogs on the DesdeCuba site grew quickly. Eight months after she started Generation Y, she was joined on the Desdecuba website by her husband Reinaldo Escobar's blog, Desde Aqui (From Here), in December 2007. In January three more Desdecuba blogs were launched: Sin EVAsion (Without Evasion); El Blog de Dimas (The Blog of Dimas); and Retazos (Fragments). In March 2008, Potro Salvaje (Wild Pony) was launched, joined by La Colmena (The Beehive) in May 2008. When the Cuban government blocked access to Sánchez's blog from the island, it also blocked access to the DesdeCuba website, where these other blogs were housed. The other bloggers faced the same challenges Sánchez had in maintaining their blogs, and also needed to find ways around the censorship—either relying on friends with access inside Cuba from their government offices, using complex and time-consuming workarounds to find "back doors" into their blogs, or reaching out to friends and strangers abroad who volunteered to help, and who posted email blog entries they would never be able to see. With their blogs targeted to Cuban readers on the island, the discouragement was compounded by knowing that even if they could post, their readers could not read the posts. This limitation was circumvented by making copies of the blogs on CDs, either from computers on the island with access to the website, or sent from friends abroad. Although this method of disseminating the blogs was slow and delayed, and readers could not comment directly on the website, it was quite effective and continues to this day [March 2009]. Sanchéz said to a known Venezuelan blogger that visited her in Havana: "In any case we are trying to educate others so blogging would become in Cuba a permanent feature, a means of democratizing citizen expression, as in the free world." On January 28, Sánchez launched Voces Cubanas. This citizen journalism project seeks to provide a multimedia platform to independent bloggers in Cuba to express the realities and hardships of everyday life there. During an interview published by Global Voices, Sánchez said this was a website "where all those who want to express ideas, put their projects online, can do so." An article in El Nuevo Herald by Ivette Leyva Martinez, speaks to the role played by Sánchez and other young people, outside the Cuban opposition and dissidence movements, in working towards a free and democratic Cuba today. On March 29, 2009, at a performance by Tania Bruguera, a podium with an open microphone was staged for those wishing to have one minute of uncensored, public speech. Sánchez was among speakers who publicly criticized censorship and said that "the time has come to jump over the wall of control". The Communist regime dismissed the event and Sánchez without using her name. ## Support and detention ### Father José Conrado's letter to Raúl Castro On February 5, 2009, Father José Conrado, Pastor of Santa Teresita del Niño Jesús in Santiago de Cuba, wrote an open letter to Cuban president Raúl Castro Ruz which was published in the digital magazine, Contodos. Sánchez and Escobar traveled to Santiago de Cuba the weekend before the letter was released and spent several days there, meeting with Father Conrado. During the same visit they held a blogger meeting with young people there, and Sánchez put her Ortega y Gasset award in the sanctuary of the Virgin of Charity of Cobre, where "the long arm of the censor does not enter." Excerpts from the letter were published on The Huffington Post. ### Abduction According to Sánchez, on Friday, November 6, 2009, she and three others were taken in her own neighborhood by men working for the Cuban government. She said that she was heading to an anti-violence demonstration and was forcefully put into a car along with another Cuban blogger, Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo (she stated that the other two were placed into another car). She characterizes the event on her blog, Generation Y, as a "kidnapping" and describes the event in detail. Sánchez said that when she was accosted on the street, "The curious crowded around and I shouted, 'Help, these men want to kidnap us', but they stopped those who wanted to intervene with a shout that revealed the whole ideological background of the operation, 'Don't mess with it, these are counterrevolutionaries.'" Sánchez said that she was put into the backseat of the car and received blows to her head, legs and buttocks as she was pinned down. The incident was condemned by the U.S. administration and by Human Rights Watch. According to BBC reporter Fernando Ravsberg, who interviewed Sánchez on Monday, November 9, 2009, he did not see bruises, marks or scars on her body. When asked, she explained, "Throughout the weekend I had a swollen cheekbone and eyebrow. Above all I have a lot of pain in the lower back." She still had marks on her buttocks however, which she couldn't show to the reporter. She attributed that to the "skill of her captors". When CNN's David Ariosto reported on the incident, after Sánchez was injured but before she met with the BBC reporter, Sánchez is shown in video footage with bruising and swelling around her left eye and bruising on her arm. The video report appeared on CNN Espanol on Monday, November 9, 2009. ### Questionnaire In 2009, Sánchez mailed seven questions to United States President Barack Obama. On November 18, 2009, Obama supposedly responded to these questions with a detailed expression of his support for the bloggers' work: > Your blog provides the world a unique window into the realities of daily life in Cuba. It is telling that the Internet has provided you and other courageous Cuban bloggers with an outlet to express yourself so freely, and I applaud your collective efforts to empower fellow Cubans to express themselves through the use of technology. The government and people of the United States join all of you in looking forward to the day all Cubans can freely express themselves in public without fear and without reprisals. The day after she received the unexpected answers from President Obama, Sánchez drafted seven questions for President Castro that she left with the council of state, supreme governing body for Cuba. According to documents revealed by Wikileaks, it was not Obama who answered the questionnaire sent by the blogger in 2009, but the United States Interests Section in Havana. ### 2012 arrest Sánchez and her husband were arrested on October 4, 2012, apparently in an attempt to prevent her from writing about the trial of conservative politician Ángel Carromero, who crashed a rental car, killing Oswaldo Payá. She was released a day later. ## 2013 trip With a change in the passport laws in January 2013, Sánchez was granted a Cuban passport enabling her to travel abroad. She had previously applied for an exit permit 20 times without success. On February 17, 2013, Sánchez traveled to more than twelve countries in Europe and The Americas, including Brazil and the United States, where, in Miami, she criticized the inadequacy of Cuba's reforms as well as the United States embargo against Cuba. She returned to Cuba on May 30. ## Awards In 2008, Sánchez was honored with awards that included Time magazine's "One of the 100 Most Influential People in the World", one of Foreign Policy magazine's "10 Most Influential Latin American Intellectuals" of the year, and the El País 2008 "Ortega y Gasset Prize for Digital Journalism". She was, as well, one of El País''' 2008 100 most notable Hispanoamericans, and one of Gatopardo's 10 most influential people of 2008. Time magazine named Sánchez's blog, "Generation Y", one of the "25 Best Blogs of 2009". The World Economic Forum, yearly, selects a group of young global leaders of whom Sánchez was one, in 2009. In the summer of 2009, Sánchez was honored as one of the winners of the Columbia University School of Journalism's "Maria Moors Cabot Prize". The prize is the oldest in international journalism. Sánchez was denied an exit permit by the Cuban government to travel to the New York City award dinner. In 2010, Sánchez was named a "World Press Freedom Hero" by the International Press Institute, and also received a Prince Claus Award from the Netherlands' Prince Claus Fund, with an honorarium of €25,000. - 2008 – Ortega y Gasset Prize for Journalism - 2008 – "100 Most Influential People in the World" – Time magazine - 2008 – "100 most notable Hispanoamericans" – El País newspaper - 2008 – "10 most influential people of 2008" – Gatopardo Magazine - 2008 – "10 Most Influential Latin American Intellectuals" of the year – Foreign Policy magazine - 2009 – "25 Best Blogs of 2009" – Time'' magazine - 2009 – "Young Global Leader Honoree" – World Economic Forum - 2009 – Maria Moors Cabot prize – Columbia University Prize - 2010 – World Press Freedom Hero – International Press Institute - 2010 – Prince Claus Award – Prince Claus Fund - 2011 – International Women of Courage Awards - 2012 – "10 Most Influential Ibero American Intellectuals" of the year – Foreign Policy magazine
16,619,334	NASA Astronaut Group 7	1,173,905,291	null	[ "1969 establishments in the United States", "1969 in spaceflight", "Lists of astronauts", "NASA Astronaut Corps" ]	NASA Astronaut Group 7 was a group of seven astronauts accepted by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on August 14, 1969. It was the last group to be selected during the Project Apollo era, and the first since the Mercury Seven in which all members were active-duty military personnel, and all made flights into space. The Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) was a semi-secret United States Air Force (USAF) space project, with a public face but a covert reconnaissance mission. Seventeen astronauts were selected for the program in three intakes in 1965, 1966 and 1967. They were drawn from the USAF, US Navy and US Marine Corps, but all were graduates of the USAF Aerospace Research Pilot School. The MOL program intended to use a modified NASA Project Gemini spacecraft known as Gemini B. When the MOL program was canceled in June 1969, fourteen astronauts remained in the program. NASA accepted the seven youngest as NASA astronauts. By the time they joined NASA, all Apollo flight assignments had been lined up, but they were given non-flying support assignments for Apollo, Skylab and the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. The former MOL astronauts went on to form the core of early Space Shuttle pilots, upgrading to commander after their first flight, and flying 17 missions between them. ## Background On August 25, 1962, the United States Air Force began studies of a manned spy satellite, which became the Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL). President Lyndon Johnson announced the MOL Program on August 25, 1965. Military astronauts would use the Gemini B spacecraft. MOL was a semi-secret project, with public experiments but a covert reconnaissance mission. ## Selection The selection criteria for MOL astronauts was: - Qualified military pilots; - Graduates of the Aerospace Research Pilot School (ARPS); - Serving officers, recommended by their commanding officers; and - Holding US citizenship from birth. No call for volunteers was issued for the first group; fifteen candidates, all ARPS graduates, were selected for a week of medical evaluation in October 1964. The evaluations were similar to those conducted for the NASA astronaut groups. The names of the first group of eight MOL astronauts were publicly announced on November 12, 1965. Five more were announced on June 17, 1966, and four more on June 30, 1967. ## Transfer to NASA On June 10, 1969, the MOL Project was canceled. Fourteen of its seventeen astronauts were still with the program; John L. Finley had returned to the Navy, Michael J. Adams transferred to the X-15, and Robert H. Lawrence died during training. Many had hoped since childhood to travel to space. The program asked NASA if it could use MOL resources, including astronauts. All of the 14 except Robert T. Herres wanted to transfer. Director of Flight Crew Operations Deke Slayton told the MOL group that he did not need more astronauts for a diminishing number of Apollo and Apollo Applications Program flights. Manned Spacecraft Center director Robert R. Gilruth agreed, but Deputy Administrator of NASA George Mueller thought that sooner or later the agency would need help from the USAF, and maintaining good relations was good policy. Slayton and Gilruth agreed to take those who met its age limit of 36. Seven of the thirteen were 35 or younger. NASA also took Albert H. Crews as a test pilot. NASA's acceptance of the seven MOL astronauts was announced on August 14, 1969. ## Group members ## Operations The seven NASA transfers under the age limit did not go through a selection process. Some immediately started working for the agency, and others in 1970 after a year of further education. They had not trained for specific MOL missions but had received useful generic training, including jungle and water survival and Scuba school, and helped develop MOL systems. While Slayton warned the MOL transfers that they would probably not fly until the space shuttle around 1980, he did have many duties for them. The first step was selection to a mission support crew. Fullerton served on the support crews for the Apollo 14 and 17 lunar landing missions, Hartsfield and Peterson on that of Apollo 16, and Overmyer on that of Apollo 17, and they performed CAPCOM duties on those missions. Fullerton was also CAPCOM on Apollo 15 and 16. Crippen, Hartsfield and Truly served on the support crews for the Skylab missions, and Bobko, Crippen, Overmyer and Truly served on that of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. On February 24, 1976, NASA announced the two crews of two astronauts to fly the Approach and Landing Tests in the . In each case, one of the MOL astronauts was paired with one of the members of NASA Astronaut Group 5 who had flown in space. The commander of the first crew was Fred Haise, with Fullerton as pilot, and the second was commanded by Joe Engle, with Truly as pilot. By this time, only 31 of the 73 pilot and scientist astronauts selected between 1959 and 1969 remained with NASA, and they would soon be outnumbered by the 35 newcomers selected in 1978. All seven MOL astronauts flew on the Space Shuttle, starting with Crippen on STS-1, the very first mission, in April 1981. The pattern of a senior astronaut flying as command with a member of the seven MOL astronauts as pilot was followed for the first six shuttle missions, after which all members of the group had flown. Although they had trained for Gemini spacecraft in which they would work in pairs, the April 1983 STS-6 mission was the only one in which two of them flew on the same mission. Peterson's extravehicular activity on that mission, the first in the Space Shuttle program, was the only one conducted by a member of the group. All the others would fly at least one more mission, as the mission commander, before they retired. Hartsfield commanded the last mission flown by a member of the group, STS-61A, in October and November 1985. The group flew 17 missions in total.
11,449,590	1986 Tampa Bay Buccaneers season	1,172,294,696	NFL team season	[ "1986 National Football League season by team", "1986 in sports in Florida", "20th century in Tampa, Florida", "Tampa Bay Buccaneers seasons" ]	The 1986 Tampa Bay Buccaneers season was the franchise's 11th season in the National Football League playing their home games at Tampa Stadium and their second under head coach Leeman Bennett. The team matched their 2–14 season from 1985, for one of the worst seasons in franchise history, and according to statistics site Football Outsiders, the sixth-worst team in the NFL since 1950. There is some sentiment that the 1986 team was even worse than the winless team of 1976, and the 473 points conceded was not beaten by any NFL team until the 2001 Indianapolis Colts gave up 486. The Buccaneers selected Bo Jackson with the top pick in the draft, but were unable to convince him to join the team. Three weeks after the draft, Jackson signed a three-year baseball contract with the Kansas City Royals. Despite holding four of the first forty selections in the draft, and the presence of a great influx of fresh talent from defunct USFL teams, the Buccaneers were unable to find any impact players in either the draft or free agency. They entered the season with a roster nearly identical to the previous season's 2–14 team. Coach Leeman Bennett treated the season as a building season, but was disappointed with the team's mental errors and lack of progress. Later in the season, he would begin to privately admit that the Buccaneers' talent was much worse than he had realized. Steve DeBerg won the starting quarterback job after outplaying Steve Young in the preseason, but was benched in favor of Young after struggling in the first two games. Kevin House and Jimmie Giles were released after an October loss to the New Orleans Saints, along with ex-Dallas Cowboys fullback Ron Springs. Bennett showed up at a press conference held after the season by owner Hugh Culverhouse, unaware that the purpose of the press conference was to announce Bennett's firing. Giles, then with the Detroit Lions, criticized the move, saying that no coach could compensate for the Buccaneers' lack of talent. He also claimed that administrator Phil Krueger destroyed team chemistry by demeaning players during contract negotiations, pointing to guard Sean Farrell's disgruntlement as an example. ## Offseason Defensive end Lee Roy Selmon retired a week before the draft. He missed the entire 1985 season due to a herniated disk, and chose to retire rather than undergo surgery. Although his retirement was expected, the Buccaneers did not seek a replacement in the draft. With Mark Cotney and Steve Wilson having retired earlier in the year, Selmon was the last original Buccaneer on the roster. ### NFL draft The Buccaneers received additional picks in the first and second rounds from the Miami Dolphins in exchange for linebacker Hugh Green. Their extra sixth-round pick came from the New England Patriots in exchange for a fifth-round pick in the 1987 draft. The second pick in the 12th round came from the San Francisco 49ers in return for the rights to center Jim Leonard. The Buccaneers’ third-round pick was traded to the New Orleans Saints for defensive back David Greenwood. Their sixth-round pick was traded to the Denver Broncos in exchange for defensive end Brison Manor. Their seventh-round pick went to the Buffalo Bills in exchange for wide receiver Perry Tuttle. Their 8th-round pick went to the Rams for defensive back Ivory Sully. #### The Bo Jackson draft fiasco Auburn University running back Bo Jackson was selected with the Buccaneers’ first overall pick in the draft, but refused to sign with them. Jackson was angry with the Buccaneers after accepting a private jet ride to attend a team workout caused him to lose his eligibility to play baseball at Auburn. Although NCAA rules allow a professional athlete to compete collegiately in a different sport, stricter Southeastern Conference rules disqualify a professional athlete from competing in any college sports. Jackson accused the Buccaneers of sabotaging his college baseball career, although Phil Krueger insisted that the SEC had advised them that the flight was allowable, and that it was Jackson himself who had insisted on using a private flight. Jackson had been rated as the best running back prospect to come out of college since O. J. Simpson 17 years earlier. Jackson was said to have ridiculed Tampa Bay's offensive line, and shortly before the baseball draft to have told two teams that he had no intention of playing football. Most teams did not believe him, but the Kansas City Royals, although they were unsure enough that they waited until the fourth round of the Major League Baseball Draft to select him. Jackson vowed never to play football again and accepted an offer from the Royals worth much less than what the Buccaneers offered. The Buccaneers turned down several impressive trade offers for Jackson, including the San Francisco 49ers' offer of Ronnie Lott, Wendell Tyler, and first- and second-round draft picks. Jackson's statements about not playing football were contradictory, as he alternated between stating he didn't want to play at all and between saying he didn't want to play for a terrible team and organization like Tampa Bay. In his book, Jackson recalls a meeting with Al Davis where he said he liked Davis and told the Raider boss he would love to play for them, and that the Raiders made offers for the \#1 pick to Tampa Bay that were spurned. There was speculation that owner Hugh Culverhouse was torn between his promise to make Jackson the highest-paid rookie ever, and his status as a member of the NFL Finance Committee, which obligated him to set a reasonable fiscal precedent for the rest of the league. This resulted in an underwhelming contract offer and produced the perception that the Buccaneers were not serious about signing Jackson. Although the Buccaneers offered Jackson \$7 million over the five years, half of it was in the form of incentives, annuities, and real estate. The actual salary averaged to over \$700,000 per year, still more than twice his yearly salary from the Royals, who gave him a three-year, \$1 million contract. Negotiator Phil Krueger said that officials from other NFL teams agreed that the Buccaneers had offered Jackson fair money; however, Jackson also recounted in his book that Culverhouse got angry when he turned out an initial offer and said the Bucs would cut their next offer by 50% if Jackson didn't accept the first contract by the following day. Jackson's Royals contract gave him the option of buying out his contract if he wanted to return to football. Jackson was eligible to be drafted again the next year if not signed by April 28, 1987, which turned out to be the case. Culverhouse announced the embarrassment at a news conference in which he quoted the "keep smiling, keep shining" lyrics of Dionne Warwick's then-current hit song "That's What Friends are For". Jackson became the fourth consecutive Heisman Trophy winner (after USFL players Herschel Walker, Mike Rozier, and Doug Flutie) to spurn the NFL, although he was the first since Pete Dawkins in 1958 to leave football entirely. It was the first time since 1979, when Tom Cousineau signed with the Canadian Football League instead of the Buffalo Bills, that the first overall pick chose not to play in the NFL. #### Other draft selections Rod Jones was known as a hard hitter and a world-class track star, but was a controversial selection because, coming from the run-heavy Southwest Conference, his pass-coverage skills were unknown. At 5'11", 165 lbs., he was considered undersized for the NFL. Jones was the first defensive back selected, but was rated no better than fifth-best by most scouting services. The Buccaneers were criticized for taking linebacker Jackie Walker with their third pick, when Kevin Murphy of the national champion Oklahoma Sooners was still available. The Buccaneers did eventually draft Murphy, who they were surprised to find still available with their 40th overall selection. Murphy was believed to have fallen due to rumors of a knee injury. The Buccaneers had rated both Walker and Murphy among the top 15 players in the draft. Craig Swoope was rated as the best safety in the draft, but fell to the fourth round because of a previous charge (and acquittal) of conspiracy to distribute cocaine. Swoope was eventually the only Buccaneer to achieve any kind of postseason honors in 1986, being selected to the Football Digest All-Rookie team. The team went for big offensive linemen in the later rounds. One of them was J.D. Maarleveld, the first cancer patient drafted by the NFL. Maarleveld was considered to have been a second-round talent, but fell all the way to the fifth round. Belief that Maarleveld was worth much more money than the average fifth-rounder caused his agent, Greg Marotta, to advise him to reject the Buccaneers' offer and sign with the USFL Baltimore Stars. Maarleveld was eventually able to reach agreement with the Buccaneers. ## Preseason ### Personnel moves Bennett made efforts in the offseason to address the passing game, and to improve team speed. He held an extra "passing camp" before training camp for all offensive and defensive players involved in the passing game. Establishing the offense was complicated by the situation of not having enough reliable running backs to run a two-back offense. Finding enough speedy receivers to run a three-receiver set was also difficult, as was finding faster defensive backs who could play the man-to-man coverage that Bennett wanted to move to. Cutting safety David Greenwood and trading cornerback John Holt improved the speed of the secondary by opening up starting spots for rookies Jones and Swoope. Former Florida Gators cornerback Vito McKeever, a product of local Dunnellon High School who had played for the USFL Michigan Panthers under Buccaneer defensive coordinator Jim Stanley, was signed toward the end of preseason. The addition of McKeever, who took over Jeremiah Castille's starting spot, meant that three of the four secondary positions turned over from the previous year. The quest for speed in the secondary meant cutting safety and punt returner Mike Prior, who went on to become a mainstay on the Green Bay Packer playoff teams of the 1990s. In an attempt to upgrade the offensive line, five-time Pro Bowl tackle Marvin Powell was brought in. While there was speculation that the New York Jets let him go because he was President of the National Football League Players Association, the Jets were concerned over quarterback Ken O'Brien having been sacked an NFL-record 62 times the previous season, and selected two tackles in the draft. There was sentiment among some teams that, despite his Pro Bowl appearances, Powell was an overrated player who had never lived up to his reputation. Powell performed well for Tampa Bay, but was placed on injured reserve midseason after undergoing arthroscopic knee surgery. Undrafted free-agent running back Nathan Wonsley emerged in the preseason as a legitimate complement to James Wilder Sr. Tyrone Keys, a defensive end from a team loaded with pass-rushers, and David Williams, a receiver who had led the nation in catches during his junior year, were claimed off waivers from the defending world champion Chicago Bears. ## Regular season Steve DeBerg won the starting quarterback job over Steve Young in the preseason, but lost it after throwing seven interceptions in the season opener against the San Francisco 49ers, and another two the next week against the Minnesota Vikings. Nose tackle Dave Logan summed up the team's condition after the 49ers game by saying, "the teams we play do not respect us". Players coming from winning teams to the Buccaneers, such as Marvin Powell and Tyrone Keys, found themselves shocked by the constant losing and discouraged by the team's easy acceptance of losses. Keys in particular thought that the Buccaneers were too used to losing, and not bothered by it. Young later criticized the team's will to win, saying that "if they could hide for four-quarters and just go home, they would be happy". Powell, one of the highest-paid offensive linemen in the league, was placed on injured reserve with a knee injury after only a few games. An embarrassing loss to the New Orleans Saints was followed by the release of Jimmie Giles and Kevin House, the top two receivers in Buccaneer history at the time, and former starting fullback Ron Springs. This upset several club veterans, and weakened an offense that already had to compensate for a defense that had allowed over 1,000 rushing yards in the previous four games. League perception was that the Buccaneers were replacing older veterans with younger players who were incapable of taking their places. Said an executive from another team of Giles' replacement, "Calvin Magee runs a 5.2 40...We wouldn't even bring him into camp". Rumors, denied by Culverhouse, began to circulate that secret meetings were being held to arrange replacing Bennett with Steve Spurrier. Nathan Wonsley, the rookie free-agent running back whose play was one of the few bright spots in the season, was lost to the team after suffering dislocated neck vertebrae during a week 10 loss to the Chicago Bears. After the abnormally large number of injuries suffered during the Bears game, the Buccaneers ended their pattern of suffering fourth-quarter collapses in close games, instead losing their last seven games by an average of over 21 points. With Jerry Bell, a tight end who played a "U-back" position that was crucial to Tampa Bay's running game, suffering a broken ankle in the same game, the Buccaneers were forced to re-sign Ron Springs just to have enough runners in their backfield. Culverhouse, saying that he had made the decision only minutes prior, fired Bennett at a press conference on Dec. 29. Bennett, who had spoken to Culverhouse earlier the same morning, was unaware that he was to be let go. Culverhouse met with Ray Perkins and offered him the Tampa Bay coaching job only hours after firing Bennett. The firing was criticized by some, who felt that no steps were being taken to address the front-office problems that were the real root of the Buccaneers' woes. This criticism was echoed by safety David Greenwood, by then with the Packers, who pointed out the team's cheapness by recounting a 1985 incident in which he wanted to keep a football as a game ball after catching it for an interception. Executive Phil Krueger demanded that Greenwood pay \$35 for the football. ### 1986 roster <table> <thead> <tr class="header"> <th><p>Tampa Bay Buccaneers 1986 roster</p></th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr class="odd"> <td><p>Quarterbacks</p> <ul> <li>Steve Young</li> <li>Steve Deberg</li> </ul> <p>Running backs</p> <ul> <li>Greg Allen</li> <li>Dennis Bligen</li> <li>Mack Boatner</li> <li>Pat Franklin</li> <li>Bobby Howard</li> <li>Ron Springs FB</li> <li>James Wilder Sr.</li> <li>Nathan Wonsley</li> </ul> <p>Wide receivers</p> <ul> <li>Gerald Carter</li> <li>Phil Freeman</li> <li>Willie Gillespie</li> <li>Leonard Harris</li> <li>Vince Heflin</li> <li>Kevin House</li> <li>David Williams</li> </ul> <p>Tight ends</p> <ul> <li>Jerry Bell</li> <li>K.D. Dunn</li> <li>Jimmie Giles</li> <li>Calvin Magee</li> <li>Jeff Spek</li> </ul></td> </tr> <tr class="even"> <td></td> </tr> </tbody> </table> ### Coaching staff ### Schedule ### Game summaries #### Week 1: vs San Francisco 49ers at Tampa Stadium, Tampa, Florida San Francisco 49ers quarterback Joe Montana completed 32 of 46 passes for 356 yards before leaving the game with an injury in the fourth quarter. The injury, similar to the one that ended Lee Roy Selmon's career, would require season-ending surgery and threaten Montana's football future. Steve DeBerg's 31-yard touchdown pass to Gerald Carter in the third quarter brought the Buccaneers to within a touchdown, but they would not score again. The 49ers' seven interceptions of DeBerg were a team record, and one short of the NFL record. DeBerg placed blame for the loss on himself, but teammates defended him, pointing out that he was under constant pressure from the 49ers' pass rush. Opposing safety Ronnie Lott said that DeBerg was predictable as to where he would throw the ball when pressured. James Wilder rushed for 81 yards and caught five passes. Selmon's number 63 was retired in a halftime ceremony. #### Week 2: vs Minnesota Vikings at Tampa Stadium, Tampa, Florida Early in the first quarter, James Wilder tipped a pass from Steve DeBerg into the hands of Vikings linebacker Chris Doleman, who returned it for a touchdown. Wilder took a helmet to the sternum on this play, leaving a deep bruise that caused him to miss the next two games, and reduced his effectiveness for the remainder of the season. Seventeen seconds later, Scott Studwell recovered a Wilder fumble at the Tampa Bay 18-yard line, leading to a Viking field goal. The Buccaneers added a Donald Igwebuike field goal before the end of the quarter, but the Vikings answered it with a touchdown pass from Tommy Kramer to Mike Mularkey. DeBerg's 1-yard touchdown pass to Jimmie Giles brought the Buccaneers to within a touchdown before halftime, but they were unable to score in the second half. The Buccaneers outperformed the Vikings in a number of statistical categories, but could not overcome the turnovers. #### Week 3: at Detroit Lions at Pontiac Silverdome, Pontiac, Michigan With running back James Wilder nursing a bruised sternum, Nathan Wonsley rushed for 138 yards and two touchdowns. Wonsley became the first Buccaneer running back, other than Wilder, to rush for 100 yards since Nov. 29, 1981. He was the first Tampa Bay rookie to rush for 100 yards since Jerry Eckwood in 1979. Wonsley followed in the footsteps of his two older brothers, George and Otis, both backup NFL running backs who came off the bench to have breakout games while leading their respective teams to victory against the Lions. Constant Buccaneer blitzes resulted in four sacks, two interceptions, and six forced fumbles. Although Lions quarterback Eric Hipple had a good statistical day, completing 31 passes for 318 yards, the Tampa Bay defense's pressure prevented him from converting his opportunities into points. The win broke Tampa Bay's 19-game road losing streak. #### Week 4: vs Atlanta Falcons at Tampa Stadium, Tampa, Florida The Atlanta Falcons overcame a 20–7 halftime deficit to defeat the Buccaneers in overtime on a Mick Luckhurst field goal. The strategy of running out the clock with a conservative offense that had worked so well against the Lions the previous week backfired against the Falcons. The Buccaneers' offensive line failed to dominate, and the Falcons wound up running 57 offensive plays in the second half, while the Buccaneers ran only 26. Twenty of those plays were runs by Gerald Riggs, who finished the day with 127 yards rushing. The Buccaneers outgained the Falcons 255 yards to 190 in the first half, but were outgained 300 yards to 68 in the second half, in which the Buccaneers never advanced beyond midfield. The win left Atlanta undefeated at 4–0. #### Week 5: at Los Angeles Rams at Anaheim Coliseum, Anaheim, California Eric Dickerson earned his fourth career 200-yard rushing game with a 42-yard touchdown run to win the game in overtime for the Los Angeles Rams. Steve Young led an 80-yard drive in the fourth quarter that ended in a Donald Igwebuike field goal and sent the game into overtime, but the Buccaneers were unable to stop Dickerson all day. It was the second consecutive overtime loss for the Buccaneers. Nathan Wonsley rushed 18 times for 108 yards and a 59-yard touchdown run. Young also ran for a touchdown. Bennett was again criticized after the game for conservative play-calling, although the Buccaneers' total of 174 rushing yards was more than double the average the Rams had allowed in their previous four games. The game left Wonsley as the NFL leader in rushing average, with 5.7 yards per carry. Dickerson continued to lead the NFL in rushing with 657 yards, 159 ahead of his record-setting pace from 1984. #### Week 6: vs St. Louis Cardinals at Tampa Stadium, Tampa, Florida The Buccaneers were once again criticized for poor tackling and conservative play-calling following a loss to a previously winless St. Louis Cardinals team. This time, complaints came from the players as the Cardinals seemed to know in advance which plays the Buccaneers would be running, and the Buccaneers waited until too late in the game to make adjustments. The Buccaneers led early, after Steve DeBerg's touchdown pass to Calvin Magee on a fake field goal. Steve Young's rushing and passing combined for 304 of the Buccaneers' 347 yards. The Cardinals unexpectedly used a soft zone defense instead of their usual blitzing, which contributed to Tampa Bay's decision to avoid the passing game until the fourth quarter. The Cardinals put the game away with Stump Mitchell's 31-yard fourth-quarter touchdown run, in which three Buccaneers missed tackles. Ron Holmes, Jeremiah Castille, Marvin Powell, and Gerald Carter all missed the game with injuries. #### Week 7: at New Orleans Saints at Louisiana Superdome, New Orleans Reuben Mayes rushed for 147 yards, the second-most in New Orleans Saints history, as the Saints equalled their highest-ever margin of victory. The Saints scored on their first three possessions. The Buccaneers did not score until the fourth quarter, when Steve DeBerg ran for a 1-yard touchdown. Steve Young left the stadium on crutches, and starting defensive end Ron Holmes left the game after trying to play the first quarter with a broken fibula. Mayes was selected with a third-round draft pick that had been obtained from the Buccaneers in exchange for safety David Greenwood, who the Buccaneers had already waived. #### Week 8: at Kansas City Chiefs at Arrowhead Stadium, Kansas City, Missouri Veteran quarterback Bill Kenney, making the start for the Kansas City Chiefs in place of the struggling Todd Blackledge, completed 15 of 29 passes for 230 yards and a touchdown. The Chiefs' offensive line protected Kenney well, allowing only one sack and few hurries. Although the Buccaneers led at halftime on a 10-yard pass from Steve Young to Calvin Magee and two Donald Igwebuike field goals, they were unable to hold the lead in the second half. They tied the game at 20 on a fourth-quarter touchdown run, James Wilder's first of the year, but immediately allowed the Chiefs to drive the length of the field for the winning touchdown. The sloppily played game included four fumbles, six sacks, two interceptions, and 17 penalties for 146 yards. Art Still contributed three of the Chiefs' five sacks. #### Week 9: vs Buffalo Bills at Tampa Stadium, Tampa, Florida The Buccaneers took a 20–0 halftime lead over the Buffalo Bills after recovering fumbles on two kickoffs and held on for the victory, with a pass from Bills quarterback Jim Kelly falling incomplete in the end zone on the last play of the game. Steve Young completed 14 of 24 passes for 193 yards, and ran for two touchdowns. James Wilder also contributed a 45-yard touchdown run. The Bills only threw two passes in the first half but opened up the gameplan in the second, with Kelly completing 21 of 32 passes for 257 yards and three touchdowns in the last two quarters. The rally fell short, the Bills lost their 31st consecutive road game, and Buffalo coach Hank Bullough was fired and replaced by Marv Levy days later. In the postgame news conference, Bucs coach Leeman Bennett declared the win to be "the start of a new season." However, it would be the last victory for Tampa Bay during his coaching tenure. #### Week 10: vs Chicago Bears at Tampa Stadium, Tampa, Florida Doug Flutie made his NFL debut in the fourth quarter for the Chicago Bears. The Bears took an early 14–0 lead after Mike Tomczak's 37-yard touchdown pass to Willie Gault. The play occurred after Ervin Randle's recovery of a Calvin Thomas fumble was nullified due to an offsides penalty on Craig Swoope. While the Buccaneers' defense improved later in the game, it was not enough to overcome the problems of the injury-battered offense. Nathan Wonsley suffered a broken neck while making a tackle on the opening kickoff. This was followed by injuries to Jerry Bell, Phil Freeman, Craig Swoope, and Willie Gillespie. Calvin Magee played with a prior injury, as did James Wilder and Leonard Harris, though both were forced to leave the game. With Gerald Carter left as the only experienced receiver, the Bears keyed on him, and with Bell, Wonsley and Wilder out, the Buccaneers could not run. #### Week 11: at Green Bay Packers at Lambeau Field, Green Bay, Wisconsin With James Wilder leaving the game after aggravating his rib injury, the Buccaneers were unable to take advantage of Green Bay Packers quarterback Randy Wright's three interceptions. Wright completed 18 of 29 passes for 238 yards, with a career-best three first-half touchdowns. The win was only the Packers' second of the season. The loss left the Buccaneers' defense in last place in the league, despite their having spent four of their first five draft picks on defensive players. #### Week 12: vs Detroit Lions at Tampa Stadium, Tampa, Florida Three first-half possessions deep in Detroit Lions territory led to zero Buccaneer points en route to another blowout loss. Lions receiver Jeff Chadwick took a 73-yard reception to the Buccaneers' 1-yard line when Rod Jones fell down while covering him. Jones also got beaten by Leonard Thompson on a jump ball in the end zone. Vito McKeever was outrun by Chadwick on the Lions' third score. James Wilder had 130 yards rushing and 71 yards receiving for the Buccaneers. #### Week 13: at Minnesota Vikings at Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, Minneapolis With Tommy Kramer injured, Vikings quarterback Wade Wilson threw for a career-best 339 yards and three touchdowns. With Tampa Bay down by 45–6, Steve DeBerg's 45-yard pass to Calvin Magee set up a 1-yard touchdown pass to Ron Heller on a tackle-eligible play. The Buccaneers' only other offense came on two Donald Igwebuike field goals. #### Week 14: at Chicago Bears at Soldier Field, Chicago The Buccaneers almost exceeded their worst-ever loss, a 42–0 loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers, on its 10th anniversary. They were shut out until the fourth quarter, and only scored when Chicago Bears safety Todd Bell intercepted a Steve Young pass and lateraled it to Mike Richardson, who attempted to lateral it to Shaun Gayle, only to have Tampa Bay receiver Vince Heflin intercept the lateral and run it in for a score. Mike Tomczak ran for the Bears' first score. Later, a Walter Payton touchdown was called back on a holding penalty. The Buccaneers stopped the Bears on fourth-and-1, but an offside penalty on Craig Swoope gave the Bears another chance. Tomczak fumbled, however, causing him to be benched in favor of Doug Flutie. Flutie scored two touchdowns, one passing and one running, before Tomczak returned in the second half. Tampa Bay scored a second time on Young's 14-yard pass to Calvin Magee, but Lew Barnes returned the ensuing kickoff for a touchdown. Magee's 143 receiving yards remain (as of 2009) the Buccaneers' single-game record for a tight end. #### Week 15: vs Green Bay Packers at Tampa Stadium, Tampa, Florida The Green Bay Packers had seven different players each contribute a sack, and Randy Wright's 190 yards passing made him the second player in Packers history to throw for 3,000 yards in a season. The crowd cheered the news that an Indianapolis Colts win moved the Buccaneers into first place for the rights to the first overall draft pick, and pelted Buccaneer players with lemons. Ron Holmes's sack of Wright was the Buccaneers' first since October 12, and Ivory Sully recorded the first blocked punt in Buccaneers regular-season history. Both teams went to their second-string quarterbacks in the second half, but Steve Young returned to the game after Steve DeBerg suffered a concussion, and Wright was reinserted after the Buccaneers threatened to start a comeback. #### Week 16: at St. Louis Cardinals at Busch Stadium, St. Louis, Missouri'' St. Louis Cardinals Pro Bowl rookie Vai Sikahema tied an NFL record by returning two punts for touchdowns as the Buccaneers clinched the NFL's worst record for the second consecutive year. Frank Garcia, playing with a back injury, had a third punt blocked for a net gain of 1 yard. The Buccaneers scored first, on a 1-yard Bobby Howard run, but the Cardinals' 21 unanswered points gave them the lead for good before halftime. A 33-yard touchdown pass from Steve Young to Phil Freeman brought the Buccaneers to within 4 points in the third quarter. The game not only ended a futile season for the Buccaneers, but also concluded the Cardinals’ worst season since moving to St. Louis 27 years earlier. ### Standings
36,861,540	Shenton Way MRT station	1,165,484,159	Mass Rapid Transit station in Singapore	[ "Mass Rapid Transit (Singapore) stations", "Railway stations in Singapore opened in 2022" ]	Shenton Way MRT station is an underground Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) station on the Thomson-East Coast Line (TEL). Situated in Downtown Core, Singapore, the station is near Shenton Way and commercial developments such as Asia Square and Marina One. First announced in August 2012 as part of the Thomson line (TSL), Shenton Way station was constructed as part of TEL Phase 3 (TEL 3) with the merger of the TSL and the Eastern Region line. The station opened on 13 November 2022. Shenton Way station features the artworks Stride Alongside the Bo-men by Daisy Boman and Everyday Singapore by Quek Kiat Sing. ## History Shenton Way station was first announced on 29 August 2012 as part of the Thomson line (TSL). Contract T225 for the design and construction of this station and associated tunnels was awarded to Shanghai Tunnel Engineering Co. Ltd at S\$368 million (US\$ million) in May 2014. Construction started in 2014, with an expected completion date of 2021. On 15 August 2014, the Land Transport Authority (LTA) further announced that the TSL would merge with the Eastern Region line to form the Thomson–East Coast line (TEL). Shenton Way station, part of the proposed line, would be constructed as part of TEL Phase 3 (TEL 3), consisting of 13 stations between Mount Pleasant and Gardens by the Bay. The station was constructed close to various developments, such as Asia Square Tower 2. Sensors were installed on tractors warning workers of their proximity to the facade of Asia Square Tower 2. A canal above the station had to be rerouted to a temporary canal with a reinforced concrete base. With restrictions imposed on construction due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the TEL3 completion date was pushed by a year to 2022. On 9 March 2022, Transport Minister S. Iswaran announced in Parliament that TEL 3 would open in the second half of that year. As confirmed during a visit by Iswaran at the and stations on 7 October 2022, it began operations on 13 November. ## Details Shenton Way station is on the TEL and is between the Maxwell and Marina Bay stations. The official station code is TE19. Being part of the TEL, the station is operated by SMRT Trains. Train frequencies on the TEL range from 5 to 6 minutes. The station is located along Park Street near the eponymous Shenton Way. Surrounding commercial developments include Asia Square, Marina One, One Raffles Quay, V on Shenton and OUE Downtown. It is also within walking distance to Downtown station on the Downtown line and Tanjong Pagar station on the East West line. The station has a stacked platform layout with a depth of 38 metres (125 ft). Stride Alongside the Bo-men is a set of three white sculptures by Daisy Boman. Donated by PSA International under the Gift of Art programme, the artwork represents people commuting into the Central Business District. An Art-in-Transit artwork Everyday Singapore 每日所见 by Quek Kiat Sing depicts everyday scenes of people alongside images of an old series of Singaporean banknotes. These scenes include the lunch crowd at Lau Pa Sat, people queuing up at the ATM, bird-watching, and chasing after an old banknote. Alluding to how art imitates life, the artwork is intended to be a reflection of ourselves.
10,389,709	Deportation of the Crimean Tatars	1,170,383,543	1944 ethnic cleansing and genocide in Soviet Union	[ "1944 in the Soviet Union", "Anti-indigenous racism", "Crimea in World War II", "Crimean Tatar diaspora", "Crimes against humanity", "Deportation", "Ethnic cleansing in Europe", "Forced migration in the Soviet Union", "Genocides in Europe", "Joseph Stalin", "Persecution of Muslims", "Persecution of Turkic peoples", "Political repression in the Soviet Union", "Soviet World War II crimes", "Soviet ethnic policy", "Tatarophobia", "Violence against Muslims" ]	The deportation of the Crimean Tatars (Crimean Tatar: Qırımtatar halqınıñ sürgünligi, Cyrillic: Къырымтатар халкъынынъ сюргюнлиги) or the Sürgünlik ('exile') was the ethnic cleansing and cultural genocide of at least 191,044 Crimean Tatars carried out by the Soviet authorities from 18 to 20 May 1944, which was supervised by Lavrentiy Beria, head of Soviet state security and the secret police, and which was ordered by the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Within those three days, the NKVD used cattle trains to deport mostly women, children, and the elderly, even Communist Party members and Red Army members, to mostly the Uzbek SSR, several thousand kilometres away. They were one of the several ethnicities who were subjected to Stalin's policy of population transfer in the Soviet Union. The deportation was officially presented as collective punishment for the claimed collaboration of some Crimean Tatars with Nazi Germany, but several modern scholars assume that the deportation was part of the Soviet plan to gain access to the Dardanelles and acquire territory in Turkey, where the Tatars had Turkic ethnic kin, or to remove minorities from the Soviet Union's border regions. Nearly 8,000 Crimean Tatars died during the deportation, and tens of thousands perished subsequently due to the harsh exile conditions. The Crimean Tatar deportation resulted in the abandonment of 80,000 households and 360,000 acres of land. An intense campaign of detatarization followed to try to erase the remaining traces of Crimean Tatar existence. By the end of the deportation, not a single Crimean Tatar was left on Crimea. In 1956, the new Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev condemned Stalin's policies, including the deportation of various ethnic groups, but did not lift the directive forbidding the return of the Crimean Tatars despite allowing most other deported peoples to return. The Crimean Tatars remained in Central Asia for several more decades until the perestroika era in the late 1980s, when 260,000 Crimean Tatars returned to Crimea. Their exile had lasted 45 years. The ban on their return was officially declared null and void when the Supreme Council of Crimea declared on 14 November 1989 that the deportations had been a crime. By 2004, the number of Crimean Tatars who had returned to Crimea had increased their share of the peninsula's population to 12 percent. The Soviet authorities had neither assisted their return nor compensated them for the land they lost. The Russian Federation never provided reparations, compensated those deported for lost property, or filed legal proceedings against the perpetrators of the forced resettlement. The deportation and subsequent assimilation efforts in Asia represent a crucial period in the history of the Crimean Tatars. Between 2015 and 2019, the deportation was formally recognised as genocide by Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia and Canada. ## Background The Crimean Tatars controlled the Crimean Khanate from 1441 to 1783, when Crimea was annexed by the Russian Empire as a target of Russian expansion. By the 14th century, most of the Turkic-speaking population of Crimea had adopted Islam, following the conversion of Ozbeg Khan of the Golden Horde. It was the longest surviving state of the Golden Horde. They often engaged in conflicts with Moscow—from 1468 until the 17th century, Crimean Tatars fought several wars with Tsardom of Russia. Thus, after the establishment of the Russian rule, Crimean Tatars began leaving Crimea in several waves of emigration. Between 1784 and 1790, out of a total population of about a million, around 300,000 Crimean Tatars left for the Ottoman Empire. The Crimean War triggered another mass exodus of Crimean Tatars. Between 1855 and 1866 at least 500,000 Muslims, and possibly up to 900,000, left the Russian Empire and emigrated to the Ottoman Empire. Out of that number, at least one third were from Crimea, while the rest were from the Caucasus. These emigrants comprised 15–23 percent of the total population of Crimea. The Russian Empire used that fact as the ideological foundation to further Russify "New Russia". Eventually, the Crimean Tatars became a minority in Crimea; in 1783, they comprised 98 per cent of the population, but by 1897, this was down to 34.1 per cent. While Crimean Tatars were emigrating, the Russian government encouraged Russification of the peninsula, populating it with Russians, Ukrainians, and other Slavic ethnic groups; this Russification continued during the Soviet era. After the 1917 October Revolution, Crimea received autonomous status inside the USSR on 18 October 1921, but collectivization in the 1920s led to severe famine from which up to 100,000 Crimeans perished when their crops were transported to "more important" regions of the Soviet Union. By one estimate, three-quarters of the famine victims were Crimean Tatars. Their status deteriorated further after Joseph Stalin became the Soviet leader and implemented repressions that led to the deaths of at least 5.2 million Soviet citizens between 1927 and 1938. ### World War II In 1940, the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic had approximately 1,126,800 inhabitants, of which 218,000 people, or 19.4 percent of the population, were Crimean Tatars. In 1941, Nazi Germany invaded Eastern Europe, annexing much of the western USSR. Crimean Tatars initially viewed the Germans as liberators from Stalinism, and they had also been positively treated by the Germans in World War I. Many of the captured Crimean Tatars serving in the Red Army were sent to POW camps after Romanians and Nazis came to occupy the bulk of Crimea. Though Nazis initially called for murder of all "Asiatic inferiors" and paraded around Crimean Tatar POW's labeled as "Mongol sub-humanity", they revised this policy in the face of determined resistance from the Red Army. Beginning in 1942, Germans recruited Soviet prisoners of war to form support armies. The Dobrujan Tatar nationalist Fazil Ulkusal and Lipka Tatar Edige Kirimal helped in freeing Crimean Tatars from German prisoner-of-war camps and enlisting them in the independent Crimean support legion for the Wehrmacht. This legion eventually included eight battalions, although many members were of other nationalities. From November 1941, German authorities allowed Crimean Tatars to establish Muslim Committees in various towns as a symbolic recognition of some local government authority, though they were not given any political power. Many Crimean Tatar communists strongly opposed the occupation and assisted the resistance movement to provide valuable strategic and political information. Other Crimean Tatars also fought on the side of the Soviet partisans, like the Tarhanov movement of 250 Crimean Tatars which fought throughout 1942 until its destruction. Six Crimean Tatars were even named the Heroes of the Soviet Union, and thousands more were awarded high honors in the Red Army. Up to 130,000 people died during the Axis occupation of Crimea. The Nazis implemented a brutal repression, destroying more than 70 villages that were together home to about 25 per cent of the Crimean Tatar population. Thousands of Crimean Tatars were forcibly transferred to work as Ostarbeiter in German factories under the supervision of the Gestapo in what were described as "vast slave workshops", resulting in loss of all Crimean Tatar support. In April 1944 the Red Army managed to repel the Axis forces from the peninsula in the Crimean Offensive. A majority of the hiwis (helpers), their families and all those associated with the Muslim Committees were evacuated to Germany and Hungary or Dobruja by the Wehrmacht and Romanian Army where they joined the Eastern Turkic division. Thus, the majority of the collaborators had been evacuated from Crimea by the retreating Wehrmacht. Many Soviet officials had also recognized this and rejected claims that the Crimean Tatars had betrayed the Soviet Union en masse. The presence of Muslim Committees organized from Berlin by various Turkic foreigners appeared a cause for concern in the eyes of the Soviet government, already wary of Turkey at the time. ### Falsification of information in media Soviet publications blatantly falsified information about Crimean Tatars in the Red Army, going so far as to describe Crimean Tatar Hero of the Soviet Union Uzeir Abduramanov as Azeri, not Crimean Tatar, on the cover of a 1944 issue of Ogonyok magazine - even though his family had been deported for being Crimean Tatar just a few months earlier. The book In the Mountains of Tavria falsely claimed that volunteer partisan scout Bekir Osmanov was a German spy and shot, although the central committee later acknowledged that he never served the Germans and survived the war, ordering later editions to have corrections after still-living Osmanov and his family noticed the obvious falsehood. Amet-khan Sultan, born to a Crimean Tatar mother and Lak father in Crimea, where he was born and raised, was often described as a Dagestani in post-deportation media, even though he always considered himself a Crimean Tatar. ## Deportation Officially due to the collaboration with the Axis powers during World War II, the Soviet government collectively punished ten ethnic minorities, among them the Crimean Tatars. Punishment included deportation to distant regions of Central Asia and Siberia. Soviet accounts of the late 1940s indict the Crimean Tatars as an ethnicity of traitors. Although the Crimean Tatars denied that they had committed treason, this idea was widely accepted during the Soviet period and persists in the Russian scholarly and popular literature. On 10 May 1944, Lavrentiy Beria recommended to Stalin that the Crimean Tatars should be deported away from the border regions due to their "traitorous actions". Stalin subsequently issued GKO Order No. 5859ss, which envisaged the resettlement of the Crimean Tatars. The deportation lasted only three days, 18–20 May 1944, during which NKVD agents went house to house collecting Crimean Tatars at gunpoint and forcing them to enter sealed-off cattle trains that would transfer them almost 3,200 kilometres (2,000 mi) to remote locations in the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. The Crimean Tatars were allowed to carry up to 500 kg (1,100 lb) of their property per family. The only ones who could avoid this fate were Crimean Tatar women who were married to men of non-punished ethnic groups. The exiled Crimean Tatars travelled in overcrowded wagons for several weeks and lacked food and water. It is estimated that at least 228,392 people were deported from Crimea, of which at least 191,044 were Crimean Tatars in 47,000 families. Since 7,889 people perished in the long transit in sealed-off railcars, the NKVD registered the 183,155 living Crimean Tatars who arrived at their destinations in Central Asia. The majority of the deportees were rounded up from the Crimean countryside. Only 18,983 of the exiles were from Crimean cities. On 4 July 1944, the NKVD officially informed Stalin that the resettlement was complete. However, not long after that report, the NKVD found out that one of its units had forgotten to deport people from the Arabat Spit. Instead of preparing an additional transfer in trains, on 20 July the NKVD boarded hundreds of Crimean Tatars onto an old boat, took it to the middle of the Azov Sea, and sank the ship. Those who did not drown were finished off by machine guns. Officially, Crimean Tatars were eliminated from Crimea. The deportation encompassed every person considered by the government to be Crimean Tatar, including children, women, and the elderly, and even those who had been members of the Communist Party or the Red Army. As such, they were legally designated as special settlers, which meant that they were officially second-class citizens, prohibited from leaving the perimeter of their assigned area, attending prestigious universities, and had to regularly appear before the commandant's office. During this mass eviction, the Soviet authorities confiscated around 80,000 houses, 500,000 cattle, 360,000 acres of land, and 40,000 tons of agricultural provisions. Besides 191,000 deported Crimean Tatars, the Soviet authorities also evicted 9,620 Armenians, 12,420 Bulgarians, and 15,040 Greeks from the peninsula. All were collectively branded as traitors and became second-class citizens for decades in the USSR. Among the deported, there were also 283 persons of other ethnicities: Italians, Romanians, Karaims, Kurds, Czechs, Hungarians, and Croats. During 1947 and 1948, a further 2,012 veteran returnees were deported from Crimea by the local MVD. In total, 151,136 Crimean Tatars were deported to the Uzbek SSR; 8,597 to the Mari Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic; and 4,286 to the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic; and the remaining 29,846 were sent to various remote regions of the Russian SFSR. When the Crimean Tatars arrived at their destination in the Uzbek SSR, they were met with hostility by Uzbek locals who threw stones at them, even their children, because they heard that the Crimean Tatars were "traitors" and "fascist collaborators." The Uzbeks objected to becoming the "dumping ground for treasonous nations." In the coming years, several assaults against the Crimean Tatars population were registered, some of which were fatal. The mass Crimean deportations were organized by Lavrentiy Beria, the chief of the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, and his subordinates Bogdan Kobulov, Ivan Serov, B. P. Obruchnikov, M.G. Svinelupov, and A. N. Apolonov. The field operations were conducted by G. P. Dobrynin, the Deputy Head of the Gulag system; G. A. Bezhanov, the Colonel of State Security; I. I. Piiashev, Major General; S. A. Klepov, Commissar of State Security; I. S. Sheredega, Lt. General; B. I. Tekayev, Lt. Colonel of State Security; and two local leaders, P. M. Fokin, head of the Crimea NKGB, and V. T. Sergjenko, Lt. General. In order to execute this deportation, the NKVD secured 5,000 armed agents and the NKGB allocated a further 20,000 armed men, together with a few thousand regular soldiers. Two of Stalin's directives from May 1944 reveal that many parts of the Soviet government, from financing to transit, were involved in executing the operation. On 14 July 1944 the GKO authorized the immigration of 51,000 people, mostly Russians, to 17,000 empty collective farms on Crimea. On 30 June 1945, the Crimean ASSR was abolished. Soviet propaganda sought to hide the population transfer by claiming that the Crimean Tatars had "voluntarily resettle[d] to Central Asia". In essence, though, according to historian Paul Robert Magocsi, Crimea was "ethnically cleansed." After this act, the term Crimean Tatar was banished from the Russian-Soviet lexicon, and all Crimean Tatar toponyms (names of towns, villages, and mountains) in Crimea were changed to Russian names on all maps as part of a wide detatarization campaign. Muslim graveyards and religious objects in Crimea were demolished or converted into secular places. During Stalin's rule, nobody was allowed to mention that this ethnicity even existed in the USSR. This went so far that many individuals were even forbidden to declare themselves as Crimean Tatars during the Soviet censuses of 1959, 1970, and 1979. They could only declare themselves as Tatars. This ban was lifted during the Soviet census of 1989. ## Aftermath ### Mortality and death toll The first deportees started arriving in the Uzbek SSR on 29 May 1944 and most had arrived by 8 June 1944. The consequent mortality rate remains disputed; the NKVD kept incomplete records of the death rate among the resettled ethnicities living in exile. Like the other deported peoples, the Crimean Tatars were placed under the regime of special settlements. Many of those deported performed forced labor: their tasks included working in coal mines and construction battalions, under the supervision of the NKVD. Deserters were executed. Special settlers routinely worked eleven to twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Despite this difficult physical labor, the Crimean Tatars were given only around 200 grams (7.1 oz) to 400 grams (14 oz) of bread per day. Accommodations were insufficient; some were forced to live in mud huts where "there were no doors or windows, nothing, just reeds" on the floor to sleep on. The sole transport to these remote areas and labour colonies was equally as strenuous. Theoretically, the NKVD loaded 50 people into each railroad car, together with their property. One witness claimed that 133 people were in her wagon. They had only one hole in the floor of the wagon which was used as a toilet. Some pregnant women were forced to give birth inside these sealed-off railroad cars. The conditions in the overcrowded train wagons were exacerbated by a lack of hygiene, leading to cases of typhus. Since the trains only stopped to open the doors at rare occasions during the trip, the sick inevitably contaminated others in the wagons. It was only when they arrived at their destination in the Uzbek SSR that the Crimean Tatars were released from the sealed-off railroad cars. Still, some were redirected to other destinations in Central Asia and had to continue their journey. Some witnesses claimed that they travelled for 24 consecutive days. During this whole time, they were given very little food or water while trapped inside. There was no fresh air since the doors and windows were bolted shut. In Kazakh SSR, the transport guards unlocked the door only to toss out the corpses along the railroad. The Crimean Tatars thus called these railcars "crematoria on wheels." The records show that at least 7,889 Crimean Tatars died during this long journey, amounting to about 4 per cent of their entire ethnicity. The high mortality rate continued for several years in exile due to malnutrition, labor exploitation, diseases, lack of medical care, and exposure to the harsh desert climate of Uzbekistan. The exiles were frequently assigned to the heaviest construction sites. The Uzbek medical facilities filled with Crimean Tatars who were susceptible to the local Asian diseases not found on the Crimean peninsula where the water was purer, including yellow fever, dystrophy, malaria, and intestinal illness. The death toll was the highest during the first five years. In 1949 the Soviet authorities counted the population of the deported ethnic groups who lived in special settlements. According to their records, there were 44,887 excess deaths in these five years, 19.6 per cent of that total group. Other sources give a figure of 44,125 deaths during that time, while a third source, using alternative NKVD archives, gives a figure of 32,107 deaths. These reports included all the people resettled from Crimea (including Armenians, Bulgarians, and Greeks), but the Crimean Tatars formed a majority in this group. It took five years until the number of births among the deported people started to surpass the number of deaths. Soviet archives reveal that between May 1944 and January 1945 a total of 13,592 Crimean Tatars perished in exile, about 7 per cent of their entire population. Almost half of all deaths (6,096) were of children under the age of 16; another 4,525 were adult women and 2,562 were adult men. During 1945, a further 13,183 people died. Thus, by the end of December 1945, at least 27,000 Crimean Tatars had already died in exile. One Crimean Tatar woman living near Tashkent recalled the events from 1944: > My parents were moved from Crimea to Uzbekistan in May 1944. My parents had sisters and brothers, but when they arrived in Uzbekistan, the only survivors were themselves. My parents' sisters and brothers and parents all died in transit because of catching bad colds and other diseases.... My mother was left completely alone and her first work was to cut trees. Estimates produced by Crimean Tatars indicate mortality figures that were far higher and amounted to 46% of their population living in exile. In 1968, when Leonid Brezhnev presided over the USSR, Crimean Tatar activists were persecuted for using that high mortality figure under the guise that it was a "slander to the USSR." In order to show that Crimean Tatars were exaggerating, the KGB published figures showing that "only" 22 per cent of that ethnic group died. The Karachay demographer Dalchat Ediev estimates that 34,300 Crimean Tatars died due to the deportation, representing an 18 per cent mortality rate. Hannibal Travis estimates that overall 40,000–80,000 Crimean Tatars died in exile. Professor Michael Rywkin gives a figure of at least 42,000 Crimean Tatars who died between 1944 and 1951, including 7,900 who died during the transit Professor Brian Glyn Williams gives a figure of between 40,000 and 44,000 deaths as a consequence of this deportation. The Crimean State Committee estimated that 45,000 Crimean Tatars died between 1944 and 1948. The official NKVD report estimated that 27 per cent of that ethnicity died. Various estimates of the mortality rates of the Crimean Tatars: \| \| \| \| \| \| \|-----\|-----\|-----\|---------------\|-------------------\| \| 18% \| 82% \| \| Died in exile \| Survived in exile \| \| \| \| \| \| \| \|-----\|-----\|-----\|---------------\|-------------------\| \| 27% \| 73% \| \| Died in exile \| Survived in exile \| \| \| \| \| \| \| \|-----\|-----\|-----\|---------------\|-------------------\| \| 46% \| 54% \| \| Died in exile \| Survived in exile \| ### Rehabilitation Stalin's government denied the Crimean Tatars the right to education or publication in their native language. Despite the prohibition, and although they had to study in Russian or Uzbek, they maintained their cultural identity. In 1956 the new Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, held a speech in which he condemned Stalin's policies, including the mass deportations of various ethnicities. Still, even though many peoples were allowed to return to their homes, three groups were forced to stay in exile: the Soviet Germans, the Meskhetian Turks, and the Crimean Tatars. In 1954, Khrushchev allowed Crimea to be included in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic since Crimea is linked by land to Ukraine and not with the Russian SFSR. On 28 April 1956, the directive "On Removing Restrictions on the Special Settlement of the Crimean Tatars... Relocated during the Great Patriotic War" was issued, ordering a de-registration of the deportees and their release from administrative supervision. However, various other restrictions were still kept and the Crimean Tatars were not allowed to return to Crimea. Moreover, that same year the Ukrainian Council of Ministers banned the exiled Crimean Tatars, Greeks, Germans, Armenians and Bulgarians from relocating even to the Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Mykolaiv and Odesa Oblasts in the Ukrainian SSR. The Crimean Tatars did not get any compensation for their lost property. In the 1950s, the Crimean Tatars started actively advocating for the right to return. In 1957, they collected 6,000 signatures in a petition that was sent to the Supreme Soviet that demanded their political rehabilitation and return to Crimea. In 1961 25,000 signatures were collected in a petition that was sent to the Kremlin. Mustafa Dzhemilev, who was only six months old when his family was deported from Crimea, grew up in Uzbekistan and became an activist for the right of the Crimean Tatars to return. In 1966 he was arrested for the first time and spent a total of 17 years in prison during the Soviet era. This earned him the nickname of "Crimean Tatar Mandela." In 1984 he was sentenced for the sixth time for "anti-Soviet activity" but was given moral support by the Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, who had observed Dzhemilev's fourth trial in 1976. When older dissidents were arrested, a new, younger generation emerged that would replace them. On 21 July 1967, representatives of the Crimean Tatars, led by the dissident Ayshe Seitmuratova, gained permission to meet with high-ranking Soviet officials in Moscow, including Yuri Andropov. During the meeting, the Crimean Tatars demanded a correction of all the injustices of the USSR against their people. In September 1967, the Supreme Soviet issued a decree that acknowledged the charge of treason against the entire nation was "unreasonable" but that did not allow Crimean Tatars the same full rehabilitation encompassing the right of return that other deported peoples were given. The carefully worded decree referred to them not as "Crimean Tatars" but as "citizens of Tatar nationality who having formerly lived in Crimea [...] have taken root in the Uzbek SSR", thereby minimizing Crimean Tatar existence and downplaying their desire for the right of return in addition to creating a premise for claims of the issue being "settled". Individuals united and formed groups that went back to Crimea in 1968 on their own, without state permission, but the Soviet authorities deported 6,000 of them once again. The most notable example of such resistance was a Crimean Tatar activist, Musa Mamut, who was deported when he was 12 and who returned to Crimea because he wanted to see his home again. When the police informed him that he would be evicted, he set himself on fire. Nevertheless, 577 families managed to obtain state permission to reside in Crimea. In 1968 unrest erupted among the Crimean Tatar people in the Uzbek city of Chirchiq. In October 1973, the Jewish poet and professor Ilya Gabay committed suicide by jumping off a building in Moscow. He was one of the significant Jewish dissidents in the USSR who fought for the rights of the oppressed peoples, especially Crimean Tatars. Gabay had been arrested and sent to a labour camp but still insisted on his cause because he was convinced that the treatment of the Crimean Tatars by the USSR amounted to genocide. In 1973, Dzhemilev was also arrested for his advocacy for Crimean Tatar right to return to Crimea. ### Repatriation Despite de-Stalinization, the situation didn't change until Gorbachev's perestroika in the late 1980s. A 1987 Tatar protest near the Kremlin prompted Gorbachev to form the Gromyko Commission which found against Tatar claims, but a second commission recommended "renewal of autonomy" for Crimean Tatars. In 1989 the ban on the return of deported ethnicities was declared officially null and void and the Supreme Council of Crimea further declared the deportations criminal, paving the way for the Crimean Tatars to return. Dzhemilev returned to Crimea that year, with at least 166,000 other Tatars doing the same by January 1992. The 1991 Russian law On the Rehabilitation of Repressed Peoples rehabilitated all Soviet repressed ethnicities and abolished all previous Russian laws relating to the deportations, calling for the "restoration and return of the cultural and spiritual values and archives which represent the heritage of the repressed people." By 2004 the Crimean Tatars formed 12 per cent of the population of Crimea. The return was fraught: with Russian nationalist protests in Crimea and clashes between locals and Crimean Tatars near Yalta, which needed army intervention. Local Soviet authorities were reluctant to help returnees with jobs or housing, After the dissolution of the USSR, Crimea was part of Ukraine, but Kyiv gave limited support to Crimean Tatar settlers. Some 150,000 of the returnees were granted citizenship automatically under Ukraine's Citizenship Law of 1991, but 100,000 who returned after Ukraine declared independence faced several obstacles including a costly bureaucratic process. ### Annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation In March 2014, the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation unfolded, which was, in turn, declared illegal by the United Nations General Assembly (United Nations General Assembly Resolution 68/262) and which led to further deterioration of the rights of the Crimean Tatars. Even though the Russian Federation issued Decree No. 268 "On the Measures for the Rehabilitation of Armenian, Bulgarian, Greek, Crimean Tatar and German Peoples and the State Support of Their Revival and Development" on 21 April 2014, in practice it has treated Crimean Tatars with far less care. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights issued a warning against the Kremlin in 2016 because it "intimidated, harassed and jailed Crimean Tatar representatives, often on dubious charges", while the representative body the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People was banned. The UN reported that of the over 10,000 people left Crimea after the annexation in 2014, most were Crimean Tatars, which caused a further decline of their fragile community. Crimean Tatars stated several reasons for their departure, among them insecurity, fear, and intimidation from the new Russian authorities. In its 2015 report, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights warned that various human rights violations were recorded in Crimea, including the prevention of Crimean Tatars from marking the 71st anniversary of their deportation. ## Modern views and legacy Historian Edward Allworth has noted that the extent of marginalization of the Crimean Tatars was a distinct anomaly among national policy in the USSR given the party's firm commitment maintaining the status quo of not recognizing them as a distinct ethnic group in addition to assimilating and "rooting" them in exile, in sharp contrast to the rehabilitation other deported ethnic groups such as the Chechens, Ingush, Karachays, Balkars, and Kalmyks experienced in the Khrushchev era. Between 1989 and 1994, around a quarter of a million Crimean Tatars returned to Crimea from exile in Central Asia. This was seen as a symbolic victory of their efforts to return to their native land. They returned after 45 years of exile. Not one of the several ethnic groups who were deported during Stalin's era received any kind of financial compensation. Some Crimean Tatar groups and activists have called for the international community to put pressure on the Russian Federation, the successor state of the USSR, to finance rehabilitation of that ethnicity and provide financial compensation for forcible resettlement. Despite the thousands of Crimean Tatars in the Red Army when it attacked Berlin, the Crimean Tatars continued to be seen and treated as a fifth column for decades. Some historians explain this as part of Stalin's plan to take complete control of Crimea. The Soviet sought access to the Dardanelles and control of territory in Turkey, where the Crimean Tatars had ethnic kin. By painting the Crimean Tatars as traitors, this taint could be extended to their kin. Scholar Walter Kolarz alleges that the deportation and the attempt of liquidation of Crimean Tatars as an ethnicity in 1944 was just the final act of the centuries-long process of Russian colonization of Crimea that started in 1783. Historian Gregory Dufaud regards the Soviet accusations against Crimean Tatars as a convenient excuse for their forcible transfer through which Moscow secured an unrivalled access to the geostrategic southern Black Sea on one hand and eliminated hypothetical rebellious nations at the same time. Professor of Russian and Soviet history Rebecca Manley similarly concluded that the real aim of the Soviet government was to "cleanse" the border regions of "unreliable elements". Professor Brian Glyn Williams states that the deportations of Meskhetian Turks, despite never being close to the scene of combat and never being charged with any crime, lends the strongest credence to the fact that the deportations of Crimeans and Caucasians was due to Soviet foreign policy rather than any real "universal mass crimes". Modern interpretations by scholars and historians sometimes classify this mass deportation of civilians as a crime against humanity, ethnic cleansing, depopulation, an act of Stalinist repression, or an "ethnocide", meaning a deliberate wiping out of an identity and culture of a nation. Crimean Tatars call this event Sürgünlik ("exile"). The perception of Crimean Tatars as "uncivilized" and deserving the deportation remains throughout the Russian and Ukrainian settlers in Crimea. ### Genocide question and recognition Some activists, politicians, scholars, countries, and historians go even further and consider the deportation a crime of genocide or cultural genocide. Norman Naimark writes "[t]he Chechens and Ingush, the Crimean Tatars, and other 'punished peoples' of the wartime period were, indeed, slated for elimination, if not physically, then as self-identifying nationalities." Professor Lyman H. Legters argued that the Soviet penal system, combined with its resettlement policies, should count as genocidal since the sentences were borne most heavily specifically on certain ethnic groups, and that a relocation of these ethnic groups, whose survival depends on ties to its particular homeland, "had a genocidal effect remediable only by restoration of the group to its homeland." Soviet dissidents Ilya Gabay and Pyotr Grigorenko both classified the event as a genocide. Historian Timothy Snyder included it in a list of Soviet policies that “meet the standard of genocide." On 12 December 2015, the Ukrainian Parliament issued a resolution recognizing this event as genocide and established 18 May as the "Day of Remembrance for the victims of the Crimean Tatar genocide." The parliament of Latvia recognized the event as an act of genocide on 9 May 2019. The Parliament of Lithuania did the same on 6 June 2019. Canadian Parliament passed a motion on June 10, 2019, recognizing the Crimean Tatar deportation of 1944 (Sürgünlik) as a genocide perpetrated by Soviet dictator Stalin, designating May 18 to be a day of remembrance. On 26 April 1991 the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic, under its chairman Boris Yeltsin, passed the law On the Rehabilitation of Repressed Peoples with Article 2 denouncing all mass deportations as "Stalin's policy of defamation and genocide." A minority dispute defining the event as genocide. According to Alexander Statiev, the Soviet deportations resulted in a "genocidal death rate", but Stalin did not have the intent to exterminate these peoples. He considers such deportations merely an example of Soviet assimilation of "unwanted nations." According to Amir Weiner, the Soviet regime sought to eradicate "only" their "territorial identity". Such views were criticized by Jon Chang as "gentrified racism" and historical revisionism. He noted that the deportations had been in fact based on ethnicity of victims. ### In popular culture In 2008, Lily Hyde, a British journalist living in Ukraine, published a novel titled Dreamland that revolves around a Crimean Tatar family return to their homeland in the 1990s. The story is told from the perspective of a 12-year-old girl who moves from Uzbekistan to a demolished village with her parents, brother, and grandfather. Her grandfather tells her stories about the heroes and victims among the Crimean Tatars. The 2013 Ukrainian Crimean Tatar-language film Haytarma portrays the experience of Crimean Tatar flying ace and Hero of the Soviet Union Amet-khan Sultan during the 1944 deportations. In 2015, Christina Paschyn released the documentary film A Struggle for Home: The Crimean Tatars in a Ukrainian–Qatari co-production. It depicts the history of the Crimean Tatars from 1783 up until 2014, with a special emphasis on the 1944 mass deportation. Crimean Tatar singer Jamala entered the Eurovision Song Contest 2016 with her song "1944", which refers to the deportation of the Crimean Tatars in the eponymous year. Jamala, an ethnic Crimean Tatar born in exile in Kyrgyzstan, dedicated the song to her deported great-grandmother. She became the first Crimean Tatar to perform at Eurovision and also the first to perform with a song with lyrics in the Crimean Tatar language. She went on to win the contest, becoming the second Ukrainian artist to win the event. ## See also - De-Tatarization of Crimea - Deportation of the Chechens and Ingush - Deportation of the Meskhetian Turks - List of ethnic cleansing campaigns - List of genocides by death toll - Population transfer in the Soviet Union ## Comments ## General and cited sources ### Books ### Online news reports ### Journal articles ### International and NGO sources
7,755,828	Costa Rica at the 1980 Winter Olympics	1,172,596,725	null	[ "1980 in Costa Rican sport", "Costa Rica at the Winter Olympics by year", "Nations at the 1980 Winter Olympics" ]	Costa Rica sent a delegation to compete at the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, United States from 13–24 February 1980. This was Costa Rica's debut appearance at a Winter Olympic Games, after five prior appearances at Summer Olympics. The only athlete sent by the country was alpine skier Arturo Kinch. In the only event he finished, the men's downhill, he placed 41st. ## Background The Comité Olímpico Nacional de Costa Rica was recognized by the International Olympic Committee on 31 December 1935, and Costa Rica first joined Olympic competition at the 1936 Summer Olympics. After that, the nation did not return to Summer Olympic competition until the 1964 Summer Olympics, and have competed in every Summer Olympics since. These Lake Placid Olympics were Costa Rica's first appearance at a Winter Olympic Games. The 1980 Winter Olympics were held from 13–24 February 1980; a total of 1,072 athletes participated, representing 37 National Olympic Committees. Arturo Kinch was the only athlete selected by Costa Rica for these Olympics. He was selected as the flag bearer for the opening ceremony. ## Alpine skiing Arturo Kinch was 23 years old at the time of the Lake Placid Olympics. In his youth Kinch was a soccer player, who moved to Colorado for college. After using skiing as a way to keep fit between soccer seasons, he decided to file paperwork to create a Costa Rican ski federation, a process that took two years. On 14 February, he took part in the downhill, and finished the race in 2 minutes and 12.24 seconds. This was good for 41st place, his best finish in a career that would eventually span five Olympics. In the downhill, the gold medal was won by Leonhard Stock of Austria, the silver was taken by his compatriot Peter Wirnsberger, and the bronze was won by Canadian Steve Podborski. On 18 February, Kinch participated in the giant slalom, but failed to finish the first run. Kinch also took part in the slalom held on 22 February, but he again failed to complete the first run. ## See also - Costa Rica at the 1980 Summer Olympics
12,547,653	Russian Spaniel	1,160,992,058	null	[ "Dog breeds originating in the Soviet Union", "Rare dog breeds", "Spaniels" ]	The Russian Spaniel is a type of spaniel first standardised in 1951 in the Soviet Union after World War II by cross breeding English Cocker Spaniels, English Springer Spaniels and other spaniel breeds. In 1951, the standard of the Russian spaniel was adopted, the selection of dogs for breeding began to be carried out in accordance with the requirements. Physically it is similar to a Cocker Spaniel, but has a shorter, tighter coat and a longer body. Developed and used as hunting dogs, this breed does not suffer from any major health complaints other than those normally associated with spaniels. It is the only gun dog breed originated in Russia. It is used for hunting game birds (marsh, field, upland and waterfowl birds) and hares. Popular in its native Russia, the breed was only introduced overseas in the 1990s, and is not yet recognised by any major kennel clubs, but is recognised by Russian Kynological Federation. ## Description The Russian Spaniel is a small, sturdy dog with a short, tight, silky coat with feathering on the ears and legs. Colors can vary greatly, and can include solid colors without white markings, piebald, speckled, black and tan, and combinations. The head and ears are also usually dark. The Russian Spaniel resembles the English Cocker Spaniel, with a body similar to the field lines of that breed though with the longer ears of the show line. The body of the Russian Spaniel tends to be longer than that of the English Cocker however, and the breed has only one line rather than being split into separate specific show and field lines of the same breed. Both the male and females of the breed weigh on average 28–40 lb (13–18 kg) and are around 15–17 inches (38–43 cm) at the withers. This makes them similar in size or a little larger than the English Cocker Spaniel which weighs approximately 13–14.5 kg (29–32 lb) and is on average between 15.5 and 16 inches (39 and 41 cm) with the females being a little smaller at 15–15.5 inches (38–39 cm). Bred primarily as hunting dogs, their goal is to find the bird, send it into the air and then to retrieve it on command after the hunter has shot the quarry. The Russian Spaniel is suited for hunting in marshland, fields, woodland, for birds as well as rabbits and other small game. The breed is also popular in their native Russia as their small size makes them suitable to be kept in busy cities, and easily transported to hunting sites. ## Health As with all long-eared spaniels, Russian Spaniels require checks to prevent ear infections. The breed does have an inclination to gain weight easily, which can be prevented by controlling food intake. The Russian Spaniel can be prone to food allergies, which are usually identified at between 1 and 5 months of age with the most common allergens being chicken and carrots. There are no other breed-specific health issues currently known. ## Temperament It is an energetic, free-spirited breed. Even though it is a gundog, it is also kept as a companion dog because of its easy-going nature and devotion. It is a cheerful, active dog and is always ready to play, responding to any form of attention with a happily wagging tail. Russian Spaniels are trainable, can make a good watchdog, and are amiable with children. The Russian spaniel swims and dives to retrieve wounded birds. It is used for hunting marsh, field and upland game. Previously the breed was also tested for blood trailing. Russian spaniels possess a good instinct, stamina. They could be used as a watchdog. Although it is believed that deliberate development of watchdog qualities could harm the hunting qualities of the dog. ## History The Russian Spaniel is the youngest of the Russian gundogs. It originated mostly from English Cocker Spaniels and English Springer Spaniels. Breeds known as Russian Spaniels have been mentioned as early as 1891 in New Zealand. The first recorded spaniel in Russia was a black Cocker Spaniel owned by hunting enthusiast Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich towards the end of the 19th century. Because of its noble connections, spaniels of various breeds were imported to St. Petersburg and Moscow. Some were used for hunting, but the smaller spaniels were not of much use in Russian bird hunting due to the weather and terrain conditions. It was at the beginning of the 20th century that selective breeding began for longer legged spaniels; specifically importing Springer Spaniels to create a rather mixed Russian Spaniel. By the late 1930s there were a variety of spaniels in Moscow, Leningrad and Sverdlovsk that did not fit any specific spaniel breed standard, but were not yet standardised into the modern Russian Spaniel. Purposeful breeding after World War II led to the original Russian Spaniel standard in 1951. Further revised standards were issued in 1966 and 2000. The popularity of the breed in Russia increased after the early 1990s, with Moscow dog shows since that time annually including between 120 and 131 Russian Spaniels, which qualifies the breed as one of the most popular, along with the Irish Setter. In 2002, the Russian Spaniel Club was set up in the United States to increase the knowledge of the breed outside Russia and to enable owners to register their dogs. ## International recognition Although not recognised by any major kennel clubs, the Russian Spaniel is recognised by the Continental Kennel Club, Federation of International Canines, North American Kennel Club, and Universal Kennel Club International. For recognition by The Kennel Club a breed is required to apply with names and addresses of UK owners/importers, number of dogs bred in the UK, copies of the pedigrees of UK dogs - at least three generations, it must be recognised in its country of origin and statistics on registration figures in that country, statistics on entries in shows in that country and at international level, any inherited health conditions, when the breed registry was closed, the standard from the country of origin and a brief history and details of any working activities. In order to become recognised fully by the American Kennel Club, they must first compete in a Miscellaneous Class. The requirements to compete in that class are to demonstrate a following by having a minimum of 100 active members in a national breed club, a population of 300 to 400 dogs, with third generation pedigrees and for all dogs in those pedigrees to be of the same breed, a distribution across twenty or more states, and the breed standard must be reviewed and approved by the AKC. Currently there are five dogs in the AKC's Miscellaneous Class which are Dogue de Bordeaux, Redbone Coonhound, Irish Red and White Setter, Norwegian Buhund and Pyrenean Shepherd. Typical stays in that class are between one and three years, and the national club of the breed must have held seminars, shows and judges workshops prior to being fully recognised.
59,054,284	Gordodon	1,119,984,030	Extinct genus of edaphosaurid synapsids	[ "Cisuralian life", "Edaphosaurids", "Fossil taxa described in 2018", "Paleontology in New Mexico", "Permian synapsids of North America", "Prehistoric synapsid genera" ]	Gordodon (meaning "fat tooth", referring to its large incisor-like front teeth) is an extinct genus of non-mammalian synapsid that lived during the Early Permian of what is now Otero County, New Mexico. It was a member of the herbivorous sail-backed family Edaphosauridae and contains only a single species, the type species G. kraineri. Gordodon is unusual among early synapsids for its teeth, which were arranged similarly to those of modern mammals and unlike the simple, uniform lizard-like teeth of other early herbivorous synapsids. Gordodon had large incisor-like teeth at the front, followed by a prominent gap between them and a short row of peg-like teeth at the back. Gordodon was also relatively long-necked for an early synapsid, with elongated and gracile vertebrae in its neck and back. Like other edaphosaurids, Gordodon had a tall sail on its back made from the bony neural spines of its vertebrae. The spines also had bony knobs on them, a common trait of edaphosaurids, but the knobs of Gordodon are also unique for being more slender, thorn-like and randomly arranged along the spines. It is estimated to have been rather small at 1 m (3 ft 3 in) in length excluding the tail and 34 kg (75 lb) in weight. The unique jaws and teeth of Gordodon amongst early synapsids suggest that it was one of the first herbivorous tetrapods to have specialised in selectively feeding on high nutrient, low-fibre plant fructifications (seeds and fruit-like structures). It was also one of the first tetrapods to show such specialised dentition and feeding apparatus, evolving only a few million years after the first obligate tetrapod herbivores appeared in the fossil record. Prior to the discovery of Gordodon, the earliest non-mammalian synapsid herbivores with similarly complex teeth were the mammal-like cynodonts that appeared 95 million years later during the Triassic. ## Discovery and naming The only known fossil of Gordodon was discovered in March 2013 by Ethan Schuth, a geology student of the University of Oklahoma, during a field trip. The specimen was found exposed along a road cut near the city of Alamogordo in Otero County, New Mexico, in strata identified as belonging to the base of the Bursum Formation. They contacted the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science (NMMNH) in Albuquerque, who collected the specimen during 2013–2014 and catalogued the specimen as NMMNH P-70796. While the specimen was being excavated, the skull was accidentally sawn through, leaving a vertical cut 6.25 mm across through the jaws and orbit. A description of the specimen was published in 2018 by palaeontologists Spencer G. Lucas, Larry F. Rinehart and Matthew D. Celeskey, where it was named as the holotype of a new genus and species, Gordodon kraineri. The generic name is from the Spanish "gordo", meaning "fat", and the Ancient Greek suffix "-odon" to mean "fat tooth", referring to its characteristically large front teeth. The name is also a play on "Alamogordo", the name of the city close to where the fossil was discovered. The specific name kraineri was chosen in honour of Karl Krainer, a geologist of the University of Innsbruck in recognition of his extensive work on palaeontology and geology in New Mexico. The only known specimen of Gordodon is an incomplete but articulated skeleton exposed mostly on its right side that consists of the front portion of the animal, including the skull and lower jaws, five cervical vertebrae in the neck, four complete dorsal vertebrae from the back and parts of the tall neural spines of 12 other vertebrae not visible on the slab, ribs, parts of both right and left scapulae and clavicles in the shoulder, and two partial digits likely from the hand. Although relatively small in size, suturing of both the vertebrae and the shoulder suggests that the specimen was not a young juvenile. The type specimen of Gordodon was discovered stratigraphically low in the Bursum Formation, at a site Lucas and colleagues referred to as the "edaphosaur locality". This locality is only 3 m (9 ft 10 in) above the base of the formation, which has been approximately dated to the earliest North American Wolfcampian stage and typically considered to be of the Early Permian, equivalent to the globally defined Asselian stage. Gordodon straddles the boundary between the Pennsylvanian subperiod of the latest Carboniferous and the very earliest Permian at approximately 299 million years old, and may alternatively be considered Pennsylvanian in age based on alternative definitions for the base of Permian (e.g. conodont biostratigraphy). The fossil was found in fluvial facies of olive-grey sandstones deposited by river channels. ## Description Gordodon was a relatively small edaphosaurid, with an estimated length from head to hips (presacral length) of about 1 m (3 ft 3 in), not including the tail. It is also estimated to have weighed only 34 kilograms (75 lb), less than half the size of most species of Edaphosaurus. Compared with later edaphosaurids, the ribs of Gordodon were much less curved, and so it is unlikely that Gordodon was as barrel-chested as Edaphosaurus, and instead had a much more narrow, straight-sided torso like those of the carnivorous sphenacodontids such as Dimetrodon. The vertebrae are relatively gracile, and unusually had a pair of keels on their undersides, a trait unique to Gordodon among edaphosaurids. The vertebrae themselves have relatively elongated, rectangular centra (the main body of the vertebrae) in the neck, while those of the dorsal vertebrae in the back are more square. Aside from part of the shoulder girdle, the only known limb bones of Gordodon are two incomplete digits likely from one of the hands. These digits are long and slender, with curved, pointed claws at their tips, more like those of Remigiomontanus than the stockier digits of the larger Edaphosaurus. Other aspects of the anatomy of Gordodon remain unknown, as it is only known from a single partial specimen. ### Skull The skull of Gordodon is relatively large for an edaphosaurid, measuring 159 millimetres (6.3 in) long from front to back. Although, like other edaphosaurids, the head is still proportionately small compared to its body. The skull is slightly arched upwards along its length, with a relatively long and narrow snout that is roughly equal in length to the portion of the skull behind the eyes. The orbits (eye sockets) themselves are large and rounded, with a prominent overhanging 'brow' of bone above them formed by the prefrontal, frontal and postfrontal bones. The single opening behind the eyes (the temporal fenestra, an attachment point for jaw muscles) characteristic of synapsids is roughly square-shaped and smaller than the orbit, although it is noticeably taller than it is wide. The jaws and teeth of Gordodon are one of its most distinctive features. The only teeth at the front of the jaw are a pair of large incisor-like teeth at the tips of both upper and lower jaws. Only the upper 'incisors' are preserved, although an opposing pair on the lower jaw is inferred by an open tooth socket on the visible right dentary (the tooth bearing bone in the lower jaw). These teeth appear triangular in shape and pointed when viewed from the side, but were likely rectangular and chisel-like from the front. These are the only teeth in the premaxillae (the front-most upper jaw bones), and behind them is a long upward-curved diastema, a prominent gap in the jaws between the front and back teeth, formed by the maxilla (the main upper jaw bone). Behind the diastema there are 18 small, peg-like teeth in each maxilla, with 8 slightly larger teeth in front and 6 smaller teeth at the back (it is unclear if the transition between them was sharp or gradual due to damage to the fossil). The dentary teeth in the lower jaw are similar in size and shape to those in the upper jaw, and there is likewise an opposing diastema at the front, although it is more gently curved. Like Edaphosaurus, Gordodon had dense batteries of small, peg-like teeth on the inside surfaces of its lower jaws set on distinctive tooth plates. These likely corresponded with an opposing set on the pterygoid bones above on the roof of the mouth, although this area is not visible in the only known specimen. Very small (\<1 mm across) palatal teeth are visible on the vomer (a bone in the palate), however, and they form a pair of elongated clusters along the midline of the diastema between the cheek teeth and the 'incisors'. The lower jaw is notably deeper at the back, with relatively shallow dentaries and an unfused mandibular symphysis (where the two lower jaws connect at the front) that is only weakly deflected downwards into a slight 'chin'. ### Sail Like other edaphosaurids, Gordodon possessed a large sail supported by enormously elongated neural spines on its vertebrae running down its neck and back. Intriguingly, the sail of Gordodon appears to have a transitional morphology between earlier edaphosaurids and Edaphosaurus. Unlike earlier edaphosaurids, the neural spines are thicker and laterally compressed, almost blade-like at their tips, although they are not as heavyset as those of Edaphosaurus. Further, Gordodon lacks an elongated spine on its axis (the second vertebra in the neck), unlike the earlier edaphosaurid Ianthasaurus, and so the sail only begins over its third cervical vertebra, as in Edaphosaurus. The neural spines also sport numerous bony tubercles like that of Edaphosaurus. However, they do not form organised rows of thick, generally symmetrical blunt cross-bars as seen in Edaphosaurus. Instead, the tubercles of Gordodon are thin and pointed, like thorns, and are randomly distributed across the spines asymmetrically on either side with no discernible pattern to them. Unusually, the neural spines continue to substantially increase in length down to the 12th spine, whereas in Edaphosaurus and Ianthasaurus the spine height evens out at the 8th spine. Likewise, the highest neural spine is the 16th, and so the sail peaks further back than where it does in Edaphosaurus (the 12th spine). Combined, this gives Gordodon a much more steeply sloping sail compared to the more semicircular shaped sails of both Edaphosaurus and Ianthasaurus. ## Classification Gordodon was a member of family Edaphosauridae, a group of mostly omnivorous and herbivorous sail-backed synapsids within the clade Eupelycosauria, with which it shares a characteristically small head, reduced size of the teeth along the jaw margins, a jaw joint below the tooth row, and tall neural spines with lateral protuberances. Gordodon is distinguished from all other edaphosaurids by its uniquely varied, or heterodont, teeth, namely its chisel-like 'incisors', diastema, and peg-like cheek teeth. Gordodon can also be distinguished by a relatively short suture between the nasals and maxilla, relatively gracile cervical and dorsal vertebrae with two keels along the bottom, and randomly distributed, thorn-like tubercles on its neural spines. A phylogenetic analysis was performed by Lucas and colleagues in 2018 to determine the relationships of Gordodon to other edaphosaurids. Another analysis of edaphosaurid relationships was published by Spindler and colleagues in 2019, which included additional newly described species of edaphosaurids. Both analyses found Gordodon in a similar position respective of other edaphosaurids, more derived than Ianthasaurus and Glaucosaurus but less so than Lupeosaurus and Edaphosaurus. The cladogram of Spindler et al. (2019) is shown simplified below: It was noted by both analyses that Gordodon helped to resolve the 'middle' portion of the edaphosaurid tree, which in previous analyses was an unstable region and the relationships between species poorly resolved. Gordodon combines traits of earlier edaphosaurids, such as longer vertebral centra and a relatively long snout, with more derived features like the numerous bony tubercles present on the neural spines. Similarly, it shows a number of intermediate traits between earlier and derived edaphosaurids, including an overall smaller skull, shortened snout length, and a deeper mandible compared to earlier edaphosaurids. The relative completeness of Gordodon allowed for comparisons to be made with earlier and derived edaphosaurids that were not known from overlapping material (e.g. skulls vs postcrania), elucidating the relationships between them. ### Evolutionary history Diastemata are found in the upper jaws of some other early synapsids, including the predatory Kenomagnathus and Tetraceratops. However, Gordodon is thus far the only herbivorous non-therapsid synapsid to possess a true diastema. Gordodon is also the only synapsid outside of cynodonts to have a dentary diastema opposing the one in the upper jaw. The mammal-like diastema and heterodont teeth of Gordodon are independently evolved from those of more derived therapsids, including mammals, and indicate that the evolution of mammalian jaws and teeth was not a linear process, with functional diastemata evolving multiple times in early synapsids, including edaphosaurids. The diastema of Gordodon likely originated from a slight gap in the upper tooth row of early edaphosaurids (an 'initial diastema') such as Ianthasaurus, formed by the overlapping attachments of the premaxilla and maxilla. Within Edaphosauridae, Gordodon is also indicative that at least two distinct feeding styles of herbivory evolved within the family early in its evolutionary history: a specialised low-fibre diet in Gordodon; and generalised browsing of high fibre plants in more derived edaphosaurids, namely Edaphosaurus. However, it is currently unclear whether both styles descended from less specialised low-fibre herbivores, or if each evolved from a more omnivorous ancestor similar to Ianthasaurus. The earliest Permian age of Gordodon also indicates that herbivorous edaphosaurids diversified early on in their evolution, and so raises the possibility for greater ecological diversity within Edaphosauridae that is yet to be discovered. ## Palaeobiology Like other edaphosaurids, Gordodon was a herbivore, although its unique dentition suggests that it was feeding on different foods than its relatives. In its description by Lucas and colleagues in 2018, they suggested that the specialised features of its jaws and teeth indicated that Gordodon was a more selective feeder, a position agreed upon by Spindler (2020). They based this interpretation on traits such as its narrower snout, specialised 'incisors', and its diastema, that together would have allowed it to selectively crop and process vegetation into smaller pieces before swallowing them. Such traits are found in living mammals known to be selective feeders. This method of feeding could have allowed Gordodon to consume more nutrient-rich, low-fibre plant matter than other edaphosaurids, namely fructifications (non-vegetative plant tissue, e.g. seeds and fruits). While true fruits are only produced by flowering plants (angiosperms) which had not evolved yet, similar fruit-like structures are found in gymnosperms, including the fleshy seeds and cones of conifers, gnetophytes, and cycads. The relatively narrow, "slab-sided" ribcage of Gordodon may also support their interpretation, as such a low fibre diet requires less time to digest and so Gordodon would not have required a large, rounded gut for fermenting fibrous vegetation. Gordodon was inferred by Lucas and colleagues (2018) to have used its large 'incisors' for chiselling food, similar to some modern rodents and rabbits, placing food within the diastema before being passed back to be ground up by the tooth plates. The simpler small, peg-like teeth of the maxilla and dentary functioned for cropping vegetation. The low, offset jaw joint allows for the upper and lower teeth to occlude along their entire length, giving Gordodon a stronger, more crushing bite, rather than shearing. Furthermore, the jaw joint is loosely fitting and has a rounded, spherical articulation, allowing for palinal motion of the lower jaw (where the jaw is slid backwards against the upper jaw) for further grinding and slicing of food. The 'cheek' teeth of Gordodon are not specialised for this purpose, unlike living mammals, and mastication (chewing) was likely accomplished by the tooth plates. This would be a relatively more complex form of mastication compared to the more limited palinal motion seen in the lower jaw of Edaphosaurus. However, the precise function of the diastema and motion of the jaws in relation to the tooth plates on the upper and lower jaws is difficult to determine, as noted by palaeontologist Frederik Spindler in 2020, who further suggested the role of a specialised tongue. Therefore, the exact mechanisms of the jaws and teeth during food processing of Gordodon, as well as other edaphosaurids, remains unknown. ## Palaeoecology The sedimentary facies of the Bursum Formation indicate that Gordodon inhabited a near-shore coastal plain environment. Over the course of the formation's deposition, the habitat alternated between terrestrial, beach, and marine environments over cyclical rises and falls of sea level, indicative of its proximity to the coast. Most organisms known from the Bursum Formation are marine, with particularly abundant remains of invertebrates that include a variety of gastropods, ostracods, echinoderms, brachiopods and bivalves, as well as tiny bryozoans and foraminiferans. Fragmentary remains of vertebrates from elsewhere in the formation, outside of the edaphosaur locality, include the remains of fish, aquatic temnospondyl amphibians and archeriids, herbivorous diadactomorphs and caseids, predatory sphenacodontids, and possibly other edaphosaurids.
2,055,888	Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap	1,161,475,579	1989 action-adventure video game	[ "1989 video games", "Game Gear games", "Hudson Soft games", "IOS games", "Master System games", "Metroidvania games", "Mobile games", "Platform games", "Single-player video games", "Therianthropy", "TurboGrafx-16 games", "Video game sequels", "Video games about curses", "Video games about shapeshifting", "Video games developed in Japan", "Virtual Console games", "Westone Bit Entertainment games", "Wonder Boy (video game series)" ]	Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap, known as in Japan, is a platforming action-adventure video game developed by Westone as part of Sega's Wonder Boy series. It was published by Sega and released for the Master System in 1989 and for the Game Gear in 1992 as Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap. It was ported by Hudson Soft and released in 1991 for the TurboGrafx-16/PC Engine under the name Dragon's Curse. It was also ported in 1993 by Brazilian company Tec Toy under the title Turma da Mônica em o Resgate, with the game retooled to include characters from Brazilian comic book series Monica's Gang (Turma da Mônica). A remake developed by Lizardcube and published by DotEmu, titled Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap, was released in April 2017. The game takes place after the events of Wonder Boy in Monster Land, in which Wonder Boy has been cursed by the Mecha Dragon and must locate the Salamander Cross to lift it. The game is nonlinear and features varying landscapes in which players must navigate. Players find items and clues needed to access different parts of Monster Land, and they can transform into other forms and gain different abilities. Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap received wide acclaim from gaming magazines upon its release. It was praised for its colorful and cartoon-like graphics, rich sound and diverse sound effects, and varied and addictive gameplay. Criticisms include sprite flickering in the Master System version as well as slippery controls. It won Electronic Gaming Monthly's "Best Game of the Year" award for the Master System in 1989. Reviews from gaming magazines have described the game as one of the best Master System and 8-bit titles of that era. ## Overview Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap takes place immediately after the events of Wonder Boy in Monster Land, Wonder Boy travels into the Mecha Dragon's lair in order to slay him. (Some sources refer to this creature as the "MEKA dragon".) However, upon doing so, he is inflicted by a curse that transforms him into "Lizard-Man". In the game, the player controls Wonder Boy as he tries to undo this curse by journeying across the land, defeating other dragons, and finally defeating the Vampire Dragon to obtain the Salamander Cross – the only object that can remove his curse. After completing the first level in the game (a simplified version of the final level from the preceding game Wonder Boy in Monster Land), the player begins as Lizard-Man from Alsedo, a town in Monster Land, and the gameplay becomes nonlinear. From there, the player explores and finds items and clues needed for Wonder Boy to access different parts of Monster Land. Gold and additional secondary items can be found by defeating enemies and opening treasure chests. With gold, players can buy additional items and better equipment in shops and restore their life meter in hospitals. Items with question marks displayed cannot be bought unless the player has "charm", which can be increased by collecting Charm Stones or by equipping certain items. In the game, the player uses the directional pad to move Wonder Boy left or right, crouch down (only possible as Hu-Man or Lizard-Man), or to enter doors. The buttons on the controller are used to attack enemies and to jump. Wonder Boy can attack with his main weapon or with secondary weapons by holding down on the directional pad and pressing the attack button. Pressing the pause button brings up the Status Screen (and pauses the game if Wonder Boy is fighting a dragon). Wonder Boy has a life meter shown on the top of the gameplay area as a series of hearts. When all hearts turn black, Wonder Boy dies and the game ends, but if he has a life potion ("medicine vial" in Dragon's Curse) remaining, he will revive with some of the hearts refilled. After the game ends, the player is taken to a "continue screen"; there the player has an opportunity to win a free life potion before restarting the game at the town. Players can visit the town's church to receive a password in order to continue the game at a later time. The password saves the player's current form, equipment, and amount of gold; but it does not save any secondary weapons or life potions in stock. Dragon's Curse has a "file cabinet" which allows players to store passwords into the game's memory. Throughout the game, players go through differently-themed levels: underwater, desert, jungle, cave, and sky. At the end of each level is a different dragon. After defeating a dragon, Wonder Boy changes form, and his abilities change. Wonder Boy begins the game as Hu-Man, equipped with all eight hearts and the strongest equipment. He turns into Lizard-Man after defeating and being cursed by the Mecha Dragon in the first level. At that point, he loses all equipment and all hearts except one. Lizard-Man attacks enemies by breathing fire at them and he can duck, but must use his fire breath to defend against enemy projectiles as he does not hold a shield in front of him. He can assume other different forms throughout the game: Mouse-Man can walk on walls and ceilings designated by checkered "mouse blocks", Piranha-Man can swim freely underwater and can access underwater places (such as the ship) which the other forms cannot, Lion-Man attacks enemies with his sword by slashing from directly above to directly below him allowing him to attack targets other forms cannot hit because all of them except for Lizard-Man simply thrust their sword, and Hawk-Man can fly freely in the air but takes damage if he enters water. ## Development and release Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap was developed by Westone and was published by Sega; it is the sequel to Wonder Boy in Monster Land. It was first released for the Master System in 1989 in North America and Europe. The game was then released to the PC Engine in Japan April 19, 1991 (1991-04-19) under the title Adventure Island (not to be confused with the Adventure Island series of games for the Nintendo Entertainment System); it was released for the TurboGrafx-16 that same year by NEC under the title Dragon's Curse. Westone allowed Hudson Soft to publish the game provided they made no reference to the Wonder Boy series. Sega then released the game for the Game Gear in 1992 in Europe under the game's original title (excluding the roman numeral "III") and in Japan under the title Monster World II: Dragon no Wana. In 1993, Tec Toy released the game in Brazil for the Master System under the title Turma da Mônica em o Resgate. Tec Toy replaced the sprites with characters from Brazilian comic book series Monica's Gang (Turma da Mônica), so instead of the player character turning into different creatures, he gets turned into different characters from the comics, relaying between them in order to rescue Monica, who disappeared after the previous game. In 2007, Sega released the game in Japan for the PlayStation 2 as part of a compilation of all the Wonder Boy games titled Sega Ages 2500 Vol. 29: Monster World Complete Collection. During the same year, Dragon's Curse/Adventure Island was released for the Wii's Virtual Console service worldwide. The Master System version of Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap was released in Europe on September 10, 2009 (2009-09-10) and in North America on November 9, 2009 (2009-11-09). ## Reception ### Contemporary Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap received wide acclaim from critics upon release. It received coverage in the September 1989 issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly, where they provided a brief overview of the game and a summary of the events in Wonder Boy in Monster Land leading up to the game's plot. GamePro published a review of the game in its September–October 1989 issue, stating that "it's truly an adventure worthy of Wonder Boy". It received extensive coverage in both the January and February 1990 issues of VideoGames & Computer Entertainment, featuring an overview and a walkthrough of the game. The magazine praised the game for its challenge and overall look, which it says "will have you manipulating your control pad for days on end". Various UK-based video gaming magazines gave Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap significant coverage. UK magazines Computer and Video Games and its spin-off Mean Machines – in the latter's premiere issue – gave the game positive reviews. Computer and Video Games praised the animation in particular and called it the best game of its type on that platform, using phrases such as "familiar air of polish and ingenuity" and "piles of addiction guaranteed". Mean Machines' Matt Regan said it "ranks as one of the greatest Sega Master System games ever!"; he compared the gameplay to the Mario series of video games and praised the game's depth, saying that "there's always something new to discover, be it a key to a previously locked door or even a secret room!" Julian Rignall praised the game's graphics and the huge world players can explore, which he says contributes to the game's addictiveness. He said that "the combination of adventuring, shooting and platform action results in one of the best games of its type available on any console". Collectively, they praised the game overall presentation and graphics, saying that the sprites complement the background. While they additionally praised its playability for being "accessible from the word go" and longevity, they criticized its sound, saying that it "could have been much better". The Games Machine complimented the game's colorful backgrounds and sprites with "the [Wonder] Boy himself being particularly well-drawn", while they criticized the Master System version's weak animation on some of the characters as well as its choppy scrolling. They called it one of the best Master System games but complained that it was expensive, saying "do you really want to spend 28 quid on it?" The magazine's review of the PC Engine version in the same issue was more positive. The magazine's successor, Raze, reviewed the PC Engine version titled Adventure Island. The magazine praised the game's simplistic and addictive platforming gameplay and its smooth-scrolling graphics, though they said they were "a little blocky". They noted that the game had excellent music which was "worth listening through some headphones". Zero, along with praising the game's graphics and music, called it "enormously addictive"; the review said the ability to transform into different forms and hence being able to progress into new areas kept the game fresh. ACE magazine in 1989 listed it as one of the top three best Master System games available at the time, along with Ys: The Vanished Omens and California Games. German magazine Video Games gave Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap a positive review, saying that the game gave more weight to strategy and tactics, that it "stands out clearly from the two predecessors", and that its graphics became less childlike but more "spectacular". The review continued, saying that its gameplay is a good example of what makes action-adventure games addictive to play. It complimented the game's depth and wide array of equipment, saying that it "provides an additional touch, which makes [it] the best thought-out game [at the time]". ### Awards In the December 1989 issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly, in its "Best and Worst of 1989" feature, the game won an award for "Best Game of the Year" for the Sega Master System. ### Retrospective Upon the release of the TurboGrafx-16 version Dragon's Curse to the Virtual Console in 2007, IGN's Lucas Thomas reviewed the game, comparing the opening sequence of the game to the opening sequence of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night; he proceeded to add that the game parallels with games in the Castlevania series, calling the game "a straightforward and simple 'Metroidvania' adventure" but with "several layers of unexpected depth". Thomas noted the game's popularity among fans and that it plays almost exactly the same as the Master System version despite graphics and sound improvements; at the time, there were no Master System games on the Virtual Console. He praised the game's rich sound, gameplay depth, and "colorful and cartoony" graphics, which "was perfectly suited to the TurboGrafx platform". IGN's Travis Fahs, in discussing the SMS version, offered another opinion, praising the game as "not only the crowning achievement of the series, but perhaps one of the best games of the 8-bit era", drawing comparisons to both Mario and Zelda.[^1] Thomas again reviewed the Master System version of Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap when it was released two years later for the Virtual Console. In this review, he compares the gameplay to Metroid – more specifically the need to gather additional equipment and abilities to advance in the game. While he acknowledged that this version from one of the best Master System games as well as for any 8-bit system, he felt that the Master System's Virtual Console release had a reduced appeal. He said that the TurboGrafx-16 version Dragon's Curse had already been out for two years and that there was no difference in gameplay between the two versions, but there were improvements in graphics and sound in the TurboGrafx-16 version because of the system's superior capabilities. He also noted that the Master System version suffers from sprite flickering – something the TurboGrafx-16 version did not have. Despite the small differences in the two versions, he decided to give the Master System version the same rating as the TurboGrafx-16 version. Allgame's review of the Master System version praised the non-linear gameplay and the ability to change into different forms, saying that it "keeps things interesting and fun" and "keeps the game from getting repetitive". It lauded its visuals and sound effects, saying the "graphics are very colorful and have a cartoon look to them". Criticisms included slippery controls and the difficulty of getting into doors; it said the controls kept the game from obtaining a perfect rating, and the gameplay was still not as good as Wonder Boy in Monster Land. The editing staff from magazine Retro Gamer listed Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap as one of the "Perfect Ten Games" for the Master System, calling it "the best in a long and highly convoluted myriad of multi-titled games" and "a great adventure that every Master System fan needs to own". The review praised the game's brisk pace and gameplay, despite the length of the game. ## Remake In June 2016, indie developer Lizardcube and publisher DotEmu announced a remake of Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap, simply titled Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap, which was released for PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox One in April 2017, with a release on PC to follow in June 2017. The game supports a different, modern visual style, but retains the same gameplay, level design and story. The game was developed in collaboration with series creator Ryuichi Nishizawa. A spiritual successor to The Dragon's Trap, titled Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom, is also developed by Game Atelier and published by FDG Entertainment for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Google Stadia, and PC. The game is also developed in collaboration with Nishizawa, though does not use the Wonder Boy'' name due to Sega owning the rights. [^1]: {{cite web\\|last=Fahs\\|first=Travis\\|title=The Legend of Wonder Boy\\|publisher=IGN\\|date=2008-11-14\\|access-date=2011-01-19\\|url=
46,270,306	Ready Player One (film)	1,173,360,327	2018 American science fiction action film	[ "2010s American films", "2010s English-language films", "2010s science fiction adventure films", "2018 3D films", "2018 films", "2018 science fiction action films", "4DX films", "Amblin Entertainment films", "American 3D films", "American adventure films", "American crossover films", "American dystopian films", "American fantasy films", "American films with live action and animation", "American science fiction action films", "American science fiction adventure films", "American teen films", "Cyberpunk films", "Drone films", "Dune Entertainment films", "Easter egg (media)", "Films about orphans", "Films about telepresence", "Films about video games", "Films about virtual reality", "Films based on American novels", "Films based on science fiction novels", "Films directed by Steven Spielberg", "Films produced by Donald De Line", "Films produced by Steven Spielberg", "Films scored by Alan Silvestri", "Films set in 2045", "Films set in Columbus, Ohio", "Films set in the future", "Films shot at Warner Bros. Studios, Leavesden", "Films shot in Hertfordshire", "Films shot in London", "Films using motion capture", "Films with screenplays by Ernest Cline", "Films with screenplays by Zak Penn", "IMAX films", "Marvin the Martian films", "Metafictional works", "Nostalgia in the United States", "Teen action films", "Teen adventure films", "Teen science fiction films", "Village Roadshow Pictures films", "Warner Bros. films" ]	Ready Player One is a 2018 American science fiction film based on Ernest Cline's novel of the same name. Directed by Steven Spielberg from a screenplay by Zak Penn and Cline, it stars Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn, Lena Waithe, T.J. Miller, Simon Pegg, and Mark Rylance. The film is set in 2045, where much of humanity uses the OASIS, a virtual reality simulation, to escape the real world. A teenage orphan finds clues to a contest that promises ownership of the OASIS to the winner, and he and his allies try to complete it before an evil corporation can do so. Development of the film first began in 2010 when Warner Bros. acquired the rights to the book. In July 2015, Spielberg signed on to direct and produce the film, with casting commencing in September 2015. Filming began in England in June 2016 and was completed in September that year. The visual effects were handled by Industrial Light & Magic, Digital Domain, and Territory Studio, with some pre-visualization work done by The Third Floor. As with the novel, many popular culture references appear throughout the film, including references to The Shining, the Back to the Future franchise, Godzilla and The Iron Giant. Ready Player One premiered at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas on March 11, 2018, and was theatrically released in the United States on March 29, 2018, by Warner Bros. Pictures. The film received positive reviews from critics, who praised Spielberg's direction, the visual effects, brisk pacing, and the performances of both Sheridan and Rylance. It grossed around \$592 million worldwide, and earned a nomination for Best Visual Effects at the 91st Academy Awards, 24th Critics' Choice Awards, and 72nd British Academy Film Awards. Ready Player One was awarded the title of Best Science Fiction Film at the 45th Saturn Awards, and a further two Outstanding Achievement Awards from the Visual Effects Society. A sequel is in development. ## Plot In a dystopian 2045, people seek to escape from reality through the OASIS (Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation), a multiplayer virtual reality entertainment universe created by James Halliday and Ogden Morrow of Gregarious Games. After Halliday's death, a pre-recorded message left by his avatar Anorak announces a contest, granting ownership of the OASIS to the first to find the golden Easter egg that sits behind a locked gate which can only be opened by completing three challenges to acquire the necessary keys. The contest has lured several "Gunters", or egg hunters, and piqued the interest of Nolan Sorrento, the CEO of Innovative Online Industries (IOI), who seeks to control the OASIS himself by inserting intrusive online advertising. IOI dispatches an army of indentured servants, and employees called "Sixers" to search for the egg. Teenage orphan Wade Watts' avatar Parzival, an avid Gunter, participates in the first challenge, an unbeatable race, along with his best friend Aech, and Art3mis, a female online streamer whose avatar Parzival has a crush on. Parzival regularly revisits Halliday's Journals, a simulated archive of Halliday's life and hobbies, run by the Curator. Here, he discovers he can win the race by driving backward, and receives the Copper Key from Anorak. Art3mis, Aech, and his friends Daito and Sho, all win the race afterward, later being collectively named the High-5 on the OASIS' scoreboard. Sorrento asks mercenary i-R0k to learn Parzival's true identity, intending to bribe him to win the contest on IOI's behalf. Wade and Art3mis discover from the Journals that Halliday once dated Morrow's wife Karen "Kira" Underwood. Wade and Art3mis visit the Distracted Globe night club to look for clues, where Wade reveals his identity and confesses his love to Art3mis. They survive an IOI raid in which Art3mis abandons Wade, explaining that her father died in debt to IOI and that she believes Parzival is not taking the contest seriously. i-R0k, having eavesdropped on their conversation, reveals his findings to Sorrento, who contacts Wade with an offer. When rejected, Sorrento attempts to dispose of Wade by bombing his home, killing his aunt Alice and her boyfriend Rick among others. Art3mis' player, Samantha Cook, takes Wade in. Together, they realize the second challenge relates to Halliday's regret of not pursuing a relationship with Kira. The High-5 search a recreation of the Overlook Hotel, where Art3mis asks Kira to dance and wins the Jade Key. Sorrento's subordinate F'Nale Zandor storms the Gunters' hideout, taking Samantha to an IOI Loyalty Center to pay off her father's debt. Wade escapes with the help of the other High-5 users, Helen Harris (Aech), Toshiro (Daito), and Zhou (Sho) in Helen's truck. Samantha escapes confinement after Aech and Parzival hack Sorrento's OASIS rig. The third challenge is found in Castle Anorak on Planet Doom, where players must guess Halliday's favorite Atari 2600 game to earn the Crystal Key. i-R0k places an impenetrable forcefield around the castle using the Orb of Osuvox, but Art3mis soon disables it. The High-5 lead an army of OASIS players against IOI's forces. Parzival kills Samantha's avatar, allowing her to flee IOI with the High-5 picking her up nearby. Parzival and Sorrento fight in the OASIS with Sorrento detonating the Cataclyst bomb, wiping out every avatar including himself. Parzival survives using an extra life coin he won in a bet with the Curator. He plays Adventure, winning the Crystal Key by locating Warren Robinett's Easter egg. He uses the three keys to enter a treasure room, where Anorak offers him a contract to sign. Parzival recognizes it as the one where Morrow signed over his shares when Halliday forced him out of Gregarious Games and refuses to sign it. Anorak transforms into Halliday, who expresses his regrets in life and awards Parzival the Easter egg. Ogden Morrow appears, revealing that he is the Curator. Wade decides to run the OASIS with the High-5, inviting Morrow to stay on as a consultant. After Aech sends the police a copy of Sorento confessing to the bombing, he and F'Nale are arrested. As the IOI Loyalty Centers are shut down, the High-5 make the controversial choice to close the OASIS twice a week for people to spend more time in the real world, including Wade and Samantha, who start a relationship. ## Cast - Tye Sheridan as Wade Watts / Parzival - Olivia Cooke as Samantha Cook / Art3mis - Ben Mendelsohn as Nolan Sorrento / IOI-655321 - Lena Waithe as Helen Harris / Aech - T.J. Miller as i-R0k - Simon Pegg as Ogden Morrow / The Curator - Mark Rylance as James Halliday / Anorak the All-Knowing - Philip Zhao as Zhou / Sho - Win Morisaki as Toshiro / Daito - Hannah John-Kamen as F'Nale Zandor - Susan Lynch as Alice - Ralph Ineson as Rick - Perdita Weeks as Karen "Kira" Underwood Lulu Wilson, Letitia Wright, Mckenna Grace, and Jane Douglas of YouTube group OutsideXbox make cameo appearances in the film, with Wright as a rebel who can be seen at Samantha's safe house, Grace and Wilson as students using the OASIS, and Douglas as a Sixer. ## Production ### Development and casting Warner Bros. bought the film rights for producers Dan Farah and Donald De Line in June 2010, one year before the book was published. Ernest Cline was set to write the script for the film, which De Line and Farah would produce. Eric Eason rewrote Cline's script, and Zak Penn was hired to rewrite the previous drafts by Cline and Eason (who became uncredited for the final draft), along with Village Roadshow Pictures coming aboard. Steven Spielberg signed on to direct and produce the film, which Kristie Macosko Krieger also produced, along with De Line and Farah. Cline and Penn made several revisions while adapting the novel to film. Most of these changes were to eliminate scenes that would be uninteresting in a visual format, such as when Wade beats a high score in Pac-Man, or recites all the lines from the film WarGames. In 2016, American musician Moby said he had tried to make the book into a movie, but discovered that Spielberg had taken the role before him. Elle Fanning, Olivia Cooke, and Lola Kirke were the frontrunners for the role of Art3mis; with Cooke announced as having been cast in the role by September 2015. In January 2016, Ben Mendelsohn joined the cast. In February 2016, Tye Sheridan was confirmed to play Wade, after a lengthy casting search for the role. Simon Pegg was added to the cast in March, with Mark Rylance joining in April. By June, T.J. Miller, Hannah John-Kamen, and Win Morisaki had also been cast in the film. In July, Philip Zhao joined the cast, with Lena Waithe, Ralph Ineson, Mckenna Grace, and Letitia Wright being revealed as appearing in the film over time prior to the film's release. In October 2019, Doctor Sleep director Mike Flanagan revealed that Jack Nicholson, who portrayed Jack Torrance in The Shining, was approached to appear in the film, but declined the offer due to his retirement. ### Filming Production was slated to begin in July 2016, but on July 1, 2016, screenwriter Zak Penn confirmed that the first week of filming had already been completed, meaning that filming began on June 24, 2016. In August and September 2016, filming took place in Birmingham, England, standing in for Columbus, Ohio. Birmingham filming included on Livery Street in the Jewellery Quarter area of the city, which was used for multiple scenes in the film. Ludgate Hill Car Park lot on Lionel Street, in which caravan homes were partially built, was also used, and a planned explosion there caused some local businesses and residents to call emergency services as no prior notice was given by the production team. Other locations in the city included the former industrial area of Digbeth, and some of the city's landmarks were erased and replaced with CGI buildings to create a dystopian future Ohio. Outside of Birmingham, filming also took place at Warner Bros. Studios, Leavesden and at Solaris House, the former Sun Microsystems headquarters in Surrey. Principal photography wrapped on September 27, 2016. ### Visual effects Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), Digital Domain, and Territory Studio developed the visual effects, with some pre-visualization work done by The Third Floor. For three hours three days a week, Spielberg met with ILM, which was in charge of the OASIS segments and produced the bulk of the visual effects shots, with 900 in total; Spielberg remarked that "this is the most difficult movie I've done since Saving Private Ryan", as three 3-hour long meetings a week were necessitated to discuss the visual effects. Visual effects supervisor Roger Guyett stated that the VFX team would collaborate with Spielberg and writers Cline and Penn: > What we did at one point was to have a card for every single character that we considered to be a "hero" character within the movie, and we put them up on a board and Steven and everyone else spent hours assigning them to scenes. We'd say, "This is where we want whoever it would be ... Batman, Chun-Li, or whoever." And then we went through the whole movie doing that. As the scenes developed, we got an understanding of how many characters we needed. Part of the film takes place in a virtual space based on the Overlook Hotel in the film The Shining. This was mostly a digital recreation using high-quality telecine of the original film, allowing new camera angles and shots that did not appear in the original. Some original footage from The Shining was also used, with ILM's modifications. Only a few scenes in this sequence involved real actors (such as the appearance of the Grady twins) and required reproduction of The Shining's physical sets. The Shining sequence was post-processed with film grain and other aging effects to make the new footage closely resemble the original. During the production of Ready Player One, The VFX team built the sequence the Overlook Hotel in the digital realm. Stanley Kubrick's blueprints were used to recreate the hotel in the film. ILM also had to produce digital versions of the film's many cultural references, including the DeLorean time machine (from the Back to the Future films); the Iron Giant; Chucky; and King Kong, modeled after the 1933 film version. The Tyrannosaurus rex from Jurassic Park was created from the base model ILM had created. Digital Domain facilitated pre-visualization (with The Third Floor), motion capture, and virtual sets, and also created 300 visual effects shots for the primarily live-action portions of the film. The virtual sets were powered by game engines and were used congruently with the motion-capture process, with previsualization supervisor Scott Meadows explaining that in real time Spielberg would "put on a headset and scout the sets and make adjustments." ## Music On June 9, 2016, John Williams was initially going to compose the film's score. However, in July 2017, Williams left the project in favor of scoring Spielberg's The Post, and Alan Silvestri took over scoring duties for the film. The official score was released by WaterTower Music as a two-CD set on March 30, 2018, with vinyl and cassette releases projected. At Spielberg's request, Silvestri references his own music from Back to the Future within the film's score, as well as quoting music written by other composers including Max Steiner's theme from King Kong, Akira Ifukube’s main theme from Godzilla, and the score by Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind from The Shining. ## Cultural references Ready Player One pays homage to popular culture from various time periods, mainly the 1970s and 1980s but also extending to the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s; reviewers have identified over a hundred references to films, television shows, music, toys, video games, anime, and comics from these eras. Cline did not have any issues with these copyrighted elements when he published the book, but was aware that securing all necessary rights would be a major obstacle for a film adaptation. This task was eventually made easier thanks to Spielberg's reputation in the film industry. In the end, Spielberg estimated that they managed to get about 80% of the copyrighted elements they desired. The production was not able to secure the rights to Spielberg's own Close Encounters of the Third Kind from Columbia Pictures. The Dungeons & Dragons module Tomb of Horrors features in an important episode of the book, the "Copper Key challenge", but that reference was excluded from the film, where the challenge features a huge car race in New York instead. However, the movie does reference the module: artwork of the Tomb of Horrors demon appears on the back of Aech's van. Similarly Blade Runner, which was integral to the plot of the book, was shelved as Blade Runner 2049 was in production at the same time as Ready Player One and the producers at Alcon Entertainment feared that Spielberg's film could damage the commercial prospects of their film; as a replacement, the creative team had the players play through the events of The Shining, which Spielberg was able to secure the rights to as an homage to his friend Stanley Kubrick. Penn and Cline also thought that the film could be the opportunity to replace such a lengthy sequence with a more action-heavy one. Once they decided to use The Shining, they were doubtful at first that Spielberg would accept the change, but Spielberg did go for it. While Cline's original work heavily used the character of Ultraman, the rights over the character were still under legal dispute, requiring them to replace Ultraman with the titular robot from The Iron Giant and RX-78-2 Gundam. Spielberg recognized that his past films were a significant part of the 1980s popular culture cited in the book, and to avoid being accused of "vanity", he opted to remove many of the references to his own work. Cline stated that he believed Spielberg wanted to avoid self-references to films he directed, due to the criticism he received for his film 1941, which lampooned his own previous works Jaws and Duel. Cline said he had to convince Spielberg to include some iconic elements, such as the DeLorean time machine from Back to the Future, which Spielberg conceded as the film was one he produced rather than directed. Spielberg also allowed the Tyrannosaurus rex from his own Jurassic Park to be included. Cline also asked ILM to include a reference to Last Action Hero, one of Penn's first screenplays, without Penn's knowledge; a movie marquee in the Manhattan race segment bears the name "Jack Slater", the character Arnold Schwarzenegger played in that film. ## Release ### Theatrical Ready Player One was originally scheduled to be released on December 15, 2017. However, on February 9, 2016, the film was delayed to March 30, 2018, to avoid competition with Star Wars: The Last Jedi. In January 2018, it was announced the film's release date had been moved up one day to March 29, 2018. The film had its world premiere at the Paramount Theatre in Austin, Texas on March 11, 2018 (as part of the South by Southwest Film Festival). Warner Bros. distributed the film worldwide, with Village Roadshow Pictures distributing in several overseas territories. Around the same time the film was released, massively multi-player online game platform Roblox held an event based on it. The winner of the event was the user r0cu. ### Home media Ready Player One was released on digital copy on July 3, 2018, and on 4K UHD Blu-ray, Blu-ray 3D, Blu-ray, and DVD on July 24, 2018. The film debuted at the top of the NPD VideoScan First Alert chart, a tracker of combined domestic Blu-Ray and DVD unit sales, for the week ending on July 27, 2018. It retained the No. 1 spot on the chart for the week ending on August 4, 2018. ## Reception ### Box office Ready Player One grossed \$137.7 million in the United States and Canada, and \$454.5 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of \$592.2 million. Deadline Hollywood estimated that the film needed to gross at least \$440 million in order to break even. In the United States and Canada, Ready Player One was projected to gross \$40–50 million from 4,100 theaters over its first four days. It made \$12.1 million on its first day, including \$3.75 million from Wednesday night previews. It ended up grossing \$41.8 million in its opening weekend (for a four-day total of \$53.7 million). The film made \$24.6 million in its second weekend, finishing second behind newcomer A Quiet Place, and \$11.5 million in its third weekend, finishing in fourth. ### Critical response On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 72% with an average score of , based on reviews. The site's critical consensus reads, "Ready Player One is a sweetly nostalgic thrill ride that neatly encapsulates Spielberg's strengths while adding another solidly engrossing adventure to his filmography." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 64 out of 100 based on 56 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A−" on an A+ to F scale, and those at PostTrak gave the film an 82% overall positive score and a 65% "definite recommend". In a review for RogerEbert.com, Brian Tallerico wrote that the film's "overwhelming" nature and non-stop action will likely thrill fans of pop culture; while he observed narrative weaknesses, such as a lack of depth among the supporting characters, he felt that they ultimately do not hinder the film from working "on the level of technical, blockbuster mastery that Spielberg helped define". Writing for Variety, Owen Gleiberman called the film a "coruscating explosion of pop-culture eye candy" and found the sequence based on The Shining to be "irresistible". However, he criticized Spielberg's separation of fantasy and reality, and he said the film has "more activity than it does layers". IndieWire's Eric Kohn characterized the film as "an astonishing sci-fi spectacle and a relentless nostalgia trip at once" and praised both the sequence based on The Shining and Penn's screenplay, particularly with respect to Mendelsohn's character. Nevertheless, he remarked that the film "drags a bunch in its final third". Alissa Wilkinson, writing for Vox, praised both the quality and quantity of the worldbuilding. She also commented on just how dystopian the future portrayed is, where the main characters fight to save the OASIS and the escape from reality it represents, with arguably less concern for the problems of the real world. Film and television critic Matt Zoller Seitz praised Ready Player One and noted the undercurrent of sadness present in the film, stating that "I don't think Spielberg gets enough credit for making sad films that most people interpret as happy, and complex films that are immediately dismissed as simple or confused". Seitz concluded that the film "is a mess, but it is a fascinating and complex one..." In March 2019, a year after the film's release, Seitz determined that with Ready Player One's images commenting on capitalism and popular culture, the film was the second-most "interesting [and] substantive" big-budgeted fantasy in 2018 after Black Panther, admitting that "I still think about [Ready Player One] a lot, especially concerning the world around me." Monica Castillo was more critical of the film in her review for The Guardian and drew attention to the absence of character arcs, the lack of resolution for plot holes in the novel, and the bloating of scenes in the film by trivia. Alonso Duralde, writing for TheWrap, found the usage of pop culture references lacking, and found his experience watching the film as "feeling bombarded with images, bored by the lack of an interesting story, and irritated with my own cultural past. I've never been much of a video-game player, but by the finale, I was ready to 'Leeroy Jenkins!' my way out of the theater". ### Accolades ## Legacy Ready Player One's depiction of a pop culture-dominated virtual world has drawn comparisons to Meta's investments in the metaverse in the 2020s. Upon the unveiling of the Apple Vision Pro mixed reality headset in 2023, many commentators compared its design to the headsets seen in Ready Player One. A promotional video produced by Apple that accompanied the Vision Pro's announcement also mirrored a scene in Ready Player One, in which Wade Watts uses his headset to enter the OASIS. ## Sequel When asked about a sequel to the film, Cline stated: "I think there's a good chance that, if this one does well, Warner Bros. will want to make a sequel. I don't know if Steven [Spielberg] would want to dive back in, because he would know what he is getting into. He's said that it's the third-hardest film he's made, out of dozens and dozens of movies". Cline wrote a book sequel, titled Ready Player Two, which was released on November 24, 2020, stating in the acknowledgments that he had consulted Spielberg on the final draft of the book and where to take a potential film adaptation. On December 22, 2020, Cline announced that a sequel was in the early stages of development.
3,119,091	Jamey Wright	1,159,274,325	American baseball player (born 1974)	[ "1974 births", "Arizona League Rockies players", "Asheville Tourists players", "Baseball players from Oklahoma City", "Cleveland Indians players", "Colorado Rockies players", "Colorado Springs Sky Sox players", "Frisco RoughRiders players", "Huntsville Stars players", "Indianapolis Indians players", "Kansas City Royals players", "Living people", "Los Angeles Dodgers players", "Major League Baseball pitchers", "Milwaukee Brewers players", "New Haven Ravens players", "Oklahoma RedHawks players", "Omaha Royals players", "Sacramento River Cats players", "Salem Avalanche players", "San Francisco Giants players", "Seattle Mariners players", "St. Louis Cardinals players", "Tampa Bay Rays players", "Texas Rangers players" ]	Jamey Alan Wright (born December 24, 1974) is an American former professional baseball pitcher. He played for 10 different teams in Major League Baseball (MLB): the Colorado Rockies, Milwaukee Brewers, St. Louis Cardinals, Kansas City Royals, San Francisco Giants, Texas Rangers, Cleveland Indians, Seattle Mariners, Los Angeles Dodgers, and Tampa Bay Rays. Wright batted and threw right-handed. An Oklahoma City native, Wright was a first round draft pick of the Rockies in 1993. He reached the majors with them in 1996 and was part of their starting rotation through the 1999 season. Traded to Milwaukee before the 2000 season, he became the Brewers' Opening Day starter in 2001, winning a career-high 11 games. After being traded to St. Louis during the 2002 season, he spent most of 2003 in the minor leagues, then pitched for the Rockies again in 2004 and 2005. He was named the fifth starter for the Giants and the Rangers in 2006 and 2007, respectively, but both times he was removed from the rotation during the year. After the 2007 season, he served almost exclusively as a reliever. With the Rangers in 2008, Wright tied for third in the American League (AL) with 75 games pitched. He spent 2009 with the Royals, split 2010 between the Indians and Mariners, and spent 2011 with the Mariners. After a year with the Dodgers in 2012, he reached the playoffs for the first time in his 18th season, with the Rays in 2013. He pitched one final year for the Dodgers in 2014, then retired after failing to make an MLB roster in 2015 and 2016. In 719 appearances (248 starts), he had a 97–130 record and a 4.81 earned run average. ## Early life Jamey Alan Wright was born on December 24, 1974, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Growing up, he was part of three Little League Baseball championship teams. He attended Oklahoma City's Westmoore High School, where he was a second team High School All-American and the Southwest Region Gatorade Player of the Year in 1993. As a senior that year, he had a 7–2 record and an 0.57 earned run average (ERA), with 94 strikeouts in 62 innings pitched, leading Westmoore to a third-place finish in the state tournament. Wright also lettered in basketball at Westmoore. He is the only baseball player from Westmoore to reach the major leagues. ## Professional career ### Colorado Rockies, first stint Wright was drafted in the first round of the 1993 Major League Baseball (MLB) draft by the Colorado Rockies, the 28th overall pick. He began his professional career with eight starts for the rookie-level Arizona League Rockies in 1993 and was promoted to the Class A Asheville Tourists in 1994. Wright split 1995 between the Single-A advanced Salem Avalanche and the Double-A New Haven Ravens in 1995, then played with New Haven and the Triple-A Colorado Springs Sky Sox in 1996. According to sportswriter Larry Stone, he "dominated" in the minor leagues. In 1996, Wright made his Major League debut when he started for the Rockies against the San Francisco Giants on July 3, allowing one run in six innings. He recorded his first major league win with a seven-inning start against the Giants on July 17, where he allowed only one earned run. The pitcher also recorded his first major league hit that day, a double against Osvaldo Fernández, though he injured his knee when sliding into second base. The injury did not end his season; Wright started 16 games (and made 1 relief appearance) in 1996, finishing with a 4–4 record and a 4.93 ERA in his debut season. He had arthroscopic surgery to repair the knee, then slipped on some ice in the off-season, requiring a second surgery. Recovered by 1997, Wright made the Rockies roster out of spring training. He spent most of the season with Colorado, other than a stretch from May 15 through June 8 when he was on the disabled list with right shoulder inflammation and a stint from June 18 through July 2 when he was demoted to Colorado Springs. He turned in his first complete game with a 7–1 win over the Chicago Cubs on July 24, giving up a solo home run to Sammy Sosa. He made 26 starts for the Rockies in 1997, posting an 8–12 record and a 6.25 ERA. The 1998 season saw Wright spend the whole year in Colorado's starting rotation, setting what would be career highs in starts (34) and innings pitched (206+1⁄3). On August 5, he hit a two-run home run against Francisco Córdova and pitched a complete game in a 6–2 victory over the Pittsburgh Pirates. He had a 9–14 record, a 5.67 ERA, and 86 strikeouts. Wright finished ninth in the National League (NL) with 235 hits allowed. After posting a 7.58 ERA in his first four starts of 1999, Wright was demoted to Colorado Springs. In 17 games (16 starts) for Colorado Springs, he had a 5–7 record, posting a slightly lower ERA at 6.46. Recalled on August 2, he posted a 4.18 ERA the rest of the season for the Rockies. He won four straight decisions from August 22 to September 20, the best winning streak of his career. In 16 starts for Colorado, he had a 4–3 record and a 4.87 ERA. ### Milwaukee Brewers On December 30, 1999, Wright and Henry Blanco were traded to the Milwaukee Brewers in a three-team trade in which the Oakland Athletics sent Jimmy Haynes to Milwaukee, the Rockies sent Justin Miller to the Athletics, and the Brewers sent Jeff Cirillo and Scott Karl to the Rockies. He began the 2000 season on the disabled list with a right rotator cuff tear, but he joined the starting rotation after being activated on May 23. Despite entering August with a 6–4 record, Wright won only one more game for the Brewers all season, giving up four runs (three earned) over 7+1⁄3 innings in a 7–4 victory over the Cincinnati Reds on September 26. In 26 games (25 starts), he had a 7–9 record and a 4.10 ERA. Wright led the NL with 18 hit batsmen. The Brewers tapped Wright to open the 2001 season, starting on April 2 against the Los Angeles Dodgers. He went seven innings, allowing the only run of the 1–0 loss with a solo homer to Gary Sheffield. He threw his first shutout on April 29, allowing just two hits in a 10–0 triumph over the Montreal Expos. Wright missed some time from May 21 through June 10 when he was on the disabled list recovering from a right intercostal strain. On June 28, he hit three Pirates over 6+2⁄3 innings but allowed just one run, though that was all the scoring in a 1–0 loss to Pittsburgh. He struck out a career-high 12 batters over 8+2⁄3 innings on August 31 against the Houston Astros, though he took the loss in a 3–2 defeat. From July 19 through September 5, Wright hit a batter in 10 straight starts, the longest streak in the major leagues since 1970. Wright had a career-high 11 wins in 2001 and struck out over 100 batters (129) for the first time, posting an 11–12 record and a 4.90 ERA. His 20 hit batsmen tied Chan Ho Park for the league lead and set a Brewers record. After the season, on October 30, he had arthroscopic surgery to remove a bone spur from his right elbow. Wright fell to third in Milwaukee's rotation in 2002, preceded by Ben Sheets and Rubén Quevedo. He was placed on the disabled list with a right rotator cuff tear after his first start of the year on April 4; Wright did not return until May 24. On July 1, he allowed just three hits in a 2–0 shutout of the Pirates. Through August 30, he had a 5–13 record and a 5.35 ERA. ### St. Louis Cardinals On July 1, 2002, Wright was traded with cash to the St. Louis Cardinals for a player to be named later (Mike Matthews) and Chris Morris. Wright had a 2–0 record in four appearances (three starts) for the Cardinals, with a 4.80 ERA. In 23 games (22 starts) total in 2002, he had a 7–13 record and a 5.29 ERA. The Cardinals won the NL Central title and advanced to the NL Championship Series (NLCS), losing to the Giants, but Wright was not part of the playoff roster. In 2013, when Wright expressed his desire to make an appearance in the playoffs, he told reporters that his time with St. Louis "definitely does not count". After the season, he became a free agent. ### Journeyman On January 28, 2003, Wright signed with the Seattle Mariners. It was a one-year, minor league contract with a \$400,000 option if he made the majors. He spent most of spring training with them but was released on March 18, the last player cut prior to the regular season. He re-signed with the Brewers organization on March 26. After he appeared in seven games (four starts) with the Triple-A Indianapolis Indians, he was released on April 28. He was then signed by the Texas Rangers on May 7, and he made seven starts for the Triple-A Oklahoma RedHawks, where he was 2–1 with a 4.12 ERA. Texas released him on June 15, and he signed with the Kansas City Royals on June 20. He made 13 appearances (12 starts) with the Triple-A Omaha Royals and was 3–5 with a 3.64 ERA. The Royals called him up to the majors on September 6, and he pitched a complete game that day against the Anaheim Angels, though the team from California won 3–1. His next start, on September 13 against the Detroit Tigers, was a complete game shutout as the Royals beat the Tigers 7–0. With Kansas City, he was 1–2 with a 4.26 ERA in four starts. After the season, he became a free agent. Wright signed with the Cubs on December 29, 2003, but was released before the start of the 2004 season on March 27. He signed a minor league deal with the Royals on April 2 and made 18 starts in Omaha, where he was 8–6 with a 4.21 ERA. Wright made the Triple-A All-Star Game but was released on July 21. ### Colorado Rockies, second stint A day after being released by the Royals, Wright re-signed with the Rockies and was added to the starting rotation. Making his MLB season debut on July 24, he held the Arizona Diamondbacks to one run in five innings, earning his first victory since September 13 of the previous season. However, he won just one more game all season, holding the Giants to one run in seven innings on September 1 in a 4–1 triumph. He was 2–3 with a 4.12 ERA in 14 starts in 2004. After the 2004 season, Wright became a free agent, but he resigned with the Rockies on December 22, 2004. He spent most of the 2005 season in their rotation. From June 4 through 16, he threw 14+1⁄3 straight scoreless innings. After beating the Giants on August 2, Wright proceeded to lose his next five starts. After Wright posted a 6–16 record and a 5.71 ERA, the Rockies moved him to the bullpen at the end of August to make room for Zach Day and Sunny Kim in Colorado's rotation. "This could be the beginning of the second half of my career, and I would like it to be here," Wright said of the move. He was 8–16 with a 5.46 ERA in 34 appearances (27 starts) in 2005. Wright's 16 losses were topped only by Kip Wells's 18 in the NL. After the season, he became a free agent. ### San Francisco Giants Wright signed a minor league contract with the Giants on January 17, 2006. He was brought to spring training in 2006 as a non-roster invitee. Following a strong performance there, in which Wright pitched nine scoreless innings, the Giants promoted him to the major leagues as their No. 5 starter. Wright beat out Brad Hennessey for the job. On May 16, he allowed three runs in seven innings, earning the win against the Astros in a 14–3 triumph. The win was his first ever victory against Houston after 12 losses, the most by a starting pitcher to start his career against any team since Don Sutton lost his first 13 decisions against the Cubs from 1966 to 1969. On August 11, Giants' manager Felipe Alou announced that Hennessey would replace the struggling Wright in the rotation. At the time, Hennessey was 6–10 with a 5.18 ERA, but since May 22 his record had been 1–7 with a 6.40 ERA. Trouble locating his pitches and a flat sinkerball contributed to his struggles. Overall, he appeared in 34 games, making 21 starts in 2006 with a 6–10 record and 5.19 ERA. According to sportswriter Rich Draper, Wright "fell far short of expectations in 2006". However, he did lead NL pitchers in batting with a .261 average. On November 1, 2006, the Giants declined their option on Wright for the 2007 season, making him a free agent. ### Texas Rangers On January 25, 2007, the Texas Rangers signed Wright to a minor-league contract with an invitation to spring training. He competed with Kameron Loe and Bruce Chen for a spot in the starting rotation. Winning the fifth spot, Wright made one short start for the Rangers on April 10 before being placed on the 15-day disabled list with right shoulder inflammation. After four rehab starts, he was activated on June 15. "My arm strength is good. I'm ready to go and to get back out there," he said. He rejoined the rotation upon being activated on June 15, posting a 3–4 record and a 4.57 ERA through August 3. Long opposed to pitching exclusively in relief, Wright reluctantly moved to the bullpen during the 2007 season, starting just one game for the rest of the season. The transition would be permanent for him this time, as he would start just two more games for the rest of his career. In 20 games (nine starts), he had a 4–5 record and a 3.62 ERA, his finest to that point. Remaining with the Rangers in 2008, Wright pitched exclusively out of the bullpen, posting an 8–7 record and a 5.12 ERA. His 75 games pitched set a new franchise record and tied with Dennys Reyes for third in the AL, behind Matt Guerrier's and Francisco Rodríguez's 76. Wright also had the second-most wins of AL relievers and the third-most innings pitched (84+1⁄3). After the season, he became a free agent. ### Kansas City Royals On February 10, 2009, Wright signed a minor league contract with the Royals and was invited to spring training. He was the only non-roster invitee that year to be named to the team's Opening Day roster. He had a 1.66 ERA through May 16 and also pitched scoreless ball in seven games in a row from August 6 through 22. Wright struggled to hold inherited runners, however, allowing 22 of 47 to score. He was 3–5 with a 4.33 ERA in 65 games. After the season, he became a free agent. ### Cleveland Indians and Seattle Mariners On February 9, 2010, Wright signed a minor league contract with the Cleveland Indians with an invitation to spring training. He made the team and was 1–2 with a 5.48 ERA. On June 4, the Indians designated Wright for assignment. He was released six days later. Wright signed a minor league contract with the Oakland Athletics on June 16. He made 10 appearances with the Triple-A Sacramento River Cats, where he was 1–0 with a 9.00 ERA. On July 15, he opted out of his contract to sign with the Seattle Mariners, who added him to the major league roster. In 28 games for the Mariners, he had an 0–1 record and a 3.41 ERA. Over 46 games between Cleveland and Seattle, he had a 1–3 record and a 4.17 ERA. Following the 2010 season, Wright became a free agent, but he resigned with Seattle for 2011. After Wright held opponents scoreless until his 10th game of 2011, Stone wrote that he had "become an increasingly vital member of Seattle's bullpen". On July 5, he earned his first career save, throwing a scoreless 10th inning in a 4–2 victory over Oakland. The save came in his 500th game; only Frank Tanana took more games (530) to get his first save. From July 29 to the end of the year, he had a 1.37 ERA in 19 games. In 60 games, he was 2–3 with a 3.16 ERA. He became a free agent after the season. ### Los Angeles Dodgers, first stint On February 7, 2012, Wright signed a minor league contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers that contained a spring training invitation. He was officially added to the roster before the start of the season on March 27. Wright pitched better at Dodger Stadium than on the road, posting a 5–0 record and a 1.71 ERA at home versus an 0–3 record and a 5.50 ERA in away games. He allowed no runs in 15 of his last 17 games. In 66 games, he had a 5–3 record and 3.72 ERA. After the season, he became a free agent. ### Tampa Bay Rays On January 22, 2013, Wright signed a minor league contract with the Tampa Bay Rays. By this time, he was one of three players in the last three decades to play for at least 17 years and never make the playoffs. His contract was selected by the Rays on March 31. On September 1, with the Rays facing a predominantly left-handed Oakland lineup, Rays manager Joe Maddon elected to skip right-handed starter Roberto Hernández's start in favor of a bullpen game handled mostly by left-handers. Wright, making his first start since 2007, allowed one run in 1+2⁄3 innings and left with the game tied, but Oakland won 5–1. He finished the season with a 2–2 record in 66 appearances, and his 3.09 ERA was the lowest of his career. Wright finally reached the playoffs, as the Rays won a wild card berth and defeated the Indians in the AL Wild Card Game. He made two appearances in the AL Division Series (ALDS) against the Red Sox. In Game 1, he finished a game the Rays trailed 8–2, allowing four runs in the eighth inning of a 12–2 loss at Fenway Park. He relieved Jeremy Hellickson with no outs and the bases loaded in the second inning of Game 4, getting out of the inning with no runs scoring by striking out Jarrod Saltalamacchia and inducing Stephen Drew to hit into a double play. However, Tampa ultimately lost the game 3–1 and was eliminated from the playoffs. After the season, he became a free agent. ### Los Angeles Dodgers, second stint On December 24, 2013, the Dodgers announced that they had signed Wright to a one-year Major League contract, the first time since 2005 that he was guaranteed a spot on the roster coming into spring training. He pitched better in the first half of the season than the second half, posting a 3.50 ERA prior to the All-Star break and a 5.74 ERA thereafter. On September 21, he filled in for a start against the Cubs. Though he hoped to last five or six innings, he only pitched two. He allowed one run in an eventual 8–5 victory. Wright appeared in 61 games, posting a 5–4 record and a 4.35 ERA. The Dodgers won the NL West, and Wright was part of the playoff roster, though he did not pitch at all as Los Angeles was eliminated by the Cardinals in four games in the NLDS. After the season, he became a free agent. ### End of career and statistics On February 14, 2015, Wright signed a minor league contract with the Rangers. However, he was released on March 31 when he was unable to make the roster during spring training. He sat out the rest of the season, then signed a minor league contract with the Dodgers on February 24, 2016. Unable to make the Dodgers Opening Day roster, he announced his retirement on March 28, 2016. Wright pitched for 19 seasons in the major leagues. Of his 719 appearances, 248 were starts. He had a 97–130 record, a 4.81 ERA, 1,189 strikeouts, 978 walks, and 2,168 hits allowed in 2,036+2⁄3 innings. Although nearly 40 percent of his career was spent in the bullpen, Wright tied with Bert Blyleven for 17th all-time in most batters hit by pitches, with 155 each. After retiring, Wright worked for his agent for a few years before rejoining the Dodgers organization in 2020 as a special assistant. In 2021, Wright was hired as the pitching coach for the Triple-A Oklahoma City Dodgers. ## Pitching style Wright was a sinkerballer, throwing the pitch at 90–93 mph with an average speed of approximately 92 mph. He also threw a cut fastball at 88–90 mph and an occasional four-seamer in the low 90s. His main breaking ball was a sharp curveball which travelled around 77–81 mph. Wright had a tendency to get ground ball outs. Prior to the 2011 season, he threw a changeup; he stopped throwing it in 2011 and 2012 but brought it back about nine percent of the time in 2013. He threw a slider through 2007, bringing it back in 2010. Once he joined the Mariners in 2010, pitching coach Rick Adair encouraged him to lower his hands to waist-level before starting to throw, which generated a faster arm action. "I've learned to be more aggressive and attack the hitter a little more than I have in the past," he said in 2011. ## Personal life Wright and his wife, Marnie, have one daughter (Presley) and two sons (Jett and Kingston). Presley's middle name, Kile, is in reference to Darryl Kile, Wright's former teammate. "I followed that guy around like a puppy dog. He helped me more than anybody else could," said Wright, after Kile's untimely death in 2002. "He was a great person and a great friend." The Wrights currently live in Dallas, Texas. An Oklahoma native, the Oklahoma Sooners are his favorite college team; he wore the same gray "Oklahoma Sooners" shirt for many years during his career. ## See also - List of Major League Baseball career hit batsmen leaders
19,409,033	Lot No. 249	1,168,019,650	Short story by Arthur Conan Doyle	[ "1892 short stories", "Ancient Egypt in the Western imagination", "Fantasy short stories", "Fiction about mummies", "Fiction set in 1884", "Gothic short stories", "Horror short stories", "Imperialism", "Masculinity", "Mystery short stories", "Short stories adapted into films", "Short stories by Arthur Conan Doyle", "Weird fiction", "Works originally published in Harper's Magazine" ]	"Lot No. 249" is a Gothic horror short story by British writer Arthur Conan Doyle, first published in Harper's Magazine in 1892. The story tells of a University of Oxford athlete named Abercrombie Smith who notices a strange series of events surrounding Edward Bellingham, an Egyptology student who owns many ancient Egyptian artefacts, including a mummy. After seeing his mummy disappear and reappear, and two instances of Bellingham's enemies getting attacked, Smith concludes that Bellingham is reanimating his mummy. Smith confronts Bellingham, who denies this is the case; the next day, Smith is attacked by the mummy and escapes. Smith then forces Bellingham to destroy his mummy and the associated artefacts at gunpoint. Written during a period of great European interest in Egyptian culture known as Egyptomania, "Lot No. 249" was inspired by Doyle's interests in the supernatural, crime and Egyptology. Though reanimated mummies had previously appeared in English literature, Doyle's story was the first to portray one as dangerous. The story has been widely anthologised and received positive reviews from critics, including praise from authors H. P. Lovecraft and Anne Rice. Critics have compared the story to the writings of Edgar Allan Poe and H. Rider Haggard and interpreted it as containing themes of imperialism and masculinity. "Lot No. 249" has been adapted for film and television, and has significantly influenced subsequent media that depicts mummies, as well as other works of horror fiction. ## Synopsis In 1884, Abercrombie Smith, an athlete and medical student at the University of Oxford, is called to the rooms of his neighbour and fellow student Edward Bellingham. Bellingham, a fanatical Egyptology student who owns many ancient Egyptian artefacts, has fainted from a severe shock. As Smith uses his medical skills to revive Bellingham, Bellingham's friend William Monkhouse Lee (to whose sister Bellingham is engaged) explains that Bellingham has a curious obsession with an Egyptian mummy that he purchased from an auction sale. Bellingham keeps the mummy in his room, and has named it "Lot 249," as those were the words the auctioneers put on its case. Over the next few weeks, Smith is frequently disturbed by the sound of mumbling and muttering from Bellingham's room. The building's caretaker, Thomas Styles, confides in Smith that he has heard something walking around Bellingham's room while Bellingham is out. Shortly afterwards, a student called Long Norton, against whom Bellingham bears a long-standing grudge, is violently attacked by a mysterious and seemingly inhuman figure. Suspecting Bellingham is connected with the assault, Smith vows to avoid his neighbour entirely. Not long afterwards, Monkhouse Lee issues a warning to Smith against Bellingham. He explains that he has called off his sister's engagement to Bellingham, after Bellingham confided in him a terrible secret about which he has sworn to keep silent. Later, when passing Bellingham's room, Smith witnesses the mummy seemingly vanish and inexplicably reappear in its sarcophagus. After discovering that Lee has been attacked in a similar manner to Norton, Smith concludes that Bellingham has brought the mummy to life and is sending it to attack people whom he dislikes. Smith confronts Bellingham angrily about the attack on Lee, but Bellingham denies any involvement. The following evening, Smith is pursued by the mummy while strolling along a dark country path. Fleeing in terror, he narrowly escapes the creature. He realises that his own life is now in danger and he must take action to stop Bellingham's evil. The next day Smith enters Bellingham's room and forces him at gunpoint to burn the mummy and all items associated with its animation. Once everything has been destroyed, Smith vows to return if Bellingham attempts any such activity again. Bellingham quits the university immediately and flees to Sudan. ## Background During the nineteenth-century, Napoleon's Egyptian campaign (1798–1801), combined with the translation of the Rosetta Stone, led many Europeans to become fascinated with Egyptian art, architecture, science and religion, a fascination that became known as Egyptomania. Egyptomania caused to mummies becoming an "enduring theme in Western fiction". In his Horror Literature through History: An Encyclopedia of the Stories that Speak to Our Deepest Fears: Volume 1, Matt Cardin contextualises "Lot No. 249" as an example of Egyptomania. In the early 1880s, the mummy of Ramses II, widely believed to be the Pharaoh of the Exodus, was discovered, and the British occupied Egypt with their military. These two events sparked a late Victorian era "fascination with the Egyptian undead," popularised by H. Rider Haggard's novel Cleopatra (1889). Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was motivated to write "Lot No. 249" due to his interest in the supernatural, crime, and Egyptology. "Lot. No. 249" was not the first work of English literature to include a reanimated mummy; that distinction goes to Jane Webb's The Mummy! (1827), a science fiction novel heavily influenced by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818). Other works of literature about mummies that predate "Lot No. 249" are "Some Words with a Mummy" (1845), a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, and Doyle's own short story "The Ring of Thoth" (1890). What separates "Lot No. 249" from previous literary depictions of reanimated mummies was that Doyle portrayed its mummy as dangerous. Richard Bleiler writes in Mummies around the World: An Encyclopedia of Mummies in History, Religion and Popular Culture that Doyle drew from "contemporary archaeological discoveries in Egypt" while writing the story, but not from any literary model. However, Rafe McGregor writes that "Lot No. 249" has an atmosphere reminiscent of Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), a story which Doyle loved. McGregor also hypothesises that the comparison of the mummy to an ape in "Lot No. 249" could be a direct reference to Poe's story. Matt Cardin, however, views "Lot No. 249" as simply using a "standard" mystery structure. Roger Luckhurst identifies Doyle's story as a work of Gothic fiction which resurrects earlier Gothic tropes of "revenge, inheritance, and the consequences of possession". The story was first published in Harper's Magazine in September 1892 and was included in Doyle's medical-themed anthology Round the Red Lamp (1894). ## Themes ### Imperialism Near the end of the nineteenth-century, many British people felt that Britain was in decline due to a belief that the world was morally and culturally degenerating even as the British Empire expanded. This fear, captured in Max Nordau's influential book Degeneration (1892), was aided by the fact that Britain faced economic threats from Europe and the United States. These circumstances led to a sub-genre of Gothic fiction that Emily Adler refers to as the "Imperial Gothic," which is concerned with British fears of being invaded by foreign cultures. Adler cites "Lot. No. 249" and Rider Haggard's novels King Solomon's Mines (1885) and She: A History of Adventure (1887) as examples of this sub-genre. Deaglán Ó Donghaile, however, sees Doyle's story as a critique of imperialism. In Blasted Literature, he writes that "The story calls into question to what extent colonialism, with its absorption of the cultures of the colonised, destabilises the perspective of the imperial, metropolitan subject position. While the process of imperial assimilation is symbolised by the private museum Bellingham keeps in his rooms...it seems in the end that it is the mummy and not he who is in control." Ó Donghaile further argues that the xenophobic portrayal of Egypt in the story actually represents the contemporary threat of Irish political violence against the British. ### Masculinity Rafe McGregor notes that Abercrombie Smith is a stereotypical "image of a man's man that Doyle admired, and tried to project of himself" and that many Doyle stories, particularly his works of weird fiction, lack such characters. In Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature 1870–1914, Bradley Deane writes that the mummy from "Lot No. 249" is one of the first fictional mummies to be presented as a "masculine competitor". Deane opines that some earlier works of British popular literature, like She, characterised the British as masculine and their enemies as feminine; he feels that Doyle subverted this expectation by making the mummy a "male, mindless but strong and swift [figure] who threatens to defeat a young Oxford athlete in a terrifying footrace." Deane argues that the lack of a masculine/feminine distinction between Smith and the mummy "suggests a darker fragmentation of identity and an emasculating reversal of the imperial hierarchy." ## Critical reception Rudyard Kipling said that the short story gave him his first nightmare in years. In his essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature" (1927), H. P. Lovecraft writes that: "Doyle now and then struck a powerfully spectral note, as in 'The Captain of the Pole-Star''', a tale of arctic ghostliness, and 'Lot No. 249', where the reanimated mummy theme is used with more than ordinary skill." Anne Rice called the story "great". David Stuart Davies enjoyed the subtlety of Doyle's prose and the tale's "growing sense of horror and unreality," adding that Doyle "carried on the tradition of the great ghost story writers... by allowing the reader's own imagination to enhance the misty picture painted by the writer." Rafe McGregor writes in The Conan Doyle Weirdbook that "Lot No. 249" "remains a highly entertaining – not to mention spinetingling – weird tale." McGregor adds that, thanks to "Lot No. 249" and his other contributions to the genre, Doyle should be seen as a master of weird fiction. Andrew Barger said that: "Not only does this excellent mummy story need more visibility, this Doyle spinetingler is one of the best horror short stories for the last half of the nineteenth century." In a mixed review, Richard Bleiler praises the tale's "narrative vigor" and "brisk" pace. However, he also feels that it is a minor work of Victorian literature remembered primarily due to its author and subject matter, and is neither Doyle's best work nor the best work of fiction involving reanimated mummies. ## Adaptations The story is a possible influence for the lost short film Robbing Cleopatra's Tomb (1899). The tale was adapted into a 1967 television production for the BBC program Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, as well as the lead segment from Tales from the Darkside: The Movie (1990). The Tales from the Darkside segment contains slapstick and slasher film elements. It depicts Bellingham (played by Steve Buscemi) as a student who funds his studies through antique dealing and the mummy (played by Mike Deak, the film's makeup artist) "as an instrument of social justice, defending the poor-but-able student body against the exploitative, leisured classes, who are corrupting the academic system by plagiarism." According to Mark Browning's Stephen King on the Big Screen, the "mummy horror sub-genre" was "largely played out" by the time the film was made. ## Legacy "Lot No. 249" has been widely anthologized, and its titular mummy has become an icon of horror. Rafe McGregor writes in The Conan Doyle Weirdbook that "Lot No. 249" is "One of the most significant [stories] in the history of supernatural fiction [for] being the first to depict a reanimated mummy as a sinister, dangerous creature." It was also the first work of fiction to feature a modern man reviving a mummy with ancient Egyptian texts as opposed to electricity. Emily Adler notes that Doyle's story predates Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) and Richard Marsh's The Beetle (1897) in its portrayal of foreign monsters invading Britain. McGregor identifies the short story as a significant influence on other mummy-related media, such as Stoker's novel The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903) and the Boris Karloff film The Mummy (1932), as well as zombie fiction. Bradley Deane feels that the masculinity of Kharis from The Mummy franchise as played by Lon Chaney Jr. was inspired by Doyle's story, while Matthew Coniam feels that Hammer Film Productions' The Mummy (1959) draws from the atmosphere of "Lot No. 249". Anne Rice cited "Lot No. 249 and "The Ring of Thoth" as inspirations for her novel, The Mummy, or Ramses the Damned'' (1989), which she dedicated to Doyle. ## See also - Arthur Conan Doyle bibliography
717,757	Stikine River	1,172,448,121	River in British Columbia and Alaska	[ "International rivers of North America", "Rivers of Alaska", "Rivers of British Columbia", "Rivers of Wrangell, Alaska", "Rivers of the Boundary Ranges", "Stikine Country", "Stikine River", "Tlingit" ]	The Stikine River is a major river in northern British Columbia (BC), Canada and southeastern Alaska in the United States. It drains a large, remote upland area known as the Stikine Country east of the Coast Mountains. Flowing west and south for 610 kilometres (379 mi), it empties into various straits of the Inside Passage near Wrangell, Alaska. About 90 percent of the river's length and 95 percent of its drainage basin are in Canada. Considered one of the last truly wild large rivers in BC, the Stikine flows through a variety of landscapes including boreal forest, steep canyons and wide glacial valleys. Known as the "fastest-flowing navigable river in North America," the Stikine forms a natural waterway from northern interior British Columbia to the Pacific coast. The river has been used for millennia by indigenous peoples including the Tlingit and Tahltan for fishing, hunting and trade. It provided access for fur traders and prospectors during the 1800s and remained an important transportation route until the 1970s, when roads were finally opened to the northern interior. However, most of the Stikine basin remains wilderness, with only a few small settlements; only two bridges, one disused, cross the river along its entire length. The river's salmon run supports large commercial and subsistence fisheries, and its extensive estuary and delta provide habitat for numerous fish and migratory bird species. Despite its isolation, the Stikine is a destination for recreational activities including boating, hunting and fishing. The river's Grand Canyon, known for its dangerous rapids, has been called the "K2 of white-water challenges" and has only been run by a handful of expert kayakers. During the latter part of the 20th century, numerous large parks and protected areas were established in the Stikine basin, and by the beginning of the 21st century some 60 percent of the basin was under some form of conservation management. However, in recent decades the water quality and natural beauty of the Stikine have been threatened by new energy, transport and mining developments in northern BC. ## Names The river was known to the Tlingit as Shtax'heen, "bitter river" or "muddy river", in reference to its murky glacial waters. The Stikine group of Tlingit, Shtaxʼhéen Ḵwáan, takes its name from the river. The Tahltan called the river Spatsizi, "red goat", referring to the mountain goats whose white coats were often colored by the red earth of the region. One tributary of the upper Stikine retains the name of Spatsizi River. Another Tahltan name for the river was Tudessa, "long river", from which the Tudenekoten clan of Tahltan took its name. Russian fur traders called the river ryka Stahkin (река Стакин), changed to Stikine by the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey in 1869 after the Alaska Purchase. Other 19th century names for the river include "St. Francis River" and "Pelly's River". A historic alternative spelling was Stickeen, reflected in the short-lived British Stickeen Territories. ## Geography The Stikine River basin covers about 50,900 km<sup>2</sup> (19,700 sq mi) in the Stikine Region and Regional District of Kitimat–Stikine, BC, with a small portion in the City and Borough of Wrangell, Alaska. Most of the Stikine basin corresponds with the southern half of the Stikine Plateau, a vast and mostly forested region of dissected plateaus, rolling hills and narrow valleys in northwest BC. The Stikine Plateau is bordered on the east by the Cassiar Mountains and Omineca Mountains and on the south by the Stikine Ranges of the Skeena Mountains. All three ranges are part of BC's Interior Mountains. To the west are the Boundary Ranges of the Coast Mountains, which run along the U.S.–Canada border. After collecting runoff from the Stikine Plateau, the Stikine River slices west through the Coast Mountains, emptying into the Inside Passage roughly in the middle of the Alexander Archipelago, which shelters Inside Passage waterways from the Pacific Ocean. The extensively glaciated Coast Mountains are the tallest mountains in the Stikine basin, with the highest point being Mount Ratz, 3,136 m (10,289 ft) above sea level. The highest points of the Stikine Plateau are generally around 1,500 to 2,000 m (4,900 to 6,600 ft). The Cassiar and Omineca Mountains, rising 2,300 to 2,600 m (7,500 to 8,500 ft), are also rugged but have less relief than the Coast Mountains due to their higher base elevation. The Tahltan Highland is located between the Coast Mountains and the Stikine Plateau. Drainage basins adjacent to the Stikine are the Taku River to the northwest, the Dease, Kechika and Finlay Rivers (all part of the greater Mackenzie River system) to the north and east, and the Skeena, Nass and Unuk Rivers to the south. The Stikine basin is very sparsely populated; in 2005, the entire basin was home to about 1,300 people. The only established communities are Iskut, Telegraph Creek and Bob Quinn Lake, all in British Columbia. Dease Lake is located just outside the northern edge of the basin, near the Tanzilla River. The larger towns of Wrangell (population 2,127) and Petersburg, Alaska (3,398) are located close to the mouth of the river, but are not within the drainage basin. Forests cover about 50 percent of the basin, and most of the remainder is covered by treeless tundra or permanent ice and snow. About 73 percent of the basin in BC is considered to be in a wilderness or semi-wilderness condition. Due to the rain shadow effect of the Coast Mountains, the interior Stikine basin has a much drier and more variable climate than the coast. Wrangell experiences a humid continental climate, with monthly average temperatures ranging from a low of 2.6 °C (36.7 °F) in January to 18.0 °C (64.4 °F) in July. The average annual precipitation is 2,070 mm (81 in). Dease Lake, about 50 kilometres (31 mi) northeast of Telegraph Creek, experiences a subarctic climate with monthly average temperatures ranging from −16.1 °C (3.0 °F) in January to 13.0 °C (55.4 °F) in June, and an average annual precipitation of just 445.3 mm (17.53 in). In the interior, freezing temperatures are observed in six months of the year. ### Course The headwaters of the Stikine are in the Spatsizi Plateau, the southeasternmost sub-plateau of the Stikine Plateau. Originating on Mount Umbach 1,830 metres (6,000 ft) above sea level in the Spatsizi Plateau Wilderness Provincial Park, it flows northeast through a chain of small lakes, including Tuaton and Laslui Lakes, then turns north, following a meandering course along the western foothills of the Omineca Mountains and the Cassiar Mountains. The river enters Stikine River Provincial Park, turning west at the confluence with the Chukachida River, then northwest at the confluence with the Spatsizi River. At the confluence with the Pitman River, it turns due west again, now flowing along the south side of the Three Sisters Range, then receives the Klappan River from the south. North of Iskut, it is crossed by BC Highway 37 (Cassiar Highway), the only road bridge across the Stikine. Below Highway 37, the river enters the Grand Canyon of the Stikine, a 300-metre (980 ft) deep canyon cutting between the Tanzilla and Klastline Plateaus, both sub-plateaus of the Stikine Plateau. Here, it flows much more swiftly, falling 460 m (1,510 ft) in 90 km (56 mi) between Highway 37 and Telegraph Creek. At one point the channel narrows from 200 m (660 ft) wide to just 2 m (6.6 ft) wide, a place known as the "Tanzilla Slot", where it squeezes between sheer walls of volcanic rock. After receiving the Tuya and Tahltan Rivers from the north it flows through Mount Edziza Provincial Park, home to the dormant stratovolcano Mount Edziza, the central feature of the Mount Edziza volcanic complex. Just downstream is Telegraph Creek, the only permanent settlement on the river. Telegraph Creek, 269 km (167 mi) upstream of the Stikine's mouth, is considered the head of navigation on the Stikine. Turning south, the Stikine flows through the Tahltan Highland along the eastern side of the Coast Mountains, where it receives numerous tributaries including the Chutine and Porcupine Rivers. The gradient flattens considerably compared to the upper course, and after the Chutine confluence it becomes wide and braided. Its course takes it around the east and south sides of the massive Stikine Icecap, the source of numerous glaciers that descend to the valley floor. John Muir, who visited the Stikine country in 1879, described the lower Stikine as "a Yosemite 100 miles long" due to its hundreds of glaciers and other glacially formed features. The Stikine is joined by its largest tributary, the Iskut River, from the east before passing the former border station of Stikine, BC where it enters Alaska. Turning west, the river cuts through the Coast Mountains for 64 km (40 mi) to the sea. In Alaska, the channel gradient is very low, with tidal influences felt up to 32 km (20 mi) upstream from the mouth. The mouth of the Stikine forms a large delta opposite Mitkof Island about 10 km (6.2 mi) north of Wrangell and 30 km (19 mi) southeast of Petersburg. The main channel empties into the Eastern Passage at the head of Sumner Strait and Stikine Strait, while the North Arm splits off from the main channel and flows into Frederick Sound. King Slough splits southwest from the North Arm and enters Dry Strait, which connects the north end of Eastern Passage to Frederick Sound. Farm Island and Dry Island are situated between the north and main channels, with King Slough dividing the two. Due to sediment deposits from the Stikine River delta, Dry Strait is often dry at low tide and thus unsuitable for most ships using the Inside Passage. Marine traffic typically uses the Wrangell Narrows or the Chatham Strait further west. ### Discharge By flow volume, the Stikine is the largest river in southeast Alaska and the fifth largest river in BC. Flows of the Stikine River are affected by three main sources of runoff: snowmelt from the Stikine Plateau (peaking late spring or early summer), glacier melt from the Coast Mountains (peaking late summer), and rainfall from coastal Pacific storms (peaking autumn). The U.S. Geological Survey has operated a stream gage near the mouth of the river from 1976 to the present. The average annual discharge is 1,576 m<sup>3</sup>/s (55,700 cu ft/s) with a monthly maximum of 3,823 m<sup>3</sup>/s (135,000 cu ft/s) in June, and a minimum of 251 m<sup>3</sup>/s (8,900 cu ft/s) in February. The highest annual mean was 2,063 m<sup>3</sup>/s (72,900 cu ft/s) in 1981, and the lowest was 1,192 m<sup>3</sup>/s (42,100 cu ft/s) in 1978. At Telegraph Creek, the average annual discharge is 405 m<sup>3</sup>/s (14,300 cu ft/s). The lower Stikine near the international border is generally frozen from October/November to April/May, while at Telegraph Creek, freezing occurs about a week earlier and break-up occurs one to three weeks later. ## Geology The Stikine basin includes several major terranes or crustal fragments that accreted to the western North American continent starting from about 180 million years ago. The Stikine Plateau roughly corresponds with the northern part of the Stikine Terrane ("Stikinia"), part of the larger Intermontane Belt complex. The Cassiar and Omineca Mountains to the east are formed from granite batholith remnants of an ancient continental volcanic arc (the Omineca Arc) which arose as a result of subduction following Stikinia's collision with the North American continent. The Coast Mountains, to the west, are formed in the same manner by the later collision of the Insular Belt terrane with the Intermontane terrane. Subduction forces created the granite batholith of the Coast Range volcanic arc, which was eventually uplifted to form the contemporary Coast Mountains between the Stikine Plateau and the Pacific coast. Despite the Coast Mountains being higher in elevation than the interior plateaus and ranges, the Stikine flows west cutting through them to reach the Pacific. Several nearby rivers including the Copper, Alsek and Taku Rivers do the same, suggesting that these river systems had been established along the west coast of the North American continent prior to the development of the Coast Range Arc. During the uplift of the Coast Mountains, the rivers maintained their courses as antecedent streams. The ancestral Stikine River may be as much as 50 million years old, with the present uplift of the Coast Mountains starting about 7 million years ago. Beginning about 2.5 million years ago in the Pleistocene, much of the interior Stikine basin was covered by successive Ice Age glaciations. During interglacial periods, the continental ice sheet retreated northward but remnant Coast Mountain glaciers blocked the outlet of the Stikine River, causing glacier melt to back up the river valley and create Glacial Lake Stikine. The lake filled and emptied numerous times, leaving shoreline deposits high on nearby mountainsides. Glaciers and ice sheets still exist in the Stikine basin today, but to a much more limited extent. The Stikine Icecap, located in the Coast Mountains between the Stikine and Taku Rivers and the source of numerous glaciers descending to the Stikine valley, is one of the largest. Glacial activity strongly affects the geomorphology of the lower Stikine River. Due in large part to glacial silt or rock flour, the Stikine carries a heavy sediment load – some 16 million tonnes per year – continually expanding the large delta at the mouth of the river. In August 1979, a glacial lake outburst flood occurred at the Flood Glacier, releasing 150 million cubic metres (120,000 acre⋅ft) of water into the Stikine River, causing minor flooding as far as the mouth of the river. The Stikine's Grand Canyon likely formed after one such glacial period. Previously, the Stikine may have turned south around the present-day Klappan River confluence, and flowed down the valley of what is now the Iskut River. The river's former course may have been blocked by glaciers and it was forced to cut a new path west towards present-day Telegraph Creek. Another theory is that lava flows from the Mount Edziza volcanic complex were responsible for diverting the Stikine to its new course. ## History and culture ### First peoples The Stikine River creates one of the only natural passages through the Coast Mountains, and for thousands of years it has been used as a trade route by indigenous peoples. The river has great cultural significance for indigenous peoples; the adjacent headwaters of the Stikine, Skeena River and Nass Rivers in the Klappan Range are known to the Tahltan as Klabona, the Sacred Headwaters. The lower Stikine and Iskut rivers are home to "a high number of aboriginal cultural heritage sites, including old villages, legend sites and traditional fishing areas." Archeological sites in southeast Alaska suggest that the first humans arrived in this region about 10,000 years ago, around the end of the last glaciation, when ice dams that had previously blocked the Stikine were receding. According to Tlingit legend, their ancestors lived in the interior thousands of years ago and migrated to the coast via the Stikine River. However, a glacier (perhaps today's Great Glacier) blocked their passage down the river. Tribal elders explored a tunnel through which the river flowed under the glacier, expecting not to return from this dangerous mission. To their surprise they discovered a way through, and their people followed to settle in southeast Alaska. Similar stories are told regarding the other rivers (Copper, Alsek and Taku) that slice through the Coast Mountains. The Pacific coastal part of the Stikine basin is in the traditional lands of the Shtax'héen Kwáan (Stikine band of Tlingit). Formed by the unification of several smaller clans under the hereditary lineage of Chief Shakes, they controlled a large area around the mouth of the Stikine and extending well upriver. The original Shtax'héen Kwáan territory, estimated at 20,000 km<sup>2</sup> (7,700 sq mi), was the largest of any Tlingit group. The lands of the Tahltan people extended over much of the interior Stikine Plateau, including the entirety of the inland Stikine basin. Tahltan and Tlingit lands met around the confluence of the Stikine and Iskut rivers. The navigable section of Stikine between the Grand Canyon and the Iskut River was shared by the Tlingit and Tahltan on a seasonal basis. In summer, Tlingit would travel up the river to dry salmon and berries in the dry interior climate. During winter the Tahltan had exclusive use of this section, which they utilized for hunting and trapping. In the area around present-day Glenora, the Tlingit claimed use of tributaries while the Tahltan held rights to the main stem. The Tlingit also had exclusive use of certain berry patches, which were not so abundant on the coast. The Tlingit, traveling in large dugout canoes up to 18 metres (59 ft) in length, dominated river commerce on the Stikine. They also transported goods from other coastal tribes including the Haida and Tsimshian into the interior, where they traded with the Tahltan. The primary trading location was at the confluence of the Stikine and Tahltan rivers. Most of the Tahltan clans visited this place every year to fish and trade. From the coast, goods including eulachon, salmon oil, shells, woven baskets and blankets, as well as slaves obtained by the militaristic Haida, were ferried to the interior and exchanged for furs, caribou and moose hides, babiche, and obsidian knives and arrowheads (the latter mined from volcanic deposits around Mount Edidza). The Tahltan in turn traded coastal goods with the Kaska and Sekani further inland. ### Fur trade Captain George Vancouver mapped the Stikine delta in 1793 during the Vancouver Expedition, but did not realize that the river extended into the interior. In 1799, Captain Rowan in the sloop Eliza reached the Stikine delta and was the first European to record the name "Stikine". In 1799 the Russian-American Company was chartered to establish new Russian settlements in North America and was granted a monopoly on the maritime fur trade in what was then Russian Alaska. The area included the mouth of the Stikine River, which became a key route for transporting furs from the interior. During the 1800s-1860s the Tlingit controlled trade on the river, transporting Western goods upstream to trade for furs from the Tahltan. At the same time, the British Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) was attempting to extend its influence on the fur trade to the Pacific Coast, after Samuel Black explored northern BC in 1824 and brought news that the Russians were trading with the Tlingit for furs. The HBC also attempted to seize control of the Stikine fur trade from the coast, sending a ship, Dryad, to establish a trading post at the mouth of the river. However, they were beaten by the Russians who in 1834 built Redoubt St. Dionysius in what is now Wrangell, Alaska. In 1838, HBC trader Robert Campbell reached the upper Stikine River and became the first white man to make contact with the Tahltans. By doing so, Campbell had established the final link of a route connecting the Pacific and Atlantic fur trades, stretching 5,000 km (3,100 mi) across northern Canada. In 1839, the HBC leased rights to the Stikine fur trade from the Russians, and took control of Redoubt St. Dionysius, renaming it Fort Stikine. The Tlingit were upset with the HBC in part due to Campbell's expedition the previous year, in which he had attempted to establish a trading post at Dease Lake. This was seen as an attempt to break the monopoly the Tlingit held on furs from the interior. The HBC also reduced the price they were willing to pay for furs, further worsening relations with the Tlingit. In 1842 the Tlingit besieged Fort Stikine, and were close to destroying it before the arrival of British and Russian reinforcements. After continued tense relations led to Tlingit attacks in 1846–47, the HBC abandoned the fort in 1849, though they continued to trade in the Stikine River area via ships. As trading with Westerners increased, the regional balance of power shifted towards the Tlingit, and the Tahltan became more culturally integrated with their coastal neighbors. Intermarriage became increasingly common, Tlingit was adopted as the official language of trade, and Tlingit customs such as potlatch made their way into the interior. Seeking more furs to trade, the Tahltan also expanded their territory beyond the Stikine River basin into the upper Nass and Taku Rivers, leading to conflicts with neighboring tribes. In the 1830s smallpox, likely introduced via Russian ships and spread up the Stikine by Tlingit traders, killed more than half the Tahltan population. Over the next few decades, repeated waves of smallpox devastated Tlingit and Tahltan populations. At the beginning of the summer 1862 epidemic, numerous Tlingit were working or trading in Victoria, BC when the first cases were discovered. To prevent the spread of disease among the white population, the Tlingit were forced to return to their homelands in southeast Alaska, bringing smallpox with them. Smallpox ravaged the coast over the 1862 summer, killing some 60 percent of the Stikine Tlingit. ### Gold rush period Alexander "Buck" Choquette discovered gold on the lower Stikine in 1861, sparking the brief Stikine Gold Rush. More than 800 men departed from Victoria to the Stikine River, where they traveled into the interior on steamboats. The large influx of miners into the Stikine country, along with the businesses that supplied them with provisions, brought an end to Tlingit control of trade on the Stikine. Although not much gold was found on the Stikine, the Stickeen Territories were established to administer the region, and soon incorporated into the Colony of British Columbia. Prospectors continued to push deeper into the Stikine country over the next few years. In light of this and declining profits from the fur trade, Russia feared it would lose control of its North American colonies to Great Britain, and sold Alaska to the United States in 1867. The U.S. Army occupied Fort Stikine in 1868, renaming it Fort Wrangel. Military force was used to assert control over the Tlingit, preventing them from interfering with settlers, prospectors and traders headed to the interior. In 1866 the Western Union Telegraph Company sought to build a telegraph line connecting North America and Europe, crossing the Bering Strait and Siberia. In order to support construction through the BC interior, large bales of wire were shipped via steamboat to the Stikine's head of navigation, which became known as Telegraph Creek. After the completion of the transatlantic telegraph cable in 1867 the project was abandoned, though the name remained. At that point the telegraph had been completed as far north as Hazelton, BC. The section from Quesnel to Hazelton was abandoned and fell into disrepair. Telegraph service was eventually extended to Telegraph Creek and onward to Dawson City, Yukon in 1899, closely following the route laid out three decades before. In 1871, the US and a newly independent Canada signed a treaty guaranteeing free navigation on the Stikine through American territory. The treaty still applies to Canada's use of the river, even though the river is no longer used for commercial shipping. In 1874, gold was discovered near Dease Lake. The Cassiar Gold Rush, lasting until 1880, saw hundreds of miners traveling deep into Tahltan lands and a resurgence in riverboat traffic. Although many Tahltans found employment as packers or hunters during the gold rush period, there were also frequent conflicts due to miners encroaching on their land, while disease continued to reduce Tahltan numbers. In order to protect their culture, several Tahltan clans built a communal village, Tahltan, at the confluence of the Stikine and Tahltan rivers. This village was inhabited until 1920, when its remaining residents moved to Telegraph Creek. In the late 1890s the Klondike Gold Rush brought even more people to the area. Due to being considered international waters, the Stikine was marketed as the "All-Canadian" route to the Yukon, allowing travelers to avoid customs duties at the Alaska border. In 1897–98 more than three thousand miners passed through the Stikine, many in such a hurry that they embarked in winter and traveled by sled up the frozen river. They camped at Telegraph Creek or Glenora (the head of low water navigation) before continuing overland north to the Yukon. In its promotion of the route, the Canadian government promised a "first-class wagon road" to be built from Telegraph Creek to Teslin Lake, where miners could board boats for the journey down the Yukon River. However, the construction was a fiasco due to delays and engineering challenges, and miners found difficult, muddy conditions waiting for them. By 1900 the gold rush was over, and the boomtowns of the Stikine quickly faded. Glenora was abandoned while Telegraph Creek remained as a small village. ### 20th century The Stikine remained the primary route to interior northern BC well into the twentieth century. After the end of the Klondike gold rush, riverboats continued to operate on the Stikine, carrying oil, machinery and food upriver and returning with furs and ore, in addition to ferrying passengers. Goods were unloaded at Telegraph Creek and transported by vehicle or pack train to remote inland communities. From the 1930s to the 1960s the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was responsible for clearing the navigation channel along the Alaska reach, which is often clogged with snags and driftwood. The shallow channels of the Stikine delta were another hazard to shipping, with boats occasionally stranding at low tide. One of the last boats to operate regularly on the Stikine was the Judith Ann, which plied the river between 1950 and 1970. In the 1960s the Cassiar Highway was extended from the Alaska Highway to Dease Lake and Telegraph Creek, and the Stikine gradually faded in importance as a commercial waterway. Commercial boat traffic on the Stikine had mostly ceased by 1972. Another effort to develop the Stikine country and beyond was the BC government's effort to build a railroad to northwest BC starting in the 1950s. The "Pacific Northern Railway" (PNR) was intended to open up the mineral and timber resources of the area and was ultimately proposed to reach Alaska via the Yukon. The proposal died in 1964 due to increasingly poor economic justifications. However, a second attempt was made in the 1970s when BC Rail began constructing the "Dease Lake Extension" from Fort St. James towards the asbestos mines at Cassiar, BC. Construction was cancelled in 1977 as the project went over budget and global prices for copper and asbestos (the main commodities to be hauled by the railway) declined. At that point, 661 kilometres (411 mi) of railroad grade had been completed to Dease Lake, but track had only been laid as far as Jackson, well short of the Stikine basin. The abandoned railroad grade still stretches across the Stikine basin today, following portions of the Klappan, Stikine and Tanzilla Rivers. It crosses the Stikine near the Klappan confluence on a steel bridge, which was completed at a cost of \$3 million only a few months before the entire project was cancelled. This is the only bridge across the river other than the Highway 37 bridge. In the 1980s BC Hydro proposed the construction of two hydroelectric dams on the Stikine River and three more on the Stikine's tributary, the Iskut River. The dams were projected to add 2,800 megawatts of capacity to the electric grid. The Stikine dams, 270 metres (890 ft) and 193 metres (633 ft) high, would have flooded the entire Grand Canyon stretch of the river. The proposal was met with outrage from the general public, the Tahltan tribe, and conservation groups. Two environmental organizations, Friends of the Stikine and Residents for a Free-Flowing Stikine, were formed in direct response to the proposal. BC Hydro camps and survey sites experienced arson and sabotage. In 1983, BC Hydro temporarily postponed the dam projects, citing rising costs, in particular the immense cost just to build transmission lines to the remote Stikine. In 2000 the Tahltan negotiated a management plan with the BC government, which protected parts of the Stikine River including the Grand Canyon from future hydroelectric development. The Grand Canyon, long considered impassable by boat, was first attempted by American kayaker Rob Lesser and several others in 1981. In 1985 Lesser returned with a larger group in addition to a National Geographic film crew who documented the descent – the first successful run through the entire canyon. In 1992 Doug Ammons completed the first solo descent of the canyon. As of 2016, fewer than 40 paddlers have run the canyon, which is rated Class V+ whitewater, the most difficult possible. A number of boaters have died attempting the run. Because of its danger and difficulty it has earned a reputation as the "K2 of white-water challenges." In 1995 the Stikine was one of seven initial rivers included in the BC Heritage Rivers system. In 1998, it was nominated for the Canadian Heritage Rivers System. ## Biota The Stikine supports runs of five species of native salmon as well as steelhead trout. Chinook salmon (king), running May–July, primarily spawn in the Tahltan, Iskut and Chutine tributaries. Sockeye (red) follow in mid-summer; although they run up many tributaries their largest spawning grounds are at Tahltan Lake, which accounts for 30–60 percent of the total. Pink and chum (dog) salmon spawn in August, primarily in the main Stikine below the Tahltan River; compared to the other species, these runs are relatively small. Coho (silver) spawn in September–October, primarily in the Iskut River, with smaller numbers in the main Stikine. Steelhead spawn in the main Stikine in both spring and fall runs. The Stikine basin is also home to several species of freshwater fish, including the coastal cutthroat, lake, rainbow and Dolly Varden trout, grayling, mountain whitefish and longnose sucker. The Stikine River and the Taku River are the highest-producing salmon rivers in Southeast Alaska. Although the Stikine is a much larger river, it produces significantly fewer salmon than the Taku basin. This is largely due to geological barriers – such as the rapids of the Grand Canyon, and falls on tributaries such as the Iskut River – which naturally block between 50 and 75 percent of potential spawning habitat within the Stikine basin. Between 2003 and 2010, the Stikine produced an average of 67,000 sockeye salmon each year, while the Taku produced over 110,000 sockeye per year. However, the Stikine produces slightly more chinook salmon, with an average of 40,000 per year compared to 35,000 on the Taku. Temperate rainforest, dominated by western hemlock and Sitka spruce, extends from Alaska up the lower valleys of the Stikine and Iskut rivers well into BC. Along the river's floodplain there are large riparian forests, consisting primarily of cottonwood, alder and willow. Further upstream along the Stikine are boreal forests including white spruce, black spruce, lodgepole pine and subalpine fir, and various hardwoods including aspens, birches and poplars. At higher elevations, dominant subalpine tree species include mountain hemlock, amabilis fir and yellow cedar closer to the coast, while interior species include Engelmann spruce, subalpine fir, and lodgepole pine. Interior forests also include various riparian hardwoods, such as quaking aspen, birches, willows and poplars. A significant portion of the basin consists of high-elevation, treeless tundra or year-round snow/ice. Overall, the Stikine basin represents eight of fourteen biogeoclimatic zones found in BC. Across the interior of the Stikine basin, vast expanses of wilderness support a diversity of animal populations including caribou, mountain goats, Stone sheep, black and brown bears, wolverines, marmots, moose and wolves. The Spatsizi Plateau is particularly rich in fauna and has been called the "Serengeti of British Columbia." Spatsizi Plateau Wilderness Provincial Park, located at the headwaters of the Stikine, includes crucial winter caribou range, as well as the Gladys Lake Ecological Reserve, which preserves mountain goat and sheep habitat. More than 140 species of birds have been observed in the area of the park. The Stikine River delta is an 11,000-hectare (27,000-acre), up to 26-kilometre (16 mi) wide estuary with a mix of freshwater and tidal wetlands, islands, mud and grass flats, and riparian forests. During low flows in winter, exposed glacial sediments in the upstream Stikine River are blown towards the coast to be deposited as loess on delta islands, renewing nutrients in the soil. The delta provides forage for some three million migrating birds each year including geese, ducks, swans and sandhill cranes. It also supports one of North America's highest concentrations of bald eagles, which gather to feast on the spring eulachon run. Numerous mammal species also use the delta including Sitka black-tailed deer, moose, bears, gray wolf, coyote, mink, river otter, beaver, seals and sea lions. Where the Stikine delta has partially filled in the Inside Passage at Dry Straits, it has provided a passage for mainland animals such as moose to colonize Mitkof, Kupreanof and Kuiu Islands. ## Recreation and conservation The lower Stikine River, with its proximity to the ports of Wrangell and Petersburg, is a popular area for recreational boating, fishing and camping. The 167-mile (269 km) section from Telegraph Creek to Wrangell often hosts canoe and raft trips by both commercial outfitters and private groups. The trip takes 7 to 10 days and has a difficulty rating of Class I–II, with only a few small rapids. Numerous features along this section of the Stikine River, including Mud, Flood and Great Glaciers in BC and Chief Shakes Hot Springs in Alaska, are only accessible by boat. In addition, single-day jetboat and kayak tours of the lower Stikine are operated out of Wrangell. These day trips are popular with visitors traveling to southeast Alaska by cruise ship. The upper Stikine River is more technical, with a few class III-IV rapids, but is also suitable for recreational boating. The take-out for the upper Stikine run is at the Cassiar Highway bridge, just upstream of the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon is not suitable for recreational boating and should only be attempted by experts. Points further upstream are not accessible by road. Boaters can access the upper Stikine by taking a floatplane to Tuaton or Laslui Lakes. In 2000, the BC government approved the Cassiar Iskut-Stikine Long Range Management Plan (LRMP) with the goal of "a healthy, productive and sustainable wilderness environment, a thriving and diverse economy, and strong communities supporting a wide range of local employment and lifestyle opportunities." The LRMP increased the size of existing protected areas (such as provincial parks), added new protected areas, and established special management zones (SMZs) across the Stikine basin. Economic activities such as mining, logging and grazing are allowed on the SMZs, but are subject to regulation, with objectives such as preserving wildlife habitat and recreational opportunities. Following the plan implementation, about 26 percent of the Stikine basin in BC was within provincial parks, and including the SMZs, about 60 percent of the basin was under some form of conservation management. Spatsizi Plateau Wilderness Provincial Park, established in 1975, encompasses 698,659 ha (1,726,420 acres) in the upper Stikine, Spatsizi and Klappan River drainages. The western edge of the park can be reached by hiking or biking along the old BC Rail grade, which provides access to several trails leading into the park (motorized vehicles are not allowed). To the north is the long, narrow Stikine River Provincial Park, which protects the Stikine River corridor from the Chukachida River confluence nearly to Telegraph Creek. The Grand Canyon of the Stikine is almost entirely within the park boundaries. First established in 1987 and expanded in 2000 to include the Grand Canyon, the park now includes 257,177 ha (635,500 acres) of the Stikine valley along the western foothills of the Cassiar Mountains. Further downstream the Stikine flows through the northern part of 266,180 ha (657,700-acre) Mount Edziza Provincial Park, established in 1972 to preserve the landscape of basalt flows, cinder cones and craters surrounding the dormant volcano Mount Edziza, which last erupted 10,000 years ago. All three parks provide opportunities for wilderness camping, wildlife viewing, horseback riding, hunting, and fishing. Several parks along the lower Stikine River can be reached only by boat. The 9,300 ha (23,000-acre) Great Glacier Provincial Park, located near the BC–Alaska border, is home to one of the largest glaciers along the lower Stikine River. Descending from the Stikine Icefield, the glacier forms a meltwater lake that empties directly into the river. Directly across the river is the small Choquette Hot Springs Provincial Park, which includes the namesake hot springs and the site of Alexander Choquette's Stikine Gold Rush trading post. In Alaska, the entirety of the river is within the Stikine-LeConte Wilderness of the Tongass National Forest. Designated in 1980, the 181,674 ha (448,930-acre) wilderness includes temperate rainforest, the Stikine River estuary, and the LeConte Glacier – the southernmost tidewater glacier in North America – just to the north of the Stikine's mouth. The U.S. Forest Service maintains twelve recreational cabins and several primitive campsites along the Stikine River. ## Economic use and development ### Fishing The Canadian portion of the Stikine River has had a commercial gillnet fishery, based out of Telegraph Creek, since 1975. Due to its remote location, commercial fishing struggled until 1979, when a system was devised to preserve fish in brine-filled barges before transportation by air to the port of Prince Rupert. The two reaches open to commercial fishing are an upper reach from the Tahltan River down to the Chutine River confluence, and a lower reach between the Flood River and the international boundary. Fishing is limited to the main stem and a small portion of the lower Iskut River. The commercial fishing season is generally June through October. First Nation fisheries in the Stikine River include the area upstream of the Chutine River and the lower Tahltan River. The First Nations are allowed a longer fishing season, from April through October. Recreational fishing is also allowed on the Canadian part of the Stikine River between April and October. In Alaska, commercial fishing on the Stikine falls within the boundaries of District 8, as defined by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G). Salmon are primarily caught offshore by trolling or drift gillnetting, and are either processed on-site or shipped to processing facilities in Wrangell and Petersburg. The ADF&G also issues permits for subsistence fishing on the Alaskan portion of the Stikine. Sockeye are the predominant commercial species, accounting for over 90 percent of the catch between 1991 and 2000, with chinook and coho making up most of the remainder. US and Canadian shares of the Stikine fishery are regulated by the Pacific Salmon Treaty, signed between the US and Canada in 1985. For sockeye, the Pacific Salmon Commission has established an annual escapement goal of 20,000–40,000 for the main Stikine River and 18,000–30,000 for Tahltan Lake. The chinook escapement goal for the main Stikine is 14,000–28,000. If the annual run is forecasted to be below this level, both Canadian and US fisheries are subject to restrictions. Since the beginning of the 21st century, the Stikine sockeye run has been relatively stable. Chinook have seen a significant decline, which has been attributed to reduced marine survival rates. ### Mining The Stikine Plateau has extensive mineral deposits including gold, silver, copper, molybdenum, and coal. There are a number of operational mines in the basin in addition to thousands of abandoned mines, many dating back to the gold rush period. One of the largest former mines, the Snip mine near the lower Iskut River, produced 28.3 million grams (1,000,000 oz) of gold prior to shutting down in 1999. Despite the Stikine's long history of mining development, in the 1990s and early 2000s both the U.S. Geological Survey and Environment Canada reported water quality in the lower river as generally good, except for elevated copper levels. Several large new mining developments in the 21st century have generated concern over potential impacts to water quality and fish habitat in the Stikine and Iskut rivers. The Red Chris copper/gold mine near Iskut, BC began operation in 2015, despite concerns raised by the Tlingit tribe and downstream communities in Alaska. The boroughs of Wrangell and Petersburg have expressed concern over the safety of the tailings dam at the Red Chris mine, which is operated by Imperial Metals, the owner of the Mount Polley mine which suffered a tailings dam failure in 2014 that contaminated Quesnel Lake. Tahltan tribal leaders have generally been supportive of this mine and some others due to the economic benefits for the region; however, they have opposed projects that impact sites of cultural significance. The Klappan Coalbed Methane Project, first proposed in 2004, would drill for natural gas on the Spatsizi Plateau in the middle of the Sacred Headwaters, where the Stikine, Skeena and Nass rivers rise. The Tahltan heavily protested this development, which was in an area of great cultural importance to them. In addition, the drilling operations would have released large amounts of briny waste effluent into nearby streams. In 2012 the BC government scrapped the project, and announced it would not issue any more drilling permits for the area. The proposed Galore Creek mine, located in BC 40 kilometres (25 mi) from the Alaska border, sits on one of the largest undeveloped copper/gold deposits in the world. The Alaska Department of Natural Resources has expressed concern over the safety of tailings storage there. As of 2020, the project was on hold due to economic uncertainties. ### Energy and infrastructure projects In 2014, BC Hydro completed the first stage of the Northwest Transmission Line (NTL), extending the electric grid north from Terrace to the community of Iskut near the Stikine River. The Red Chris mine was the first development to receive power from the line. Several run-of-the-river type hydroelectric projects, smaller in scale than the massive dams proposed in the 1980s, have been built in the Stikine basin to feed power into the extended grid. The largest of these is the 195 megawatt Forrest Kerr hydroelectric plant on the Iskut River, completed in 2014. The NTL project is part of the Alaska–BC Intertie, planned to connect Southeast Alaska to the North American power grid via BC. The Alaska Energy Authority has criticized the plans, as the low population, long distances, and rugged terrain would make a region-wide power grid uneconomical. The Southeast Mid-Region Access Project, first proposed in 1978, would create a road connection from southeast Alaska to the Cassiar Highway, enabling ore and timber to be exported from the interior via Alaskan ports. One of the proposed alternatives would construct a road along the lower Stikine and Iskut Rivers – currently a roadless wilderness area – with either a ferry terminal or bridges connecting to Wrangell and Petersburg. The completion of the road is also seen as an opportunity to complete the Alaska–BC Intertie, as the Forrest Kerr hydro plant is less than 60 kilometres (37 mi) from the Alaska border. Both the BC and Alaska governments have strongly supported the project, while other port cities such as BC, which would see economic competition from Alaskan shipping, have opposed it. The road project faces environmental challenges as well, as the Stikine River route would pass through the Stikine-LeConte Wilderness. ## See also - List of rivers of Alaska - List of rivers of British Columbia - Steamboats of the Stikine River
248,692	Román Baldorioty de Castro	1,159,763,597	Puerto Rican politician and abolitionist	[ "1822 births", "1889 deaths", "19th-century Puerto Rican people", "Burials at Panteón Nacional Román Baldorioty de Castro", "People from Guaynabo, Puerto Rico", "Politicians from Ponce", "Puerto Rican abolitionists" ]	Román Baldorioty de Castro (23 February 1822 – 30 September 1889) was Puerto Rican abolitionist and spokesman for the island's right to self-determination. In 1870, he was elected as a deputy in the Cortes Generales, the Spanish parliament, where he promoted abolition of slavery. In 1887, Baldorioty de Castro was the founder of the Partido Autonomista (Autonomist Party), also known as "Partido Autonomista Puro" (Pure Autonomous Party), "Partido Histórico" (Historic Party), and "Partido Ortodoxo" (Orthodox Party). ## Early years Baldorioty de Castro was born in Guaynabo to a poor family. His family moved to San Juan when he was young, where he received his primary education as a student of the noted educator, Rafael Cordero. After completing his elementary education, he enrolled in El Seminario Conciliar de Idelfonso, which at that time was the most organized institution in Puerto Rico. He spent most of his adolescent years studying, and finished with one of the best averages in his class. Baldorioty de Castro was granted a scholarship, which he used for further study in Spain. He collected the money necessary to travel and departed to Spain in the company of three fellow Puerto Ricans, two students and a professor. Before establishing a permanent residence in Madrid, the group traveled to several Spanish provinces, where they visited some of the country's tourist sites. Among the places visited were locations in Cordoba, Seville, Andújar and Bailén where they met Alberto Lista, an educator from Spain. The three other students (who traveled with Baldorioty de Castro) contracted smallpox shortly after beginning their academic studies in the Central University of Madrid. Baldorioty de Castro cared for them, but two of the youths died from complications of the disease. Baldorioty de Castro was offered a chance to return to Puerto Rico but he declined. He continued his studies along with the only survivor and graduated with a degree in physics and mathematical sciences from the university. Dr. José Gualberto Padilla together with Román Baldorioty de Castro, founded the Puerto Rican chapter of the Sociedad Económica de los Amigos del País and called it "La Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País en Puerto Rico" (the Economic Friends of Puerto Rico). In 1847 the Sociedad de Amigos del País de Puerto Rico named Baldorioty de Castro the organization's correspondent in Spain. On 21 March 1851 he was granted permission to transfer to France to continue his studies. Baldorioty de Castro moved to Paris, where he attended the Central School of Arts. ## Political and professional careers In 1853, after seven years of study, Baldorioty de Castro returned to Puerto Rico and married Isabel Matilde Díaz y Ruiz, the granddaughter of Lieutenant Francisco Díaz, hero of the Battle of San Juan of 1797. Upon his return, he noticed that there was political tension, because of the differences between the governor in office and the political and educational groups in Puerto Rico. Baldorioty de Castro began promoting the restructuring of the social, political and educational establishments. These contributions led Fernando Norzagaray, the colony's incumbent governor to offer him the position of mayor of one of the island's municipalities (towns). Baldorioty de Castro declined the offer, based on his ideals. At the time, the government displayed no interest in promoting education among the Criollos of the island. Two years earlier, the governor had imposed the Reglamento del Jornalero, which promoted a more ample labor base by reducing the amount of unemployed citizens. However, this measure was criticized for its elements that were used to increase the wealth of employers. As a consequence, the merits of said law were reconsidered and a group led by Baldorioty de Castro was selected to decide its validity. In 1853, he became a member of the Liberal Reform Party of Puerto Rico. ### Educator Besides politics, Baldorioty de Castro also loved teaching. He taught Botany and Maritime Sciences at the School of Commerce, Agriculture and Maritime Studies in San Juan. In January 1854, the Councilor Seminary selected Baldorioty de Castro as its botany professor. On November of that year, Puerto Rico's Commerce and Foment Joint selected him to work as a professor in a Nautical School, where he taught Maritime Studies. The colonial government discovered that there was fertile terrain in the islands of Mona and Monito in 1856. After the discovery, they selected Baldorioty de Castro as the supervisor of a series of experiments to determine the terrain's components. In 1857, the cattle industry in Puerto Rico began having difficulties, when the number of animals diminished significantly. To resolve this problem, the island's Economic Society formed a commission composed of Baldorioty de Castro, José Julián Acosta and Juan Hernández Arbizu. Baldorioty de Castro proposed that geometry classes be included in the curriculum of elementary schools in Puerto Rico, which was accepted by the pertinent authority. On 2 January 1858, the Economic Society unanimously named him the Secretary of the Studies Commission. On 4 June 1860, the organization named him spokesman of a commission to promote conservation of the island's natural resources. Later that year, Baldorioty de Castro represented Puerto Rico as a delegate in the Spanish Parliament, serving for five years until 1865. On 17 September 1864, he was certified as an applied mechanics professor and worked for a salary of thirty-five dollars a month. ### Spanish parliament While working in the Spanish Parliament, he made the most of his position and encouraged the abolition of slavery in Puerto Rico and Cuba, and drafting a constitution to guarantee Puerto Ricans more political rights. On 4 November 1866, he was named Puerto Rico's representative to Paris' 1867 Universal Exposition. He served as a critic and subsequently wrote a review titled Exposición Universal de París en 1867. Memoria presentada a la Comisión Provincial de Puerto Rico. After completing his participation in Paris, Baldorioty de Castro returned to Puerto Rico. There were rising tensions between groups that supported the abolition of slavery in the island and the Spanish colonial government. This led to protests and demands by the local Criollo population and influenced several revolutionaries, which led to the Grito de Lares. Baldorioty de Castro did not promote the armed revolution; instead he chose to debate the several conflicts and issues on diplomatic venues. After the revolution attempts, a new superior provisional government was established in the island. This government promoted a union between the conflicting parties in order to establish reforms in the government's structure. In line with the proposed solution, Baldorioty de Castro proposed a conciliation of these groups, but the efforts to unify the opposing views was unsuccessful. After this, he traveled to Madrid, under political pressure, and presented the island's status situation to the respective authorities. He began writing several documents that strongly criticized the colonial government and wrote a report listing the elements that he felt were being used by the administration that were affecting the island's social and economic aspects. In January 1867, Baldorioty de Castro received a communication from Puerto Rico's Superior Instruction Juncture, notifying him that he was selected as a member of the Test Commission, where he was in charge of monitoring tests being issued in physics and the natural sciences. In 1870, he was named deputy to the Spanish Parliament, after the governor in office had revoked his accreditation as an educator. There he continued to speak about his cause. Baldorioty de Castro became known as "The Father of Puerto Rican Autonomy". On 19 November 1872, Ramon Baldorioty de Castro together with Luis Padial, Julio Vizcarrondo and the Spanish Minister of Overseas Affairs, Segismundo Moret, presented a proposal for the abolition of slavery. On 22 March 1873, the Spanish Government approved the proposal, which became known as the Moret Law. ## Later years Baldorioty de Castro returned to Puerto Rico in 1873 and went to live in the City of Ponce. There, he founded the newspaper El Derecho (The Law). He was also the founder of a weekly paper called La Crónica, in which he expressed his ideas on autonomy for the island. In 1887, Baldorioty de Castro co-founded, along with José de Diego, the Autonomist Party of Puerto Rico. He named a young and upcoming politician, Antonio R. Barceló, the position of party Secretary. The Autonomist Party of Puerto Rico became one of Puerto Rico's first political parties. Its credo was that Puerto Rico should pick its own government and should have a representative in the Spanish Parliament. The Spanish government, however, considered Baldorioty de Castro a dangerous person and a dissenter and had him jailed in Fort San Felipe del Morro in San Juan. Although he was not in jail for long and was soon released, his health suffered greatly during this imprisonment. Román Baldorioty de Castro died in Ponce on 30 September 1889. He is buried in Ponce's Cementerio Viejo cemetery which was renamed "Panteón Nacional Román Baldorioty de Castro". ## Legacy The cities of Bayamón, Juana Díaz, San Germán and San Juan have honored the memory of Baldorioty de Castro by naming plazas after him. Puerto Rico Highway 26, called the Román Baldorioty de Castro Expressway, is the main highway to the Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport. In Puerto Rico's capital city, where the Baldorioty de Castro Expressway meets the Condado Lagoon in the Miramar neighborhood of Santurce, an obelisk was constructed in the center of the city park surrounding the lagoon. The obelisk is in honor of Baldorioty de Castro. A bronze statue of Baldority de Castro stands at the base of the statue as a gift of the people of Puerto Rico. There are schools named after him in other areas of Puerto Rico. The province of Azua de Compostela, Dominican Republic, honored him by naming one of the capital city's secondary education institutions after him: Liceo de Estudios Secundarios Román Baldorioty de Castro. ## Gallery ## See also - List of Puerto Ricans - Politics of Puerto Rico - Autonomism - Panteon Nacional Roman Baldorioty de Castro
1,099,515	Squall Leonhart	1,171,071,402	Protagonist in Final Fantasy VIII	[ "Characters designed by Tetsuya Nomura", "Fictional bodyguards in video games", "Fictional child soldiers", "Fictional knights in video games", "Fictional mercenaries in video games", "Fictional private military members", "Fictional swordfighters in video games", "Final Fantasy VIII", "Final Fantasy characters", "Male characters in video games", "Orphan characters in video games", "Science fantasy video game characters", "Square Enix protagonists", "Video game characters introduced in 1999" ]	Squall Leonhart (Japanese: スコール・レオンハート, Hepburn: Sukōru Reonhāto) is a character and the protagonist of Final Fantasy VIII, a role-playing video game that was produced by Square (now Square Enix). Within the game's plot, Squall is a 17-year-old student at Balamb Garden, a prestigious military academy for elite mercenaries (known as "SeeDs"). Forced into becoming the Commander (委員長, Iinchō, lit. "Chairman") due to his outstanding skills, Squall befriends his underlings, and falls in love with Rinoa Heartilly. These relationships, combined with the game's plot, gradually change him from being a loner to an open, caring person. Squall has appeared in several other games, including Chocobo Racing, Itadaki Street Special, and the Kingdom Hearts series as the older mentor-like figure named Leon (レオン, Reon). Squall was designed by Tetsuya Nomura with input from game director Yoshinori Kitase. He was modeled after the actor River Phoenix. Squall's weapon, the gunblade, was made so it would be difficult to master. To ensure players understand Squall's silent attitude, Kazushige Nojima made the character's thoughts open to them. Squall's first voiced appearance is in the first Kingdom Hearts game, in which he is voiced by Hideo Ishikawa in Japanese and by David Boreanaz in English; Doug Erholtz has since assumed the role for later English-speaking appearances. Squall had a mixed reaction from critics, some of whom judging him poorly in comparison with other Final Fantasy heroes due to his coldness and angst, and others praised his character development. The character has been popular, and his relationship with Rinoa has been praised. ## Creation While previous games in the Final Fantasy franchise involved an ensemble cast, for Final Fantasy VIII the Square staff decided to create a story centered around a hero and the heroine according to director Yoshinori Kitase. The rest of the characters were created to support the relationship between the duo. When asked about what is one thing Kitase would change about the game, he mentioned the FH concert where Rinoa Heartily mocks Squall by mimicking his mannerisms and he raises his hand at her and she dodges. Writer Kasushige Nojima was against this action, claiming a man should not hit a girl. Square's Hiroki Chiba said the scene in which Squall and Rinoa embrace in space is his favorite in the Final Fantasy franchise due to the use of Faye Wong's song "Eyes On Me" in the background and because he had to adjust every frame to make the scene work. The first illustration of Squall was used to create the world around him. The game's logo that depicted Squall embracing Rinoa was left open for interpretation by players. After Nojima created the scenario, Nomura created the game's introduction movie mostly on his own which left a major positive reaction on the Square staff. In Final Fantasy VIII Nojima wanted to give players insight into Squall's thoughts in contrast to VII, which encouraged players to speculate on them. According to Nojima, the development staff made Squall "cool". In the video game it is implied the character Laguna Loire is Squall's father but Square Enix has never confirmed this idea. Nomura designed Squall to contrast with Laguna; while Laguna is seen as a friendly man, Squall is distant and silent. The staff found this problematic and thus Squall was given a character arc of him opening up to others to make the story easier to make fitting for a lone wolf. While at first these two characters' stories run parallel, they would ultimately clashed as conceptualized by Nomura. In the original Japanese game, Squall has a tendency to respond negatively to other characters' comments by using sarcastic remarks like "well, excuse me". In the English localization this was turned into a catchphrase known as "whatever". ### Design Squall Leonhart was the first character Nomura designed for Final Fantasy VIII; he was inspired by actor River Phoenix, although Nomura said "nobody understood it". Squall is 177 cm (5 ft 10 in) tall, and initially had long hair and a feminine appearance. The scar on Squall's forehead was also left ambiguous although Nomura said it was important for him. After objections from Kitase, Nomura made the character more masculine and added a scar across Squall's brow and the bridge of his nose to make him more recognizable similar to Cloud Strife's striking spiky hair from Final Fantasy VII, leaving its cause up to scenario writer Kazushige Nojima. Nomura's design of Squall included a fur lining along his jacket collar as a challenge for the game's full motion video designers. Nomura created Squall's gunblade (ガンブレード, Ganburēdo) and its silver accessories. The weapon is a sword that has components of a revolver that send vibrations through the blade when they are triggered; this inflicts additional damage as Squall strikes an enemy if the player presses the R1 trigger on the controller. Although the weapon was intended as a novel way for players to control weapons in battle, Nomura said he feels it looks odd in retrospect and that it was very difficult to master. According to other staff members, Nomura's idea with the Gunblade was combine the two weapons and expand the sense of strength. ### Portrayal While Final Fantasy VIII does not use voice acting, Squall has a voice in the Square Enix series Kingdom Hearts, in which he is known as Leon. He is voiced by David Boreanaz in the English version of the game and Hideo Ishikawa in the Japanese version. He returns in Kingdom Hearts II and is voiced in the English version by Doug Erholtz, who said he had a "fun journey" voicing Leon and that it was a "really fun role to play". For the Kingdom Hearts series, Nomura decided to use Squall as a mentor character to newcomer Sora. Event planner Jun Akiyama persuaded Nomura to change Squall's name to Leon in order to make his introduction more surprising to the players as he is first mentioned in a letter from Mickey Mouse. The last name Leonhart was removed for unspecified reasons. Meanwhile, some parts of his design were changed to reference Rinoa's, most noticeably the wings in his jacket in order to signify that something happened between the two in the past. However, the real reason for the two being split was because Nomura had problems writing Rinoa out of all Final Fantasy VIII characters. Leon's design was revised to be more effeminated using the original sketches from Final Fantasy VIII that only appeared in the game's logo. Although polygons were used alongside other returning Final Fantasy characters, Leon could not return in Kingdom Hearts III which bothered many of the staff members. In the Final Fantasy fighting game, Erholtz said that Squall came across as an easy character to understand but felt he was not very emotive. This stoic personality led to Erholtz claim that Squall is fighting an inner darkness as shown by his facial expressions. Erholtz found the game to be fun to do due to all the people he worked with. ## Appearances ### Final Fantasy VIII At the beginning of Final Fantasy VIII, Squall is known as a "lone wolf" because he never shows his feelings and seems unresponsive to his associates. His superiors including his teacher Quistis Trepe consider him challenging to deal with but respect his talents. Squall is stoical and his taciturn nature used for comic relief. He is forced into a heroic role midway through the game when Cid, headmaster of Balamb Garden, appoints him the leader of the academy. During a late battle against Galbadia Garden, Squall has difficulty leading because of his lingering isolation. Although other characters try to become less reserved and Rinoa Heartilly expends considerable energy pursuing him, it takes time for him to accept the others' friendship, and fall in love with Rinoa. Later in the game, Squall becomes more comfortable in a leadership role, especially when he must fight Ultimecia. Throughout the game, Squall has a rivalry with Seifer Almasy. The two characters scar each other at the beginning but later they are supposed to cooperate; they still quarrel, however. Although Seifer later allies with the Sorceress, requiring Squall to fight him several times, Squall still feels a camaraderie with Seifer. According to flashbacks during the game, Squall grew up in an orphanage with the other playable characters, except Rinoa. The orphans were cared for by Edea; although Squall remembers little about his past, he becomes an emotionally detached, cynical, and introverted boy whose goal is to go through life without emotional ties or dependence. He gradually warms and his detachment from his companions is later revealed to be a defensive mechanism to protect himself from the emotional pain he suffered when he and his older step sister were separated. After Ultimecia is defeated, the time and space she had absorbed begin to return to normal, pulling Squall's comrades back into their places in the timeline while Squall returns to the orphanage and meets a younger Edea. Squall plants the ideas for Garden and SeeD in her mind, creating an origin paradox; Squall must become the leader of Balamb Garden so he can pass its version of SeeD tradition to Edea, who teaches them to her husband Cid, who co-founds Balamb Garden, which admits Edea's orphans—including Squall. ### Other appearances Squall appears as a non-playable character in Kingdom Hearts, in which he wears a short leather jacket with red wings on the back and a Griever necklace. Squall takes the name Leon as an alias because he is ashamed of not protecting those he loved from the Heartless when his home world the Radiant Garden was consumed by darkness. His role in Kingdom Hearts is to help guide the protagonist Sora in his battle against the Heartless. Although Squall's appearance and age differ—he is 25 in Kingdom Hearts— and 17 in Final Fantasy VIII), his personality remains the same. A memory-based version of Squall (as Leon) appears in Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories teaching gameplay in a tutorial. In the sequel Kingdom Hearts II game, he works with his friends to restore their world alongside Sora while facing the army of Heartless creatures used by the villains, Organization XIII. Squall also appears as an opponent in Olympus Coliseum tournaments, where he is often paired with other Final Fantasy characters. His virtual replica appears in Kingdom Hearts coded, in which it meets Sora's virtual replica. Leon's latest appearance is in the Remind DLC of Kingdom Hearts III as a cameo. He is also featured in the Kingdom Hearts manga where his portrayal is more comical. Squall is a secret character in Chocobo Racing and Itadaki Street Special, and a sprite version of him occasionally appears on the loading screen of the PlayStation version of Final Fantasy VI. He appears as a playable character in every Dissidia: Final Fantasy title. He is one of Cosmos' chosen warriors to determined to fight Chaos' Ultimecia. He returns with his Kingdom Hearts as downloadable content (DLC) in Dissidia 012 where Squall is defeated by Kain Highwind from Final Fantasy IV who wants him to stop from fighting Chaos' mannekins army. In the latest installment, Dissidia NT, Squall teams up with several other Materia soldiers, mostly Bartz from Final Fantasy V, and faces Jecht from Final Fantasy X. He is a playable character in Itadaki Street Portable and is the main character representing Final Fantasy VIII in the rhythm games Theatrhythm Final Fantasy, its follow-up Curtain Call, and the arcade-only game TFF: All Star Carnival. Squall also appears as a premium character in Pictlogica Final Fantasy and All The Bravest, both of which are designed for Android and iOS. He is also present in Mobius Final Fantasy where Squall finds himself in an alternate version of Balamb Garden. ## Reception ### Popularity Squall became a popular character within the Final Fantasy series, appearing in lists from GamesRadar about heroes, or characters in general by GameZone. He was also described as the most popular video game character. Despite negative commentary, GameDaily and Den of Geek found him visually appealing. ### Critical response Critical reaction to Squall was mixed. Jack Patrick Rodgers of PopMatters said Squall's cynicism and frustration with those around him made him a strong character but "coldly inhuman". Despite sharing a similar view, GameSpot said the "standoffish because of some repressed Wagnerian broodiness, in which case he was kind of interesting". According to IGN, the problem with the game was that is too centered around Squall's who comes across as a "jerk" most of the time, making him impossible to relate. 1UP.com still found him irrating, comparing him with similar archetypes explored in the franchise, but Edge compared Squall unfavorably with Final Fantasy VII protagonist Cloud Strife, as the former's angst is not given a proper source unlike the latter's The Gamer said Squall's antisocial personality might divide gamers. Eurogamer commented that while Squall remains as unlikable character even after his character arcs that contrast the more social and expressive Final Fantasy leads like Tidus or Noctis Lucis Caelum, he still remained as a realistic take on a soldier. While noting that Squall manages to become a better person, the changes are minimum and the idea of him being able to save the world comes across as "cringe comedy" due to its characterization. There was also commentary about Squall and Rinoa's relationship withGamesRadar's Brett Elston criticized it, comparing it with the romance from Attack of the Clones. However, he stated in a different article, "Squall and Rinoa are at the heart of it all" even if they do not properly develop. According to Ryan Woo of Complex, the problem with the romance was it because it was mostly one-sided from Rinoa's side until the latter parts of the game where Squall's development makes it come across as forced. Mike Gorby, writing for Goomba Stomp, said the character lacks realism in comparison to Rinoa. On a more positive view, the website called Squall and Rinoa the best couple created by Square Enix, noting the differences between them and that their relationship is the first in the series to drive the plot of a game. Christopher Michael Baker of Allgame said that his romance changes the main character for the better as he originallly hated him. There was commentary over Squall's Leon persona from Kingdom Hearts. RPGInformer was shocked by his introduction not only due to the crossover element provided in the first game but also because Squall was voiced for the first time. Erutid said that Leon is far more mature than his younger Squall persona as he is no longer filled with constant angst when compared with his Final Fantasy VIII persona. Despite being initially confused with Leon's appearance and weaponry in the first Kingdom Hearts boss fight, Polygon enjoyed his character. In a retrospect, the writer found the idea of the crossover ridiculous. Arnold Katayev of PSXextreme praised Squall's redesign in Kingdom Hearts as the game's best character design. Comic Book Resources lamented how Squall and the rest of the Final Fantasy characters became cameos in Kingdom Hearts III and the player never gets the chance to fight against them. VentureBeat said that while Kingdom Hearts offered Squall a more passable backstory, he still lacked development to the point he is often overshadowed by Laguna not only in his original appearance but also Dissdia. In retrospect, while Fanbyte found Leon more sexually appealing than Squall, the writer felt that his new backstory made the character unlikable as he broods even more than in his original game. Kotaku commented that voice actor David Boreanaz made "stilted and odd" and, among other Kingdom Hearts actors, he was overshadowed by Billy Zane's portrayal of Xehanort, also referred as Ansem. In contrast, GamesRadar praised Boreanaz. GameRant believes David Boreanaz was chosen for Squall's role due to voicing a similar brooding anti-hero, Angel, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer with Doug Erholtz providing a nearly identical performance in following games. Hideo Ishikawa's performance as Squall was highlighted as popular within even if he never got the chance to properly voice him in his original game as said by fans in Animate Times. ## See also - Characters of Final Fantasy VIII
19,626,817	Hurricane Tara	1,172,395,522	Category 1 Pacific hurricane in 1961	[ "1961 Pacific hurricane season", "1961 in Mexico", "Category 1 Pacific hurricanes", "Hurricanes in Guerrero" ]	Hurricane Tara was one of the deadliest Pacific hurricanes on record. The final tropical cyclone of the 1961 Pacific hurricane season, Tara formed on November 10 about 230 mi (365 km) off the coast of Mexico. It strengthened to reach maximum sustained winds of 85 mph (140 km/h) before making landfall in the Mexican state of Guerrero near Zihuatanejo. Hurricane Tara dissipated on November 12, bringing heavy rainfall and strong winds to locations inundated by 10 days of precipitation. Damage was light in the major port city of Acapulco, though further west along the coast, the effects of Tara were much worse. The city of Nuxco in Tecpán de Galeana municipality received the most damage and deaths from the hurricane. Throughout Mexico, at least 436 fatalities were reported, and damage exceeded \$16 million (1961 USD, \$115 million 2009 USD). ## Meteorological history On November 9, a weak circulation remained nearly stationary off the coast of Acapulco, Mexico. While the system did not have significant convection, it organized enough to be considered a tropical cyclone at 0000 UTC on November 10, about 230 mi (365 km) off the coast of Mexico. By the afternoon of the 10th, it was a tropical depression moving northeastward toward the coastline. Tara intensified, reaching hurricane status and its peak intensity of 85 mph (140 km/h) late on November 11. Early on November 12, Hurricane Tara made landfall near Zihuatanejo, Guerrero, between Acapulco and Manzanillo, near where Hurricane Iva moved ashore five months earlier. Continuing inland, it was last observed at 1200 UTC on November 12. At the time, it was known as Cyclone Tara, as the term cyclone was the more common equivalent for hurricane in the region. ## Impact and aftermath Hurricane Tara caused severe damage in southern Guerrero where it moved ashore, wrecking at least 10 communities. Heavy rainfall from Tara exacerbated flooding in the area, which was caused by ten days of precipitation preceding the hurricane; the heavy rainfall contaminated drinking water. Strong waves killed a surfer in the Acapulco area. In the city, low-lying areas were inundated with water, causing in excess of \$1 million in damage (1961 USD). In nearby Tecpán de Galeana, the hurricane killed 116 people, and dozens more were killed in other close villages. Elsewhere in Guerrero, the coastal highway between Acapulco and Zihuatanejo received heavy damage, which later hampered relief efforts; the highway was a priority for storm repairs, with crews working continuously for several days to restore the vital link. Many deaths were reported in coastal towns of Guerrero, although exact death tolls were initially unknown, with many of the towns covered in mud. People received little warning of the hurricane, and many people died while sleeping. In addition, thousands were left homeless by the storm. According to radio reports, a hurricane-related waterspout wrecked the city of Nuxco, although the damage was later described as flooding from a lagoon; 225 deaths were reported in Nuxco. Food supplies were depleted in some coastal communities, forcing residents to rely on coconuts that were downed during the hurricane. Overall crop damage in Mexico was unofficially estimated at \$16 million (1961 USD, \$115 million 2009 USD). By two days after the storm, the government of Mexico sent two airplanes to Acapulco, where the food, clothing, and medicine were distributed by truck or helicopter to the affected areas. The Mexican government arranged plans to drop food and medical aid into isolated villages, although food supplies were initially insufficient for the great number of people affected by the storm. Five army units and three helicopters were sent to the region to assist in the aftermath, although planes encountered difficulties in landing due to flooded runways. Army soldiers were responsible for rescue operations, while paratroopers were sent to the most affected areas to distribute aid. Despite fears of the spread of disease in the aftermath, prompt work by medical officials prevented any epidemics due to the storm. The exact death toll was unknown, but believed to be several hundred. About two days after the storm, the official death toll was more than 80. By three days after the storm, the toll rose to 190, and by four days after it made landfall, the official total was 290 deaths; officials estimated the toll could have exceeded 500. Due to downed communications, reports of storm fatalities were slow to spread, though news became more rapid as links were repaired. On November 19, a week after the storm struck, the Mexican Army set the final death toll at 436 deaths, with 300 missing; the death toll was later reported by the United States Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance in 1993. Overall, Hurricane Tara was the deadliest disaster in 1961, as well as the third deadliest Mexico Pacific hurricane on record, after a hurricane in 1959 and Hurricane Liza in 1976. ## See also - Other tropical cyclones of the same name
37,900,349	Battle of Torrence's Tavern	1,104,611,775	Part of the American Revolutionary War	[ "1781 in North Carolina", "1781 in the United States", "Battles in the Southern theater of the American Revolutionary War 1780–1783", "Battles of the American Revolutionary War in North Carolina", "Conflicts in 1781", "Iredell County, North Carolina", "Rowan County, North Carolina" ]	The Battle of Torrence's Tavern (also referred to as the Skirmish at Torrence's Tavern or the Battle at Tarrant's Tavern) was a minor engagement of the American Revolutionary War that took place in what was the western portion of Rowan County, North Carolina, approximately 10 miles (16 km) east of the Catawba River near modern-day Mooresville in Iredell County. Torrence's Tavern was a part of the larger Southern campaign of the American Revolution, which, by 1780–1781 involved a series of clashes between the British Army and Loyalist militia and the Continental Army and Patriot militia in the Piedmont region of North and South Carolina. The engagement took place on either February 1 or February 2, 1781 immediately following the Battle of Cowan's Ford, and resulted in a victory for General Daniel Morgan and a defeat for units under the command of Colonel Banastre Tarleton. The American victory served to demoralize Loyalist supporters in western North Carolina. General Nathanael Greene, commander of the Continental Army in the southern theater, moved his forces further east. This move allowed Greene to unite his army with several detached Patriot forces in the Piedmont prior to the Battle of Guilford Courthouse. After the conclusion of the war, the site of Torrence's Tavern was commemorated by two state and local historical markers. ## Prelude Throughout the winter of 1780–1781, the British Army in the Carolinas, under the command of General Charles Cornwallis, pursued the southern Continental Army, commanded by Nathanael Greene, from central South Carolina to North Carolina. At the Battle of Cowpens on January 17, 1781, the Continental Army scored a victory against a force, detached from the main British Army, commanded by Tarleton. After the defeat, Cornwallis set out to pursue Greene into nearby North Carolina. The victor of Cowpens, Daniel Morgan, had requested that Greene relieve him of his command of the Patriot militia due to a flare-up of sciatica, but Greene refused. Morgan then set about establishing defenses on the Catawba River, which Cornwallis' army would be forced to cross in order to drive into central and eastern North Carolina. Defensive positions were established at every ford on the river in that state in expectation of the British assault. By January 30, Morgan had received word that the British were indeed preparing to cross the river. On January 31, 1781, Greene and Morgan left the Catawba River defenses in the hands of militia General William Lee Davidson, and rode towards Salisbury to establish a rallying point. The Continental force crossed the Catawba River ahead of Cornwallis' army, and followed Davidson and Morgan to the rallying point. At Cowan's Ford on February 1, 1781, a force of Patriot militia commanded directly by Davidson held back the British Army for a period of time, and slowed their crossing of the Catawba River. Davidson's militia inflicted numerous casualties before withdrawing towards the rally point. Davidson was killed in the battle at the ford, leaving the surviving militia temporarily without effective strategic command. ## Battle and aftermath ### Date of the engagement Confusion exists over the exact date of the Battle of Torrence's Tavern; official North Carolina historical sources often cite February 2 as the date, but Tarleton's memoirs indicate that the engagement occurred at two o'clock in the afternoon of February 1, after the early-morning confrontation at Cowan's Ford. ### Tarleton's pursuit of the militia Cornwallis, whose army took a longer amount of time to cross the Catawba, wanted to prevent Greene's forces from withdrawing quickly and being able to regroup, and so he ordered Colonel Tarleton, the commander of the British Legion, to pursue the militia formerly commanded by Davidson. After the engagement at Cowan's Ford, citizens between the Catawba and Yadkin rivers who were sympathetic to the Patriots became panicked, and many fled their homes with whatever valuables they could pack in a short period of time. Tarleton's British Legion was a force that contained infantry, cavalry, and artillery units, but Tarleton was forced to take only his mounted soldiers with him due to heavy rains in the area. Upon nearing the site of what Tarleton labeled "Tarrant's Tavern", the British commander gained information that led him to believe the militia ahead were unprepared for any engagement, and were waiting on reinforcements from Mecklenburg and Rowan county militias. At the time of the battle, Torrence's Tavern sat on a roadway that ran from Beatty's and Cowan's fords on the Catawba directly to Salisbury. Additionally, the same rain that forced Tarleton to shed his foot-soldiers had rendered much of the militia's gunpowder supply useless. Refugees with Patriot sympathies who had fled in advance of Cornwallis' army had also used Torrence's Tavern as a rendezvous point, and a large number of both militiamen and refugees consumed alcohol from the tavern's stores. ### Assault of the British Legion Despite lacking support from Cornwallis' main army, Tarleton's cavalry struck immediately upon arriving at the scene, charging into the militia's makeshift camp. At the first sign of the British approach, the Patriots attempted to organize a defense under the ad hoc command of Captain Nathaniel M. Martin, who tried to rally the militia to a line behind a nearby rail fence. There is also evidence that Col. Thomas Farmer and some 300 militia were stationed at the tavern as a secondary defensive line. Tarleton claimed to have led the charge by reminding his cavalrymen to "remember the Cowpens". The British won in a quick and convincing fashion, dispersing the outnumbered militia units before they managed to complete their rally. Martin was captured in the first few moments of the battle, thereafter leaving the Patriots without any effective tactical command. With Patriot forces under the effects of such confusion, Tarleton divided his dragoons into smaller parties, ordering them to chase and further disburse the militia from the area. While the battle was a minor engagement, the defense provided some additional time for Greene's main army of regulars to cross the Yadkin River without harassment near Salisbury, which allowed that force to regroup and resupply. At the time of the skirmish, Greene was at a farm owned by David Carr (sometimes attributed as "Cain"), approximately 6 miles (9.7 km) from the tavern. Carr's farm had been set as a secondary rendezvous point for the Patriot militia, but none of the expected units rallied to that location following the Torrence's Tavern engagement. Upon reaching Salisbury after the loss, and finding nearly 1,700 stands of muskets rusted and in useless condition, Greene reportedly exclaimed: "These are the happy effects of defending the Country with Militia from which the good Lord deliver us!" The tavern that stood at the location of the battle was burned to the ground the day after the engagement by the main British army, as it had been operated by the Ann (Bonar) Torrence, widow of Patriot Adam Torrence—a militiaman killed at the Battle of Ramsour's Mill. ## Legacy The battle's impact on the American Revolutionary War in the southern theater was minor, but the failure of Patriot militia to significantly stall Cornwallis at Cowan's Ford and Torrence's Tavern caused Greene to hasten his retreat towards his ultimate goal, Guilford Courthouse, where he determined to rendezvous with a detached force under the command of Isaac Huger. The total impact of Torrence's Tavern alone, however, has been rated as especially minor, since the Continental Army force commanded by Greene managed to escape Cornwallis' advance regardless of the short engagement's outcome, and given the more substantial delay to the British caused by the defense at Cowan's Ford the previous day. John Buchanan, an American historian and archivist, postulated that at most, Torrence's Tavern discouraged further militia turnout among North Carolinians of fighting age, noting, however, that turnout had previously been very low in that state. Buchanan went so far as to state that "had Tarleton not lived to write his history of the campaign Torrence's Tavern probably would have merited at most a footnote." Cornwallis, however, wrote to George Germain, 1st Viscount Sackville about the engagements of February 1–2, 1781, and stated that "this stroke, with our passage of the ford, so effectively dispirited the militia, that we met with no further opposition on our march to the Yadkin." A Daughters of the American Revolution stone marker was placed near the battle site in 1914, marking the site of the tavern and commemorating the members of nearby Centre Presbyterian Church who had fought in the war. In 1939, the State of North Carolina placed a Historical marker on the south-bound shoulder of N.C. Highway 115 in Mount Mourne marking the approximate location of the battle.
51,510,551	1989 Football League Second Division play-off final	1,170,272,968	null	[ "1988–89 Football League Second Division", "1989 Football League play-offs", "1989 sports events in London", "Blackburn Rovers F.C. matches", "Crystal Palace F.C. matches", "EFL Championship play-off finals", "Football League Second Division play-off finals", "June 1989 sports events in the United Kingdom", "May 1989 sports events in the United Kingdom" ]	The 1989 Football League Second Division play-off Final was an association football match played over two legs between Blackburn Rovers and Crystal Palace on 31 May 1989 and 3 June 1989. The final was to determine the third and final team to gain promotion from the Football League Second Division, the second tier of English football, to the First Division. The top two teams of the 1988–89 Football League Second Division season gained automatic promotion to the First Division, those placed from third to sixth in the league table competed play-off semi-finals. The winners of the semi-finals played against each other for the final place in the First Division for the 1989–90 season. Crystal Palace ended the season in third position, two places ahead of Blackburn Rovers, while Swindon Town and Watford were the other semi-finalists. The first leg of the final took place at Blackburn's Ewood Park on 31 May 1989. Midway through the first half, Simon Garner flicked on a cross from Scott Sellars and Howard Gayle scored to make it 1–0 to Blackburn. In the 27th minute, Gayle doubled his side's lead with a half-volley from just outside the Palace penalty area. In the 70th minute, Jeff Hopkins brought Gayle down in the box and a penalty was awarded. Gayle took the spot kick himself but struck his shot wide of the goal. With four minutes of regular time remaining, Palace made it 2–1 through Eddie McGoldrick. Garner restored the two-goal lead in injury time, ending the match 3–1. Selhurst Park hosted the second leg of the final on 3 June 1989. Blackburn started the game strongly but Palace took the lead through Ian Wright who scored after 17 minutes from an Alan Pardew cross. A minute after half time, Mark Atkins tripped McGoldrick in the box to concede a penalty from which David Madden scored. Palace were 2–0 ahead at the end of regular time, and with the aggregate score being 3–3, the game went into extra time. With three minutes of the match remaining, Wright scored his 33rd goal of the season heading the ball from a McGoldrick cross past Terry Gennoe. The match ended 3–0 and Palace were promoted to the First Division with a 4–3 aggregate victory. Crystal Palace ended the following season in fifteenth position in the First Division. Blackburn's next season saw them finish in fifth position in the Second Division and qualify for the play-offs where they lost to Swindon Town. ## Route to the final Crystal Palace finished the regular 1988–89 season in third place in the Football League First Division – the second tier of the English football league system – two places and four points ahead of Blackburn Rovers. Both missed out on the two automatic places for promotion to the First Division and instead took part in the play-offs, along with Watford and Swindon Town, to determine the third promoted team. Crystal Palace finished one point behind Manchester City (who were promoted in second place) and eighteen behind league winners Chelsea. Blackburn Rovers faced Watford in their play-off semi-final, with the first leg taking place at Ewood Park in Blackburn on 21 May 1989. The game was described by Stephen Bierley in The Guardian as "hot, hectic and mostly horrible." The home side made the better start but the match ended goalless with misses from Howard Gayle and Scott Sellars, while Neil Redfearn's shot for Watford in the second half was saved by Terry Gennoe. The return leg was played three days later at Vicarage Road in Watford. Simon Garner put Blackburn ahead after beating Paul Miller and Kenny Jackett and striking the ball past Tony Coton in the Watford goal. Redfearn equalised on 29 minutes with a long-range strike which took a deflection off John Millar to beat Gennoe. Ending 1–1, the game moved into extra time but with no further change to the score, Blackburn progressed to the play-off final on the away goals rule. In the other play-off semi-final, Crystal Palace's opponents were Swindon Town, and the first leg was played at the County Ground, Swindon, on 21 May 1989. The match was dominated by Swindon but the first half ended goalless. In the 53rd minute, Crystal Palace's captain Jeff Hopkins scored an own goal after a dangerous cross from Dave Hockaday. Swindon manager Lou Macari suggested that his side were favourites going into the second leg but added "we shan't be defending". The return leg took place at Selhurst Park three days later. The largest crowd of the season meant congestion caused the kick off to be delayed by fifteen minutes. On eight minutes, Mark Bright scored his 25th goal of the season after Paul Digby had beaten away a shot from David Madden, to put Palace ahead. Seven minutes before half-time, Ian Wright doubled the lead after scoring from a Bright header. The match ended 2–0 and Crystal Palace qualified for the final with a 2–1 aggregate win. ## Match ### Background Neither side had featured in a play-off final although Blackburn Rovers had lost in the semi-finals during the 1988 Football League play-offs. Crystal Palace had played in the second tier of English football since being relegated in the 1980–81 season, while Blackburn had been in the Second Division since they were promoted in the 1979–80 season. During the regular 1988–89 season, Blackburn Rovers had won their home game between the two sides 5–4 in October, while the clubs played out a 2–2 draw at Vicarage Road the following February. Garner was Blackburn's leading scorer during the regular season with 23 goals across all competitions (20 in the league, 1 in the FA Cup and 2 in the League Cup), followed by Gayle who scored 20 in total (19 in the league, 1 in the FA Cup and 1 in the League Cup). The leading marksman for Crystal Palace was Wright who had scored 30 goals during the regular season comprising 24 in the league, 1 in the FA Cup, and 5 in the League Cup. ### First leg #### Pre-match In a training session leading up to the first leg of the final, the Blackburn manager Don Mackay tore ankle ligaments, but suggested it had helped to relax his players: "There was a lot of tension in the air until the players saw me hobbling about." He had a fully fit squad to choose from. Crystal Palace had Gavin Nebbeling available for selection after suspension. #### Summary The first leg of the final took place at Blackburn's Ewood Park on 31 May 1989 in front of a crowd of 16,421 and was refereed by Joe Worrall. In the 13th minute, a chance fell to Garner as he volleyed a cross from Chris Sulley, but Perry Suckling in the Crystal Palace goal saved the shot. Eight minutes later, Garner flicked on a cross from Sellars and Gayle scored to make it 1–0 to Blackburn. In the 27th minute, Gayle doubled his side's lead with a half-volley from just outside the Palace penalty area after David Burke had failed to clear the ball. Blackburn continued to dominate the match in the second half, with Hopkins almost scoring an own goal and Millar striking a shot wide of the Palace goal. On 57 minutes, Palace made the only substitution of the game, with Glenn Pennyfather coming on for Madden. In the 70th minute, Hopkins brought Gayle down in the box and a penalty was awarded. Gayle took the spot kick himself but missed out on his hat-trick after he struck his shot wide of the goal. With four minutes of regular time remaining, Palace made it 2–1. John Pemberton's free kick was headed on by Wright to Eddie McGoldrick who scored his first goal of the season from close range. Garner restored the two-goal lead in injury time with a tap-in from a Gayle cross, ending the match 3–1. After the match, Garner warned that, despite the lead, that his team would "be treating the second leg as if the score was 0–0." #### Details ### Second leg #### Pre-match Crystal Palace had been hoping to temporarily increase the capacity of Selhurst Park by 7,000 to 38,000. Geoff Thomas, the Palace captain, was available for selection after an extended period of absence as a result of a stomach operation. Blackburn's Hendry was carrying a leg injury. #### Summary The second leg of the final took place at Selhurst Park on 3 June 1989 and was refereed by George Courtney in front of a crowd of 26,358. Blackburn started the game strongly but Palace's defence kept the score goalless. Palace took the lead through Wright who scored from after 17 minutes from an Alan Pardew cross. Wright then saw his volley from the edge of the box tipped round the post by Gennoe, before a header from McGoldrick went wide of the Blackburn goal. A minute after half time, Atkins tripped McGoldrick in the box to concede a penalty from which Madden scored, sending the Blackburn goalkeeper Gennoe the wrong way. Six minutes later, a poor backpass from Gary O'Reilly was claimed from Garner's feet by the Palace goalkeeper Suckling. On 56 minutes, Sean Curry came on to replace Miller in the first substitution of the game. With Palace 2–0 ahead at the end of regular time, the aggregate score was 3–3 and the game went into extra time. On 105 minutes, Blackburn made their second change of the game with Gayle being replaced by Alan Ainscow. With three minutes of the match remaining, Wright scored his 33rd goal of the season heading the ball from a McGoldrick cross past Gennoe. The match ended 3–0 and Palace were promoted to the First Division with a 4–3 aggregate victory. ### Details ## Post-match Coppell stated that he had a fulfilled his five-year ambition at Crystal Palace: "It is five years tomorrow since I joined the club as manager. I said then that promotion was a five-year job." Wright, who had signed from non-League club Greenwich Borough five years earlier, had been confident of promotion: "I had faith in the club. I knew we could do it. We are ready for the First Division." Crystal Palace ended the following season in fifteenth position in the First Division, having conceded more goals than any other team. Blackburn's next season saw them finish in fifth position in the Second Division and qualify for the 1990 Football League play-offs where they lost 4–2 on aggregate to Swindon Town.
449,098	Out Run	1,164,376,772	1986 video game	[ "1986 video games", "Amiga games", "Amstrad CPC games", "Arcade video games", "Atari ST games", "Cancelled Sega 32X games", "Cancelled X68000 games", "Commodore 64 games", "DOS games", "Ferrari video games", "Game Boy Advance games", "Game Gear games", "Golden Joystick Award for Game of the Year winners", "Golden Joystick Award winners", "MSX games", "MSX2 games", "Master System games", "Mobile games", "NEC PC-8801 games", "Nintendo 3DS eShop games", "Nintendo Switch games", "OutRun", "Rutubo Games games", "SIMS Co., Ltd. games", "Sanritsu Denki games", "Sega Games franchises", "Sega Genesis games", "Sega Saturn games", "Sega arcade games", "Sega video games", "Single-player video games", "Tiger Electronics handheld games", "TurboGrafx-16 games", "U.S. Gold games", "Video games designed by Yu Suzuki", "Video games developed in Japan", "Video games scored by David Whittaker", "Video games scored by Hiroshi Kawaguchi", "Video games with stereoscopic 3D graphics", "ZX Spectrum games" ]	(also stylized as OutRun) is an arcade driving video game released by Sega in September 1986. It is known for its pioneering hardware and graphics, nonlinear gameplay, a selectable soundtrack with music composed by Hiroshi Kawaguchi, and the hydraulic motion simulator deluxe arcade cabinet. The goal is to avoid traffic and reach one of five destinations. The game was designed by Yu Suzuki, who traveled to Europe to gain inspiration for the game's stages. Suzuki had a small team and only ten months to program the game, leaving him to do most of the work himself. The game was a critical and commercial success, becoming the highest-grossing arcade game of 1987 worldwide as well as Sega's most successful arcade cabinet of the 1980s. It was ported to numerous video game consoles and home computers, becoming one of the best-selling video games at the time and selling millions of copies worldwide, and it spawned a number of sequels. Out Run is considered one of the most influential racing games, cited as an influence upon numerous later video games, playing a role in the arcade video game industry's recovery, and providing the name for a popular music genre. ## Gameplay Out Run is a 3D driving video game in which the player controls a Ferrari Testarossa convertible from a third-person rear perspective. The camera is placed near the ground, simulating a Ferrari driver's position and limiting the player's view into the distance. The road curves, crests, and dips, which increases the challenge by obscuring upcoming obstacles such as traffic that the player must avoid. The object of the game is to reach the finish line against a timer. The game world is divided into multiple stages that each end in a checkpoint, and reaching the end of a stage provides more time. Near the end of each stage, the track forks to give the player a choice of routes leading to five final destinations. The destinations represent different difficulty levels and each conclude with their own ending scene, among them the Ferrari breaking down or being presented a trophy. ## Development During the mid-1980s, Sega experienced success in the arcades with games developed by Yu Suzuki. Hang-On was a good seller and Enduro Racer had been successful enough for Sega to consider a second production run. Both are motorcycle racing games, and Out Run was Suzuki's chance to develop a car racing game. His original concept was to base the game on the American film The Cannonball Run, of which he was a fan. He disliked racing games where cars exploded on impact, and wanted gamers to enjoy the experience of driving and to feel "superior". Suzuki initially conceived the game's setting across the United States, and he requested to scout various locations there. According to Suzuki's boss, Youji Ishii, Sega president Hayao Nakayama believed the US was too unsafe, and suggested Europe as a safer option. Additionally, Suzuki concluded that the US was too "large and empty" for the game's design. He scouted Europe for two weeks in a BMW 520 for ideas. This tour included Frankfurt, Monaco, Rome, the Swiss Alps, the French Riviera, Florence, and Milan. While in Monaco, Suzuki was inspired to use the Ferrari Testarossa as the playable car in the game, so when he returned to Japan he arranged for his team to find and photograph one. They took many photos of the car from every side and recorded the sound of the engine. A small team of four programmers, a sound creator, and five graphic designers developed Out Run. Suzuki had to use only personnel that were available and not assigned to other projects at the time. As a result, Suzuki did most of the programming and planning himself, spending extra hours at the studio to complete development of the game within ten months. Suzuki believed that the most difficult part of developing the game was to make it as fun as possible, which he achieved by emphasizing the design elements of wide roads, buildings, and a radio with soundtrack selection. Four cabinet designs were released, all of which are equipped with a steering wheel, a stick shift, and acceleration and brake pedals. Two of the cabinet designs are upright, the larger of which has force feedback in the steering wheel. The other two models are sit-down motion simulator cabinets that resemble the in-game car and use a drive motor to move the main cabinet—turning and shaking according to the onscreen action. Both models feature stereo speakers mounted behind the driver's head. The arcade system board made specifically for the game is the Sega OutRun, based on the Sega System 16. Suzuki stated that he was often unable to make games based on existing hardware and that Sega would have to create a new board. He said that his "designs were always 3D from the beginning. All the calculations in the system were 3D, even from Hang-On. I calculated the position, scale, and zoom rate in 3D and converted it backwards to 2D. So I was always thinking in 3D". The game achieves its 3D effects using a sprite-scaling technique called Super Scaler technology, as used one year earlier in Hang-On. Released in September 1986, Out Run's fast sprite-scaling and 3D motion provide a smoother experience than other contemporary arcade games. Suzuki also set about simulating car features that were previously lacking in earlier driving games, so that being a skillful driver in real life would translate to being skillful in the game. They simulated features such as horsepower, torque, gear ratios and tire engineering close to real cars. They also added AI assistance for features that were difficult to control, such as drifting. For the drifting, they added details such as, if the car's tires grip the road surface too closely, the car's handling becomes too twitchy, something that wasn't appreciated in earlier driving games. Out Run's original score was composed by Hiroshi Kawaguchi, who had previously composed soundtracks for other games designed by Suzuki, including Hang-On. The soundtrack is similar in style to Latin and Caribbean music. Three selectable tracks are featured: Passing Breeze, Splash Wave, and Magical Sound Shower. An additional track, Last Wave, plays at the final score screen. Some of the game's audio samples were corrupted due to one of the master ROM chips failing, and the glitch was not noticed until Sega was preparing a soundtrack box-set for the game's 20th anniversary. The correct files were recovered from an 8-inch floppy disk, and subsequent re-releases of the game use the fixed data. Cassette tapes of the arcade soundtrack were distributed in the United Kingdom during December 1987, both with the home computer conversions and with Computer and Video Games magazine. ## Reception ### Commercial performance In Japan, Out Run topped the Game Machine charts for upright/cockpit arcade cabinets in November 1986, and remained at the top of the charts in December 1986. It was Japan's highest-grossing upright/cockpit arcade game during the latter half of 1986, and the overall seventh highest-grossing upright/cockpit arcade game of 1986. Out Run went on to become Japan's highest-grossing arcade game of 1987. In North America, it topped the RePlay dedicated arcade game chart in February 1987, and went on to become the highest-grossing arcade game of 1987 in the United States. In the United Kingdom, the game topped London's Electrocoin arcade charts for several months in 1987, from February through June, and was the top arcade game of the year. In Japan, it continued to rank among the annual highest-grossing dedicated arcade games for the next several years, ranking number three in 1988, number five in 1989, and number seven in 1990. In Europe, Out Run was the most popular arcade game during the late 1980s. Sega had sold 18,000 Out Run arcade machines worldwide by early 1987, including 3,500 units in Japan, 8,000 units in the United States, and 6,500 units in Europe and Southeast Asia. By late 1987, Out Run had sold 20,000 units worldwide, earning Sega over \$100 million (\$million adjusted for inflation) in arcade machine sales, and becoming Sega's best-selling arcade cabinet of the 1980s. By 1994, 30,000 cabinets had been sold worldwide. Sega eventually surpassed OutRun's arcade sales with Virtua Fighter (1993) and Virtua Fighter 2 (1994). The 8-bit computer game ports published by U.S. Gold sold over 200,000 copies within two weeks of release in the United Kingdom, and more than 250,000 by Christmas 1987, topping the UK's Christmas 1987 chart. Out Run became the fastest-selling and best-selling computer game in the UK that year. By early March 1988, it had sold over 350,000 copies, becoming the UK's all-time fastest-selling game up until then. In May 1988, the Atari ST version of Out Run became the first ST title to top the UK all-formats chart. The Atari ST version had sold over 25,000 copies in the UK by mid-1988. Out Run remained on the UK charts for several years. The budget price re-release from Kixx topped the all-formats chart in November 1990, and the Commodore 64 version was at number two on the all-formats chart in March 1991. It also topped the PC Engine charts during January–February 1991. In 2020, it was revealed that Out Run is the second best-selling Sega Ages title in overseas markets outside of Japan (after Sonic the Hedgehog), especially in Europe. As of 2021, the game's various home conversions have sold millions of copies worldwide. ### Critical response and accolades Out Run's arcade release received positive reviews and became one of the most popular arcade games of the year. The game won the 1987 Golden Joystick Award for Game of the Year, as well as for Arcade Game of the Year. It also won "Best Visual Enhancement in a Video Game" at the 1986 Amusement Players Association's Players Choice Awards. Clare Edgeley reviewed the arcade game in both Computer and Video Games and in Sinclair User, praising the graphics and the element of danger in the gameplay as well as the hydraulic motion simulator cabinet. Top Score newsletter called it "the most enjoyable" and "realistic driving video game ever created" while praising its innovative simulator cabinet, detailed visuals and stereo soundtrack. A review in Commodore User described it as "a great game for driving enthusiasts" and awarded it a score of 9 out of 10. Gary Penn, writing for Crash called the game "highly polished" and praised the attention to detail. In Your Sinclair, Peter Shaw praised its realism and described it as "the most frighteningly fast road race game I've ever played". Out Run was ported to numerous home consoles and computers. Computer and Video Games praised the Master System release, with the writers concluding that it had "all the thrill power of the arcade version". The Games Machine gave the Master System version a score of 72%, stating that the Master System version came closest to the original coin-op. Reviewers for Dragon described it as a "refreshing" game "that provides hours of entertainment". Computer Gaming World named it as the year's best arcade translation for Sega. Reactions to the 16-bit versions were generally positive. The Atari ST version (1988) was described by Computer and Video Games as "far from perfect", but that it came closer to the arcade original than the other ports. The 1991 Sega Genesis version also received positive reviews, scoring 90% from French gaming magazines Joypad and Joystick, as well as an 85% from Swedish magazine Svenska Hemdatornytt. The reception for the 8-bit personal computer ports by U.S. Gold was mixed. The ZX Spectrum version received positive scores from Your Sinclair and Sinclair User. Some reviewers at Crash expressed disappointment at the low quality in contrast to the arcade original. The Games Machine gave the Spectrum version a score of 61%, noting the machine's technical limitations in comparison to the Master System and Commodore systems. The Commodore versions received positive to average reviews, though Computer and Video Games described the Commodore 64 port as "rushed". The Amstrad CPC port received a score of 8 out of 40 from Computer and Video Games, which described it as a "travesty", and a 37% score from Amstrad Action where the reviewer considered it one of the worst arcade conversions ever. ## Legacy Out Run was followed by various sequels, including three arcade sequels Turbo Out Run (1989), OutRunners (1992) and Out Run 2 (2003), and several non-arcade sequels including Out Run 3-D (1988) and Out Run Europa (1991). Rad Mobile (1991) is similar to Out Run. A conversion of Out Run was under development by Hertz for the Sharp X68000 but according to former Hertz employee Tsunetomo Sugawara, it was never released due to company management cancelling its development. A 32X version was also reportedly under development by Sega, but was never released. Ports of the arcade game were released for Nintendo 3DS on March 12, 2015 and Nintendo Switch on January 9, 2019. Former Sega arcade director Akira Nagai has credited Out Run and similar games, for Sega's arcade success in the 1980s. According to Nagai, "Out Run, in particular, was really amazing for its time... Suzuki went on to make After Burner and a number of other games, but Out Run is still talked about with a special kind of wonder. With the taikan games, Sega's arcade business, which had been Sega's lowest performer in sales, gradually started to rise... For me personally, Hang-On and Out Run are my most memorable titles. They helped lift the arcade industry out of its slump, and created entirely new genres". The game's title has been adopted as a name for the synthwave music genre, which is also known as "outrun" music, inspired by the game's soundtrack which is selectable in-game as well as the game's 1980s aesthetic. French musician Kavinsky named his debut album OutRun (2013) after the game. The game has been listed among the best games of all time by Next Generation, Retro Gamer, Stuff, Time, G4, Killer List Of Videogames, Yahoo!, and NowGamer. In 2017, GamesRadar+ ranked the game 31st on their "Best Sega Genesis/Mega Drive games of all time". Writing in 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die, Joao Diniz Sanches praised Out Run's "unforgettable design and expertly tuned game balance", describing the game as "the consummate exhibit in an oversubscribed genre" and "one of the purest and most joyous experiences in video gaming". In 2015, Out Run appeared at 4th place on IGN's list of The Top 10 Most Influential Racing Games Ever, behind Pole Position, Gran Turismo and Virtua Racing. According to Luke Reilly, "traces of Out Run DNA can be found in series like Test Drive, Need for Speed, Project Gotham Racing and Burnout" as well as "modern racers like the Forza Horizon games and DriveClub". According to Jacopo Prisco of Wired UK, the influence of Out Run "is still being felt on consoles, in music, and in movies". Along with its influence on a wide range of racing games from Need for Speed and Gran Turismo to Project Gotham Racing and Forza Horizon, the game's selectable radio music has become commonplace in video games such as Grand Theft Auto series as well as the choice to drive through alternate paths in racing games.
3,302,395	Unearthed Arcana	1,173,597,305	AD&D supplement by Gary Gygax	[ "1985 books", "2004 books", "Books by Gary Gygax", "Dungeons & Dragons sourcebooks", "Role-playing game supplements introduced in 1985" ]	Unearthed Arcana (abbreviated UA) is the title shared by two hardback books published for different editions of the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role-playing game. Both were designed as supplements to the core rulebooks, containing material that expanded upon other rules. The original Unearthed Arcana was written primarily by Gary Gygax, and published by game publisher TSR in 1985 for use with the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons first edition rules. The book consisted mostly of material previously published in magazines, and included new races, classes, and other material to expand the rules in the Dungeon Masters Guide and Players Handbook. The book was notorious for its considerable number of errors, and was received negatively by the gaming press whose criticisms targeted the over-powered races and classes, among other issues. Gygax intended to use the book's content for a planned second edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons; however, much of the book's content was not reused in the second edition, which went into development shortly after Gygax's departure from TSR. A second book titled Unearthed Arcana was produced by Wizards of the Coast for Dungeons & Dragons third edition in 2004. The designers did not reproduce material from the original book, but instead attempted to emulate its purpose by providing variant rules and options to change the game itself. The title Unearthed Arcana is also used for a regular series on the official Dungeons & Dragons website that presents new playtest content for Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition. ## Advanced Dungeons & Dragons ### Development history The original Unearthed Arcana was written by Gary Gygax with design and editing contributions by Jeff Grubb and Kim Mohan, respectively, and published by TSR in 1985. Gygax reportedly produced the book to raise money as TSR was deeply in debt at the time. He announced in the March 1985 issue of Dragon magazine that Unearthed Arcana would be released in the summer of that year. He proposed the book as "an interim volume to expand the Dungeon Masters Guide and Players Handbook", as the information was spread out in several places and difficult to keep track of. Unearthed Arcana was to include material previously published in Dragon, written by Gygax and updated and revised for the book. The book would also contain previously unpublished material, some of it written by other contributors to Dragon. According to British writer Paul Cockburn, some of the material in Unearthed Arcana had been previously published in Imagine magazine. The original Unearthed Arcana contains errors in its text, which readers discovered and reported to Dragon magazine. Even some positive reviews of the book pointed out the considerable number of mistakes. Dragon editor Kim Mohan, with ideas from Gygax, Frank Mentzer, and Jeff Grubb, addressed the many errors found in the book. In the November 1985 issue of Dragon magazine, Mohan printed four pages of rules corrections as well as new supplementary material intended to be inserted into the book, and some explanations and justifications for items which were not actually errors, and compiled a two-page list of type corrections meant to be pasted into further revisions of Unearthed Arcana. Dragon also devoted the entirety of its "Sage Advice" column in the January 1987 issue to answering readers' questions about Unearthed Arcana, as a follow-up to Mohan's prior column. However, the errata were not incorporated into later printings of the manual. In 1999, a paperback reprint of the first edition was released. The original Unearthed Arcana was reproduced in a premium edition with gilded pages, released on February 19, 2013, after the premium reprints of the 1st Edition Player's Handbook, Dungeon Masters Guide, and Monster Manual. This reprint is the first printing of the book to be modified with the errata previously published in Dragon magazine incorporated into the corrected text. ### Contents The 128-page Unearthed Arcana was written for use with the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons first edition rules and was divided into two sections: one for players and one for the Dungeon Master (or "DM", the game organizer). The book provided new races, classes, and other expansion material. The book gives details on using "subraces" of the standard races, such as dark elves (drow), and deep gnomes (svirfneblin), for use as player characters and non-player characters. Unearthed Arcana includes the barbarian (found in Dragon \#63), cavalier (found in Dragon \#72), and thief-acrobat (found in Dragon \#69) character classes, and also includes expansions and revisions of the druid and ranger classes. The book presents a large addition to the range of character races, including the drow and svirfneblin. The book includes new weapons, and revised information on character level maximums for non-human player characters. Unearthed Arcana details the weapon specialization rules, in which a fighter or ranger "can adopt a weapon as a special arm, and receive bonuses in its use". The book also describes the comeliness attribute, and contains new spells. The DM's section covers suggestions for handling player characters, social class and rank tables, many new magic items, weaponless combat rules, and nonhuman deities. ### Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd edition By 1985, Gygax was planning a second edition for the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D) rules, and intended beginning work on this in 1986. He intended to incorporate material from Unearthed Arcana, Oriental Adventures, and the original Players Handbook into the new edition's Players Handbook. Gygax used the book to explore some ideas he had for the new edition, such as changing the mechanics for hit dice (the measurement of a character's "health" in the game), and altering the game's mechanics to allow the game system to work other genres, and to allow characters to have skills that complement the character classes. Shortly after announcing his intentions for second edition, Gygax was removed as TSR's president and chairman of the board. In 1986, he resigned all positions with TSR, leaving the shape and direction of the Dungeons & Dragons game to other designers. The designers of second edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons removed material from the original Players Handbook in the new edition, as well as much of the new material that had appeared in Unearthed Arcana, which they considered to be "unbalanced". The book had five printings after the release of AD&D 2nd edition with the last printing published two years after the new edition was released. ## Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition The second book to use the name Unearthed Arcana was written by Andy Collins, Jesse Decker, David Noonan, and Rich Redman, and published in February 2004 by Wizards of the Coast, for use with the Dungeons & Dragons third edition rules. Cover art was by Matt Cavotta, with interior art by Steven Belledin, Ed Cox, Wayne England, Emily Fiegenschuh, David Hudnut, Jeremy Jarvis, Doug Kovacs, John and Laura Lakey, David Martin, Dennis Crabapple McClain, Mark Nelson, James Pavelec, Steve Prescott, David Roach, Richard Sardinha, Ron Spencer, Stephen Tappin, Joel Thomas, and Ben Thompson. The designers aimed the book at experienced players and DMs looking for something new, encouraging them to customize the game's rules. The designers did not want the third edition book to be like the original Unearthed Arcana mechanically, because according to Andy Collins: "Every book on the market looks like the original Unearthed Arcana. New classes, new spells, new magic items - that's the default "recipe" for a d20 product these days. We saw no need to do that with this book." Where the original Unearthed Arcana had simply expanded the rules and options of the core game, this 224-page supplement was aimed at providing an extensive list of variant rules and options to change the standard game itself. The volume of options added was intentionally excessive; according to the designers, a Dungeon Master who reads the book must be prepared to "Drink from the fire hose" and to think before using options that may radically imbalance the game. The book ends with a checklist of the included variants, preceded by a short chapter discussing ways of transitioning among multiple games using different rulesets (one of which explicitly emulates the "Eternal Champion" stories of Michael Moorcock). ## Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition The Unearthed Arcana title has been used for a semi-regular series of digital releases at the official D&D website that began in February 2015; the series presents new, work-in-progress content such as class archetypes, playable races, and rule variants, similar to the playtest process that preceded the release of 5th edition. Much of the information in Xanathar's Guide to Everything (2017) and Tasha's Cauldron of Everything (2020) was developed through the public Unearthed Arcana playtest. On the playtest subclasses developed for Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, Jeremy Crawford said "almost every single one made it into the game". Starting in January 2018, Unearthed Arcana content was generally added to D&D Beyond approximately one week after it was released on the official D&D website. Once the playtest period has concluded for Unearthed Arcana content (whether it is published in a book or retired, as determined by Wizards of the Coast), it is archived on D&D Beyond; existing character sheets already using the content are able to continue doing so, but the archived playtest content can not be newly added to a character. Since August 2022, Unearthed Arcana articles have featured One D&D playtest material with releases now exclusive to D&D Beyond. In August 2023, Crawford stated that since originally launching Unearthed Arcana they have "received more than 500,000 surveys from players based on their time spent with the" playtest content. ### List of Unearthed Arcana ## Reception Reaction to the Unearthed Arcana hardcover was often critical. According to Lawrence Schick, in his 1991 book Heroic Worlds, "Many players regard the new character classes introduced in this volume as overly powerful and out of line with those in the Player's Handbook." Paul Cockburn reviewed the original Unearthed Arcana in issue 73 of White Dwarf magazine (January 1986), rating it 4 out of 10 overall. He summed up the book's contents by calling them "A rules extension package of reprints, most of which add very little of interest or value to anybody's game." William B. Haddon's review of the third edition Unearthed Arcana on RPGnet lauded the book's content while criticizing the interest level of the content as "very flat". He found the power level unbalanced for each of the new sub-systems introduced, and found little in the suggested rules that he wanted to use. Viktor Coble listed Unearthed Arcana as \#10 on CBR's 2021 "D&D: 10 Best Supplemental Handbooks" list, stating that "If there is ever a supplemental guide to include in a player's library, it's any of the "Unearthed Arcana" editions. They're by far one of the most useful handbooks D&D ever puts out, and are rarely a regretted addition."
30,944,549	Al Jalali Fort	1,163,340,566	Fort in the harbor of Old Muscat, Oman.	[ "1586 establishments in the Portuguese Empire", "Buildings and structures completed in 1586", "Buildings and structures in Muscat, Oman", "Forts in Oman", "Old Muscat", "Portuguese colonial architecture in Oman", "Tourist attractions in Muscat, Oman" ]	Al Jalali Fort, or Ash Sharqiya Fort, is a fort in the harbor of Old Muscat, Oman. The fort was built by the Portuguese under Philip I of Portugal in the 1580s on an earlier Omani fortress to protect the harbor after Muscat had twice been sacked by Ottoman forces. It fell to Omani forces in 1650. During the civil wars between 1718 and 1747, the fort was twice captured by Persians who had been invited to assist one of the rival Imams. The fort was extensively rebuilt later. At times, Al Jalali served as a refuge or a jail for a member of the royal family. For much of the 20th century it was used as Oman's main prison, but this function ended in the 1970s. Fort al-Jalali was restored in 1983 and converted into a private museum of Omani cultural history that is accessible only to dignitaries visiting the country. Exhibits include cannons, old muskets and matchlocks, maps, rugs and other artifacts. ## Etymology The Portuguese called the structure Forte de São João (Fort St. John). The origin of the present name "Al Jalali" is disputed. One theory is that it comes from the Arabic Al Jalal, which means "great beauty". Legend states that it was named after a Baluchi commander called Mir Jalal Khan from the tribe of Hooth, so was Fort Al-Mirani named after his brother, Mir Miran, who also a commander. Al Jalali Fort is also known as the Ash Sharqiya Fort. ## Location "Muscat" means "anchorage". True to its name, Old Muscat is a natural port in a strategic location between the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean. It lies on the coast of the Gulf of Oman on a bay about 700 metres (2,300 ft) long, protected from the sea by a rocky island. The port is surrounded by mountains, making it difficult to access from the landward side. Muscat may have been described by the geographer Ptolemy in the 2nd century, who noted a "concealed harbor" in the region. Al Jalali Fort lies on a rocky outcrop on the east side of the Muscat harbor. It faces Fort Al-Mirani, which is built on another outcrop on the west side. Muscat was strongly defended against attack from the sea by these twin forts, by the Muttrah fort further to the west and by other fortifications on the rocky ridges surrounding the bay. Until recently, the fort was only accessible from the harbor side by way of a steep flight of stone steps. Land reclamation on the seaward side of the rock has now provided space for a heliport. A funicular railway makes the fort more accessible. ## History ### Background In the early 15th century Muscat was a minor port, used by ships as a place to collect water. By the start of the 16th century it was becoming an important trading center. At this time the interior of Oman was ruled by an Arab Imam, but the coast on which Muscat lay was subject to the Persian King of Hormuz. In 1497 the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama found a route around the southern cape of Africa and east to India and the Spice Islands. The Portuguese quickly began trying to establish a monopoly on the trade in spices, silk and other goods. They came into conflict with Mamluk Egypt, whose trade with Europe through the Red Sea was threatened. Hormuz was the main center for the trade route with modern Iraq and Iran through the Persian Gulf. The Portuguese wanted control of this route, too. On 10 August 1507, an expedition of six ships under Admiral Afonso de Albuquerque left the newly established Portuguese base on Socotra with Hormuz as the objective. The Portuguese sailed along the Oman coast destroying ships and looting the towns. At Qurayyat, which they took after a hard fight, the Portuguese mutilated their captives, killed the inhabitants regardless of sex or age, and despoiled and burned the town. Muscat, at first, surrendered unconditionally to avoid the same fate. However, the people withdrew their submission when reinforcements arrived. Albuquerque launched a successful assault against Muscat. He slaughtered most of the inhabitants, and then plundered and burned the town. The Portuguese continued along the coast. The governor of Sohar agreed to transfer his allegiance to the king of Portugal and to pay tribute. The Portuguese arrived at Hormuz on 26 September 1507. They took the town after fierce resistance on 10 October 1507. Albuquerque signed a treaty under which the Portuguese were free of customs duties and could build a fort and trading factory at Hormuz. Muscat now became a regular port of call for the Portuguese. Diogo Fernandes de Beja came there in 1512 to collect the tribute. Albuquerque, now Viceroy of India, visited in March 1515. In 1520 a fleet of twenty three Portuguese ships anchored in the harbor en route from the Red Sea to Hormuz. When a general revolt against Portuguese rule over Hormuz broke out in November 1521, Muscat was the one place where the Portuguese were not attacked. ### Portuguese stronghold In 1527 the Portuguese began to construct a barracks, warehouse and chapel at Muscat, apparently completed in 1531. A force of four Ottoman galiots entered the harbor in 1546 and bombarded the town, but did not land. To make their base more secure the Portuguese sent an engineer to build a fort to the west of the harbor, where al-Mirani stands today. The Portuguese built this first Muscat fort in 1550 on perhaps an earlier existing fortress mentioned by Albuquerque in his description of Muscat. In April 1552 an Ottoman fleet of twenty four galleys and four supply ships under Piri Reis left Suez en route to Hormuz, aiming to eliminate Portuguese presence in the region. An advance force landed at Muscat in July 1552. After an eighteen-day siege of Muscat the town fell and the fort was destroyed. The commander, João de Lisboa, and 128 Portuguese were taken captive. The main Ottoman fleet arrived, and the combined fleet went on to Hormuz. The Portuguese regained the town two years later, and in 1554 repulsed another attack by the Turks. Fort Al Jalali was built after the Ottomans sacked Muscat for a second time in 1582. In 1587 Captain Belchior Calaça was sent to Muscat to build the fortress, which was named Forte de São João. The top of the prominence on which the fort stands was first leveled, and the rock was scarped. Calaça built a cistern to hold water for the occupants and armed the fort with cannon. It seems to have been built on older foundations. The main improvement made by the Portuguese was to construct a gun deck looking over the harbor. Fort al-Jalali and the twin Fort al-Mirani were both completed between 1586 and 1588. The Portuguese faced growing competition in the region from English and Dutch traders. In 1622 a joint Persian-English force took Hormuz. After this the Portuguese built forts in other ports on the Omani coast, although they abandoned most of them in 1633–34, concentrating on defending Muscat. After 1622 the Portuguese began to strengthen Fort al Jalali, apparently with the intention of making it the main fort. However, in 1623 Forte do Almirante (today's Fort Al-Mirani) was still considered the more important of the two forts, and was used as a residence in the hot weather by the governor of Muscat. In 1625 the Portuguese built walls and towers around Muscat to improve the defenses. Remains of these fortifications exist today. Muscat was a drain on Portuguese finances, with its requirement to maintain large military and naval forces to defend it. Trade did not prosper as hoped since the Persian market was closed to them until 1630. By then the Dutch and English dominated trade in the Persian Gulf. Nasir bin Murshid (r. 1624–49) was the first Imam of the Yaruba dynasty in Oman, elected in 1624. He was able to unify the tribes with a common goal of expelling the Portuguese. Nasir bin Murshid drove the Portuguese out of all their bases in Oman except Muscat. He was succeeded by his cousin Sultan bin Saif in 1649. In December 1649 the forces of Sultan bin Saif captured the town of Muscat. About 600 Portuguese managed to escape by sea, while others fled into Forte do Almirante (al Mirani). They surrendered on 23 January 1650. The capture of Muscat from the Portuguese marked the beginning of an expansion of Omani sea power in which the Portuguese possessions in India and East Africa soon came under threat. ### Persian invasions After the death in 1718 of the fifth Yaruba Imam of Oman, Sultan bin Saif II, a struggle began between rival contenders for the Imamate. Fort al-Jalali was damaged during this civil war. The country became divided between Saif bin Sultan II and his cousin Bal'arab bin Himyar, rival Imams. Finding his power dwindling, Saif bin Sultan II asked for help from Nader Shah of Persia. In 1738 the two forts were surrendered to the Persian forces. The Persians reembarked for Persia, taking their loot with them. A few years later Saif bin Sultan II, who had been deposed, again called for help. A Persian expedition arrived at Julfar around October 1742. The Persians made an unsuccessful attempt to take Muscat, defeated by a stratagem of the new Imam Sultan bin Murshid. Later in 1743 the Persians returned, bringing Saif bin Sultan II with them. They took the town of Muscat, but the al-Jalali and al-Mirani forts held out and Saif bin Sultan II would not order them to yield. Omani historians say that the Persian commander, Mirza Taki, invited Saif to a banquet on his ship. Saif became stupefied by wine and his seal was taken from him. It was used to forge orders to the forts' commanders to surrender, a ruse that was successful. ### Later history Ahmad bin Said al-Busaidi, the first ruler of the Al Said dynasty, blockaded Muscat and captured the forts in 1749. He renovated them, particularly al-Jalali. The function of al-Jalali changed from passive defense of the harbor to a base from which troops could be dispatched. In the decades that followed the large central buildings and the round towers were added. Early in 1781 two of Ahmad bin Said's sons, Sultan and Saif, took control of the forts of al-Mirani and al-Jalali. When the governor of Muscat tried to recover the forts, Sultan and Saif began a damaging bombardment of the town. The two brothers gained the support of the powerful Sheikh Saqar, who marched on the capital in April 1781. Their father agreed to an amnesty, letting his rebellious sons hold both the forts. He changed his mind and took al Mirani, while the brothers held al Jelali for some months. Sultan and Saif then kidnapped their brother Said bin Ahmad and imprisoned him in al Jalali. The Imam, their father, hurried to Muscat which he reached in January 1782. He ordered the commander of al Mirani to fire on al Jalali while his ships joined in from the east of the fort. While this was in progress Said bin Ahmad bribed his jailer and escaped. Isolated and without a hostage, the two brothers agreed to surrender. The Imam took Saif and held him under surveillance to prevent a fresh rebellion. Said bin Ahmad ruled from 1783 to 1789. During his reign his son was held prisoner in Fort al-Jalali for a period by the governor of Muscat, until another of his sons managed to free him. The fort is mentioned several times in the history of 19th century Oman. While the ruler of Oman was away on a pilgrimage to Mecca early in 1803, his nephew Badr bin Saif made an attempt to get control of Fort Jalali. The story is that he was being smuggled into the fort in a large box, but was detected by a Hindu trader. He managed to escape and took refuge in Qatar. In June 1849 the governor of Sohar made a treaty with the British resident to suppress the slave trade. This triggered a revolt by the religious party in which the governor was killed and his father, Hamad, was made governor. The Sultan of Oman, then residing in Zanzibar, arranged for Hamad to be seized and thrown in jail in Fort al Jalali. Hamad died on 23 April 1850, either from starvation or from poison. In 1895 the tribes sacked Muscat. Sultan Faisal bin Turki took refuge in Fort al-Jalali until his brother, who was holding Fort al-Mirani, regained control of the town. For most of the 20th century Fort al-Jalali was the main prison in Oman, holding about 200 prisoners. Some were Omanis from the interior captured during the Jebel Akhdar War (1954–59), or taken after that war. Other prisoners were taken during the Dhofar Rebellion (1962–76). It was the most notorious of Omani prisons, which were known for their appalling conditions. Colonel David Smiley, commander of the Sultan's armed forces at Muscat, called the prison "a veritable hellhole". In 1963 forty four prisoners escaped in a well-planned break-out, but most were quickly recaptured, handicapped by their weakened physical condition. In 1969 a guard helped two members of the royal family escape, but they were caught after a few days. The prison was closed in the 1970s. ## Structure and exhibits Fort al-Jalali was restored in 1983. Today little remains of the Portuguese period apart from a few inscriptions in that language. It has been converted into a museum of Omani cultural history. It is open to important people such as visiting heads of state, but not to the public. The fort is made up of two towers with a connecting wall pierced by gun ports for cannon. The interior is now landscaped with fountains and pools, trees and gardens. The result has been described as "Disneyfication". In the center of the fort there is a courtyard planted with trees. Around it on various levels are rooms, enclosures and towers accessible through a complex set of stairways that may have once had a defensive purpose. Massive doors with protruding iron spikes protect sections of the fort. Exhibits include cannons at the gun ports with shot, ropes and firing equipment, as well as old muskets and matchlocks. There are maps and historical illustrations, including a plaque that depicts the winds and the currents in Muscat bay. One room, with a ceiling made from palm-logs, is filled with cultural relics of Oman. The central square tower holds the main museum exhibits including rugs, pottery, jewelry, weapons, household utensils and incense holders. A dining hall overlooks the courtyard for use by the distinguished visitors. An old breeze-maker has been preserved in this room, once manually operated but now mechanized. The fort plays a role in special events where the royal dhow and yacht sail in through the harbor, fireworks are launched and bagpipers play on the battlements. ## See also - Al Alam Palace
1,548,464	Princess Victoria Melita of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha	1,173,563,504	Grand Duchess Victoria Feodorovna of Russia (1876–1936)	[ "1876 births", "1936 deaths", "Anti-communists from the Russian Empire", "British princesses", "British women in World War I", "Burials at Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral, Saint Petersburg", "Companions of the Order of the Crown of India", "Daughters of monarchs", "Duchesses of Holstein-Gottorp", "Exiled royalty", "German anti-communists", "Grand Crosses of the Order of the Crown (Romania)", "Grand Duchesses of Hesse", "House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (United Kingdom)", "Ladies of Justice of the Order of St John", "Ladies of the Royal Order of Victoria and Albert", "Members of the Royal Red Cross", "People from Attard", "Princesses of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha", "Remarried royal consorts", "Russian grand duchesses by marriage", "White Russian emigrants to Finland", "White Russian emigrants to France", "White Russian emigrants to Germany", "White Russian emigrants to Switzerland", "Women who experienced pregnancy loss" ]	Grand Duchess Victoria Feodorovna of Russia (born Princess Victoria Melita of Edinburgh; 25 November 1876 – 2 March 1936), was the third child and second daughter of Alfred, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, and Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna of Russia. She was a granddaughter of both Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom and Emperor Alexander II of Russia. Born a British princess, Victoria spent her early life in England and lived for three years in Malta, where her father served in the Royal Navy. In 1889 the family moved to Coburg, where Victoria's father became the reigning duke in 1893. In her teens Victoria fell in love with her first cousin Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich of Russia (the son of her maternal uncle), but his Orthodox Christian faith discouraged marriage between first cousins. Bowing to family pressure, Victoria married her paternal first cousin Ernest Louis, Grand Duke of Hesse and by Rhine, in 1894. The marriage failed – Victoria scandalized the royal families of Europe when she divorced her husband in 1901. The couple's only child, Princess Elisabeth, died of typhoid fever in 1903. Victoria married Kirill in 1905. They wed without the formal approval of Britain's King Edward VII (as the Royal Marriages Act 1772 would have required), and in defiance of Russia's Emperor Nicholas II. In retaliation, the Tsar stripped Kirill of his offices and honours, also initially banishing the couple from Russia. They had two daughters, Maria and Kira, and settled in Paris before being allowed to visit Russia in 1909. In 1910 they moved to Russia, where Nicholas recognized Victoria as Grand Duchess Victoria Feodorovna. After the fall of the Russian monarchy in 1917 they escaped to Finland (then still part of the Russian Empire) where she gave birth to her only son, Vladimir, in August 1917. In exile they lived for some years among her relatives in Germany, and from the late 1920s on an estate they bought in Saint-Briac in Brittany. In 1926 Kirill proclaimed himself Russian emperor in exile, and Victoria supported her husband's claims. Victoria died after suffering a stroke while visiting her daughter Maria in Amorbach (Lower Franconia). ## Early life Victoria was born on 25 November 1876 in San Anton Palace in Attard, Malta, hence her second name, Melita. Her father, who was stationed on the island as an officer in the Royal Navy, was Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, the second son of Queen Victoria. Her mother was Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna, the only surviving daughter of Alexander II of Russia and Marie of Hesse. As a grandchild of the British monarch, Victoria Melita was styled Her Royal Highness Princess Victoria of Edinburgh. Within her family, she was always known as "Ducky". At the time of her birth, she was 10th in the line of succession to the British throne. The princess was christened on 1 January 1877 at San Anton Palace by a Royal Navy chaplain. Her godparents included her paternal grandmother, who was represented by a proxy. After the Duke's service in Malta was over, the family returned to England, where they lived for the next few years. They divided their time between Eastwell Park, their country home in Kent, and Clarence House, their residence in London facing Buckingham Palace. Eastwell, a large estate of 2,500 acres near Ashford, with its forest and park was the children's favorite residence. In January 1886, shortly after Princess Victoria turned nine, the family left England when her father was appointed commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean naval squadron, based on Malta. For the next three years, the family lived at the San Anton Palace in Malta, Victoria's birthplace. The marriage of Victoria's parents was unhappy. The Duke was taciturn, unfaithful, prone to drinking and emotionally detached from his family. Victoria's mother was independent-minded and cultured. Although she was unsentimental and strict, the Duchess was a devoted mother and the most important person in her children's lives. As a child, Victoria had a difficult temperament. She was shy, serious and sensitive. In the judgment of her sister Marie: "This passionate child was often misunderstood." Princess Victoria Melita was talented at drawing and painting and learned to play the piano. She was particularly close to Marie. The two sisters would remain very close throughout their lives. They contrasted in appearance and personality. Victoria was dark and moody while Marie was blonde and easy-going. Although she was one year younger, Victoria was taller and seemed to be the older of the two. ## Youth in Coburg As a son of Queen Victoria's deceased husband, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Victoria Melita's father was in the line of succession to Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, the sovereign German duchy ruled by Albert's elder brother, Ernest II, until his death in 1893. Prince Alfred became heir presumptive to the duchy when his older brother, the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII), relinquished his Saxon succession rights in favour of his younger brothers. Alfred and his family therefore moved to Coburg in 1889. Their mother immediately began attempting to "Germanise" her daughters by installing a new governess, buying them plain clothing, and having them confirmed in the German Lutheran church, even though they had previously been raised as Anglicans. The children rebelled and some of the new restrictions were eased. The teenage Victoria was a "tall, dark girl, with violet eyes ... with the assuredness of an Empress and the high spirits of a tomboy," according to one observer. Victoria had "too little chin to be conventionally beautiful," in the opinion of one of her biographers, but "she had a good figure, deep blue eyes, and dark complexion." In 1891, Victoria travelled with her mother to the funeral of her maternal aunt Grand Duchess Alexandra Georgievna of Russia. There Victoria met her first cousin Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich. Although the two were deeply attracted to each other, Victoria's mother was reluctant to allow her to marry him because the Russian Orthodox faith forbids the marriage of first cousins. She was also suspicious of the morality of the Romanov men. When her teenage daughters were impressed by their handsome cousins, their mother warned them that the Russian grand dukes did not make good husbands. Soon after her sister Marie was married to Crown Prince Ferdinand of Romania, a search was made for a suitable husband for Victoria. Her visit to her grandmother Queen Victoria at Balmoral Castle in the autumn of 1891 coincided with a visit by her cousin Prince Ernest Louis of Hesse, heir apparent to the grand ducal throne of Hesse and by Rhine. Both were artistic and fun loving, got along well and even shared a birthday. The Queen, observing this, was very keen for her two grandchildren to marry. ## Grand Duchess of Hesse `Eventually, Victoria and Ernest bowed to their families' pressure and married on 19 April 1894 at Schloss Ehrenburg in Coburg. The wedding was a large affair, with most of the royal families of Europe attending, including Victoria Melita's grandmother Queen Victoria, her aunt Empress Frederick of Germany, her cousin Kaiser Wilhelm II and her uncle Albert Edward, Prince of Wales. Victoria became Grand Duchess of Hesse and by Rhine, Ernest having ascended the throne in 1892. Her wedding is also significant since at the same time the official engagement of the future Tsar Nicholas II of Russia to Ernst's younger sister, Alix, was proclaimed. Together Victoria and Ernst had two children, a daughter, Princess Elisabeth of Hesse and by Rhine, whom they nicknamed Ella, born on 11 March 1895, and a stillborn son, born on 25 May 1900.` Victoria and Ernest proved incompatible. Victoria despaired of her husband's lack of affection towards her, while Ernest devoted much of his attention to their daughter, whom he adored. Elisabeth, who physically resembled her mother, preferred the company of her father to Victoria. Ernest and Victoria both enjoyed entertaining and frequently held house parties for young friends. Their unwritten rule was that anyone over thirty "was old and out." Formality was dispensed with and royal house guests were referred to by their nicknames and encouraged to do as they wished. Victoria and Ernest cultivated friends who were progressive artists and intellectuals as well as those who enjoyed fun and frolic. Victoria's cousin Prince Nicholas of Greece and Denmark remembered one stay there as "the jolliest, merriest house party to which I have ever been in my life." Victoria was, however, less enthusiastic about fulfilling her public role. She avoided answering letters, put off visits to elderly relations whose company she did not enjoy, and talked to people who amused her at official functions while ignoring people of higher standing whom she found boring. Victoria's inattention to her duties provoked quarrels with Ernst. The young couple had loud, physical fights. The volatile Victoria shouted, threw tea trays, smashed china against the wall, and tossed anything that was handy at Ernest during their arguments. Victoria sought relief in her love for horses and long gallops over the countryside on a hard-to-control stallion named Bogdan. While she was in Russia for the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II, Victoria's affection for Kirill was also rekindled. She enjoyed flirting with him at the balls and celebrations that marked the coronation. ## Divorce Victoria and Ernest's suffered a further blow in 1897, when Victoria returned home from a visit to her sister Queen Marie of Romania and reportedly caught Ernest in bed with a male servant. She did not make her accusation public, but told a niece that "no boy was safe, from the stable hands to the kitchen help. He slept quite openly with them all." Queen Victoria was saddened when she heard of trouble in the marriage from Sir George Buchanan, her chargé d'affaires, but refused to consent to her grandchildren's divorce because of their daughter, Elisabeth. Efforts to rekindle the marriage failed and, when Queen Victoria died in January 1901, significant opposition to the end of the marriage was removed. Ernest, who had at first resisted the divorce, came to believe it was the only possible step. "Now that I am calmer I see the absolute impossibility of going on leading a life which was killing her and driving me nearly mad," Ernest wrote to his elder sister Princess Louis of Battenberg. "For to keep up your spirits and a laughing face while ruin is staring you in the eyes and misery is tearing your heart to pieces is a struggle which is fruitless. I only tried for her sake. If I had not loved her so, I would have given it up long ago." Princess Louis later wrote that she was less surprised by the divorce than Ernest was. "Though both had done their best to make a success of their marriage, it had been a failure ... [T]heir characters and temperaments were quite unsuited to each other and I had noticed how they were gradually drifting apart." The divorce caused scandal in the royal circles of Europe. Tsar Nicholas wrote to his mother that even death would have been better than "the general disgrace of a divorce." `After her divorce, Victoria went to live with her mother at Coburg and at her house in the French Riviera. She and Ernest shared custody of Elisabeth, who spent six months of each year with each parent. Elisabeth blamed Victoria for the divorce and Victoria had a difficult time reconnecting with her daughter. Ernest wrote in his memoirs that Elisabeth hid under a sofa, crying, before one visit to her mother. The Grand Duke assured the child that her mother loved her too. Elisabeth responded, "Mama says she loves me, but you do love me." Ernest remained silent and did not correct Elisabeth's impression. ` Elisabeth died at age eight and a half of typhoid fever during a November 1903 visit to Tsar Nicholas II and his family at their Polish hunting lodge. The doctor advised the Tsar's family to notify the child's mother of her illness, but it is rumored that the Tsarina delayed in sending a telegram. Victoria received the final telegram notifying her of the child's death just as she was preparing to travel to Poland to be at her bedside. At Elisabeth's funeral, Victoria removed her Hessian Order, a medallion, and placed it on her daughter's coffin as a final gesture "that she had made a final break with her old home." ## Remarriage `After Victoria's divorce from Ernest, Grand Duke Kirill, whom Victoria had seen on all her subsequent visits to Russia, was discouraged by his parents from trying to keep a close relationship with her. Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna told Kirill to keep Victoria as his mistress and marry someone else. ` A few months later, war broke out between Russia and Japan. As a senior member of the navy, Kirill was sent on active service to the front in the Russo-Japanese War. His ship was blown up by a Japanese mine while entering Port Arthur and he was one of the few survivors. Sent home to recover, the Tsar finally allowed him permission to leave Russia and he left for Coburg to be with Victoria. The narrow escape from death had hardened Kirill's determination to marry Victoria. "To those over whom the shadow of death has passed, life has a new meaning," Kirill wrote in his memoirs. "It is like daylight. And I was now within visible reach of fulfillment of the dream of my life. Nothing would cheat me of it now. I had gone through much. Now, at last, the future lay radiant before me." The couple married on 8 October 1905 in Tegernsee. It was a simple ceremony, with Victoria's mother, her sister Beatrice, and a friend, Count Adlerburg, in attendance, along with servants. The couple's uncle Grand Duke Alexei Alexandrovich of Russia was invited, without being told the reason, but did not arrive until after the ceremony. Tsar Nicholas II responded to the marriage by stripping Kirill of his imperial allowance and expelling him from the Russian navy. The Tsarina was outraged at her former sister-in-law and said she would never receive Victoria, "a woman who had behaved so disgracefully", or Kirill. The couple retired to Paris, where they purchased a house off the Champs-Élysées and lived off the income provided by their parents. Victoria, who had matured as she entered her 30s, decided to convert to the Russian Orthodox Church in 1907, a decision that thrilled both her mother and her husband. Three days later the first of their three children, Maria Kirillovna, was born. She was named after both her grandmothers and nicknamed "Masha". Their second daughter, Kira Kirillovna, was born in Paris in 1909. Victoria and Kirill, who had hoped for a son, were disappointed to have a girl, but named their daughter after her father. ## Grand Duchess of Russia `Nicholas II reinstated Kirill after deaths in the Russian imperial family promoted Kirill to third in the line of succession to the Russian throne. Kirill and Victoria were allowed in Russia, Victoria was granted the title of Grand Duchess Victoria Feodorovna, and in May 1910 the couple arrived in St Petersburg. The new grand duchess enjoyed entertaining at evening dinners and lavish balls attended by the cream of Saint Petersburg society. Victoria had an artistic talent that she applied to home decoration in her several elaborate residences, which she arranged attractively. She decorated, gardened, and rode and also enjoyed painting, particularly watercolors.` Victoria fit in within the Russian aristocracy and the circle of her mother-in-law Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna. As French was frequently spoken in high circles, Victoria never completely mastered the Russian language. Although she was a first cousin of both Nicholas II, on her mother's side, and to Empress Alexandra, on her father's side, the relationship with them was neither close nor warm. As Kirill became a keen auto racer, the couple often took trips by car; a favorite pastime was traveling through the Baltic provinces. Victoria dreaded the long Russian winter with its short days, and she traveled abroad, frequently visiting her sister Marie in Romania and her mother in the south of France or in Coburg. Victoria and her husband had a close relationship with their daughters, Maria and Kira. The family was spending the summer of 1914 on their yacht in the Gulf of Finland and were in Riga when the war broke out. ## War During World War I, Victoria worked as a Red Cross nurse and organized a motorized ambulance unit that was known for its efficiency. Victoria frequently visited the front near Warsaw and she occasionally carried out her duties under enemy fire. Kirill, for his part, was also in Poland, assigned to the naval department of Admiral Russin, member of the staff of Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, commander in chief of the Russian army. Kirill and Victoria had always shared their relatives' distaste for the Tsar and Tsarina's friendship with the starets Grigori Rasputin. The Tsarina believed Rasputin healed her son of his hemophiliac attacks with his prayers. Victoria told her sister, Queen Marie of Romania, that the Tsar's court was "looked upon as a sick man refusing every doctor and every help." When Rasputin was murdered in December 1916, Victoria and Kirill signed a letter along with other relatives asking the Tsar to show leniency to Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich of Russia, one of those implicated in the murder. The Tsar denied their request. Twice during the war Victoria visited Romania, where her sister Marie was now queen, volunteering aid for war victims. Victoria returned to Saint Petersburg in February 1917. Kirill had been appointed commander of the Naval Guards, quartered in Saint Petersburg, so he could be with his family for some time. Although publicly loyal to the Tsar, Victoria and Kirill began to meet in private with other relatives to discuss the best way to save the monarchy. ## Revolution At the end of the "February Revolution" of 1917, Tsar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate and political turmoil followed. Victoria wrote to Queen Marie of Romania in February 1917 that their home was surrounded by a mob, "yet heart and soul we are with this movement of freedom which at the time probably signs our own death warrant ... We personally are losing all, our lives changed at one blow and yet we are almost leading the movement." By March 1917, the revolution had spread all over Petrograd (Saint Petersburg). Kirill led his naval unit to the Provisional Government on 14 March 1917, which was obliged to share headquarters with the new Petrograd Soviet, and swore loyalty to its leadership, hoping to restore order and preserve the monarchy. It was an action which later provoked criticism from some members of the family, who viewed it as treason. Victoria supported her husband and felt he was doing the right thing. She also sympathized with the people who wanted to reform the government. Kirill was forced to resign his command of the Naval Guards, but nevertheless his men remained faithful and they continued to guard Kirill and Victoria's palace on Glinka Street. Close to despair, Victoria wrote to her sister Marie of Romania that they had "neither pride nor hope, nor money, nor future, and the dear past blotted out by the frightful present; nothing is left, nothing." Anxious for their safety, Kirill and Victoria decided that the best thing to do was to leave Russia. They chose Finland as the best possible place to go. Although a territory of the Russian Empire, Finland possessed its own government and constitution, so in a way it would be like being in Russia and not being at the same time. They had already been once invited to Haikko, a beautiful estate, near Porvoo, a small town on the south coast of Finland, not far away from Helsinki. The Provisional Government permitted them to leave, though they were not allowed to take anything of value with them. They sewed jewels into the family's clothing, hoping they would not be discovered by the authorities. ## Exile After two weeks in Haikko, the family moved to a rented house in Porvoo where, in August 1917, Victoria gave birth to Grand Duke Vladimir Kirillovich of Russia, her only son and the heir to the dynasty. The family remained in Finland, a former grand duchy under Russian rule, which had declared its independence in December 1917. They hoped that the White Russians would prevail. They gradually ran out of supplies and had to beg for help from family. In July 1918, Victoria wrote to her first cousin, Crown Princess Margaret of Sweden, begging her to send baby food so she could feed Vladimir. She was alienated from England because she felt her English relatives had not done enough to help the Romanovs. Victoria pleaded with her cousin King George V to help the White Russians retake the country. In a letter to the King, Lord Acton, the British minister in Helsinki, noted the toll the revolution had taken on Victoria. She "looked aged and battered and has lost much of her beauty, which is not astonishing considering all that she has gone through." After more than two years living under strained conditions, in the autumn of 1919 Victoria and Kirill left Finland and went to Germany. In Munich they were reunited with Victoria's mother and the family group moved to Zurich in September 1919. With the death of Victoria's mother, she inherited her villa, Chateau Fabron in Nice and her residence in Coburg, the Edinburg Palais. In the following years the exiled family divided their time between these two places. While in Germany, Victoria showed an interest in the Nazi Party, which appealed to her because of its anti-Bolshevik stance and her hope that the movement might help restore the Russian monarchy. She attended a Nazi rally in Coburg in 1922. She was likely unaware of the most sinister aspects of the Nazi Party. ## Claims to the Russian throne Kirill suffered a nervous breakdown in 1923 and Victoria nursed him back to health. She encouraged his dreams of restoring the monarchy in Russia and becoming tsar. At Saint-Briac Kirill, aware of the murders of Tsar Nicholas II and his only son, officially declared himself the Guardian of the Throne in 1924. Victoria went on a trip to the United States in 1924, hoping to raise American support for restoration of the monarchy. Her efforts evoked little response, due to the isolationism prevalent in the United States during the 1920s. She continued in her efforts to help Kirill restore the monarchy and also sold her artwork to raise money for the household. By the mid-1920s, Victoria worried over the prospects of her children. Maria, her eldest daughter, married the head of one of Germany's mediatized families, Karl, Hereditary Prince of Leiningen on 25 November 1925, Victoria's 49th birthday. Victoria was at her daughter's bedside when she gave birth to her first child, Emich Kirill, in 1926 (later father of claimant to the Russian throne, Prince Karl Emich of Leiningen). In the mid-1920s, the German government established relations with Moscow and the presence of Kirill and his wife, pretenders to the Russian throne, became an embarrassment. Although the Bavarian government rejected pressures to expel the Russian claimant, Kirill and Victoria decided to establish their permanent residence in France. In the summer of 1926 they moved to Saint-Briac on the Breton coast, where they had spent their summer vacations. The remoteness of Brittany provided both privacy and security. They bought a large house on the outskirts of the town and gave it a Breton name, Ker Argonid, Villa Victoria. The resort town of Saint-Briac was a favorite spot for retired British citizens who wanted to live well on a limited income. Victoria made friends among the Britons as well as the French and other foreign residents of the town. Though at first her manner could seem haughty, residents soon discovered that Victoria was more approachable than her husband. Their friends treated them with deference, curtsying or calling them by their imperial titles. They lived a secluded country life, finding it more agreeable than at Coburg. Victoria was exceedingly protective of her son Vladimir, upon whom her hopes for the future rested. She would not let him attend school because she was worried about his safety and because she wanted him to be brought up as Romanov grand dukes were prior to the revolution. Instead, she hired a tutor for him. She also refused to let him be educated for a future career. In return for her devotion, Vladimir loved and respected his mother. "We adored our parents and their love for us was infinite," Vladimir wrote after their deaths. "All the hardships and bitterness we had to endure in the years were fully covered by our mutual love. We were proud of (them)." ## Last years In Saint-Briac, during the summer, Kirill played golf and he and Victoria joined in picnics and excursions. They were part of the social life of the community, going out to play bridge and organizing theatricals. During the winter Victoria and her husband enjoyed visiting nearby Dinard and invited friends home for parties and games. However, it was rumored in town that Kirill went to Paris "for the occasional fling". Victoria, who had devoted her life to Kirill, was devastated when she discovered in 1933 that her husband had been unfaithful to her, according to correspondence of her sister Marie of Romania. She kept up a façade for the sake of her children, including her teenage son Vladimir, but was unable to forgive Kirill's betrayal. Victoria suffered a stroke soon after attending the christening of her fifth grandchild, Mechtilde of Leiningen, in February 1936. Family and friends arrived, but nothing could be done. When her closest sister reached her bedside Victoria was asked if she was glad Marie had come, to which Victoria haltingly replied, "It makes all the difference." However, she "shuddered away from Kirill's touch," wrote Marie. She died on 1 March 1936. Queen Marie eulogized her sister in a letter after her death: "The whole thing was tragic beyond imagination, a tragic end to a tragic life. She carried tragedy within her – she had tragic eyes – always – even as a little girl – but we loved her enormously, there was something mighty about her – she was our Conscience." Victoria was buried in the ducal family mausoleum at ' in Coburg, until her remains were transferred to the Grand Ducal Mausoleum of the Peter and Paul Fortress in Saint Petersburg on 7 March 1995. Her husband was intensely lonely after her death. The marriage of their daughter, Kira, to Louis Ferdinand, Prince of Prussia, in 1938 was a bright spot for Kirill, who saw it as the joining of two dynasties. However, Kirill died just two years after his wife. Kirill, though he had been unfaithful, still loved and missed the wife he had depended so much upon and passed his remaining years writing memoirs of their life together. "There are few who in one person combine all that is best in soul, mind, and body," he wrote. "She had it all, and more. Few there are who are fortunate in having such a woman as the partner of their lives – I was one of those privileged." ## Archives Victoria Melita's letters to her sister Alexandra are preserved in the Hohenlohe Central Archive (Hohenlohe-Zentralarchiv Neuenstein) in Neuenstein Castle in the town of Neuenstein, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. ## Honours and arms ### Honours - United Kingdom: - CI: Companion of the Imperial Order of the Crown of India, 11 December 1893 - VA: Dame of the Royal Order of Victoria and Albert, 1st Class - GCStJ: Dame Grand Cross of the Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem - RRC': Member of the Royal Red Cross - Kingdom of Prussia: Dame of the Order of Louise, 1st Division - Ernestine duchies: Dame of the Saxe-Ernestine House Order - Grand Duchy of Hesse: - Dame of the Grand Ducal Hessian Order of the Golden Lion, in Brilliants, 19 April 1894 - Dame Grand Cross of the Grand Ducal Hessian Order of Ludwig, in Brilliants, 25 November 1898 - Medal of the Merit Order of Philip the Magnanimous - Kingdom of Romania: Dame Grand Cross of the Order of the Crown of Romania - Russian Empire: - Dame Grand Cross of the Imperial Order of Saint Catherine, November 1894 - Decoration of the Military Order of Saint George - Restoration (Spain): Dame of the Royal Order of Noble Ladies of Queen Maria Luisa, 31 October 1913'' ### British arms As a male-line grandchild of the British monarch, Victoria Melita bore the royal arms, with an inescutcheon for Saxony, the whole differenced by a label of five points argent, the outer pair bearing hearts gules, the inner pair anchors azure, and the central point a cross gules. In 1917, the inescutcheon was dropped by royal warrant. Her arms from that point on are duplicated in the arms of Princess Alexandra, The Honourable Lady Ogilvy. ## Ancestry
17,221,714	Château de Chinon	1,152,186,135	Castle in France	[ "Castles in Centre-Val de Loire", "Châteaux of the Loire Valley", "Historic house museums in Centre-Val de Loire", "Monuments historiques of Indre-et-Loire", "Museums in Indre-et-Loire", "Royal residences in France" ]	Château de Chinon is a château located on the bank of the river Vienne in Chinon, France. It was founded by Theobald I, Count of Blois. In the 11th century the castle became the property of the counts of Anjou. In 1156 Henry II of England, a member of the House of Anjou, took the castle from his brother Geoffrey, Count of Nantes, after Geoffrey rebelled for a second time. Henry favoured the Château de Chinon as a residence. Most of the standing structure can be attributed to his reign; he died there in 1189. Early in the 13th century, King Philip II of France harassed the English lands in France, and in 1205 he captured Chinon after a siege that lasted several months. Thereafter, the castle remained under French control. When King Philip IV accused the Knights Templar of heresy during the first decade of the 14th century, several leading members of the order were imprisoned there. Used as a residence by Charles VII in the 15th century, the Château de Chinon became a prison in the second half of the 16th century, but then fell out of use and was left to decay. It was recognized as a monument historique by the French Ministry of Culture in 1840. The castle, which contains a museum, is now owned and managed by the Indre-et-Loire General Council and is a major tourist attraction. It was restored in the early 21st century, at a cost of €14.5 million. ## History ### Background The settlement of Chinon is on the bank of the river Vienne about 10 kilometres (6 mi) from where it joins the Loire. From prehistoric times, when the settlement of Chinon originated, rivers formed the major trade routes, and the Vienne joins the fertile southern plains of the Poitou and the city of Limoges to the thoroughfare of the Loire. The site was fortified early on, and by the 5th century a Gallo-Roman castrum had been established. Theobald I, Count of Blois built the earliest known castle on the mount of Chinon in the 10th century. He fortified it for use as a stronghold. After Odo II, Count of Blois died in battle in 1037, Fulk III, Count of Anjou marched into Touraine to capture Château de Langeais and then Chinon, some 22 km (14 mi) away. When Fulk arrived at Chinon the castle's garrison immediately sought terms and surrendered. In 1044, Geoffrey (the count of Anjou) captured Theobald of Blois-Chartres. In exchange for his release, Theobald agreed to recognise Geoffrey's ownership of Chinon, Langeais, and Tours. From then until the early 13th century, Château de Chinon descended through his heirs. ### Counts of Anjou According to contemporaneous chronicler Robert of Torigni, on the death of Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou in 1151 his second son, who was also called Geoffrey, inherited four castles. Robert did not specify which these were, but historian W. L. Warren speculated that Chinon, Montsoreau, Loudun, and Mirebeau numbered amongst these castles as they were in the territory which may have been traditionally the inheritance of the second oldest son. Geoffrey rebelled against his older brother, Henry, in 1152. Henry negotiated with the castellans of the castles of Chinon, Loudun, and Mirebeau to surrender before laying siege to Château de Montsoreau. Following the loss of Montsoreau, Geoffrey surrendered to his brother. By 1156 Chinon, Loudun, and Mirebeau were back under Geoffrey's control. That year he readied them for war as he rebelled against Henry a second time. In the intervening years, his brother had been crowned King Henry II of England at the end of a long-running civil war. Henry besieged and captured Geoffrey's castles in the summer of 1156 and kept them under his control, giving Geoffrey an annuity of £1,500 in compensation. The presence of a treasury and one of Henry II's main arsenals marked Chinon as a particularly important castle in the 12th century. It was a primary residence of Henry II who was responsible for construction of almost all of the massive castle. In 1173 Henry II betrothed his youngest son, Prince John, to the daughter of Count Humbert, an influential lord in Provence. John had no land, but as part of the arrangement Henry promised him the castles of Chinon, Loudun, and Mirebeau. Henry II's eldest son, also called Henry, had been crowned King of England alongside his father but had no land of his own and was angered by the situation. His discontent grew and Henry the Young King demanded some of the land promised to him be handed over, claiming to have the support of the English barons and his father-in-law, King Louis VII of France. While the king was at Limoges he was informed of a conspiracy involving his wife and sons to overthrow him. Choosing to keep his eldest son by his side, Henry II set off north to Normandy, ensuring along the way that his castles in Aquitaine were prepared for war. En route they stayed at Chinon; under the cover of darkness Henry the Young King escaped and set off to Paris to join the court of Louis VII. Two of Henry the Young King's brothers, Richard and Geoffrey, joined him in rebellion along with the barons of France and some in England. War followed, lasting until 1174, and Chinon, Loudun, and Châtellerault were key to Henry II's defence. After the revolt ended in 1174, relations between Henry II and his sons continued to be strained. By 1187 Henry the Young King was dead, Richard was in line to inherit, and Henry II was on the brink of war with Philip II. In June that year Richard travelled to Paris with Philip II and struck up a friendship with the French king. Concerned his son might turn against him, Henry II asked him to return. Richard went to Chinon and raided the castle's treasury so he could fund the repair of his own castles in Aquitaine. In 1189 Richard and Philip were wreaking havoc in Maine and Toulouse, capturing Henry II's castles; the king was ill and went to Château de Chinon. He left briefly in July to meet with Richard and Philip II and agree a truce, and died at Chinon on 6 July. The king's body was taken to Fontevraud Abbey and Richard became king. In 1199, John succeeded his brother as King of England. By 1202 his lands in France were under threat from Philip II of France, threatening the east, and the barons of Brittany. In January 1203 John sent a band of mercenaries to retrieve Queen Isabelle from Chinon as it was under threat from rebels. In the spring Hubert de Burgh, 1st Earl of Kent, took over as commander of Chinon's garrison; the war was not going in John's favour and in August that year he ordered the demolition of several castles, including Château de Montrésor, to prevent them from being used by the enemy. By 1205, Chinon was one of the last castles in the Loire Valley. Château de Chinon fell to French force in the Easter of 1205 after a siege of several months; damage to the castle meant the garrison was no longer able to hold out so sallied to meet the French outside the castle walls. Hubert de Burgh was injured and taken prisoner in the event, and would remain in captivity until 1207. Soon after Château de Chinon was captured, Philip II took Normandy from the England crown. The French king was a prolific castle-builder and was responsible for building the cylindrical keep at Chinon, the Tour du Coudray. The round keep was typical of French design the period, a departure from usually square keeps, and was repeated by Philip II at the castles of Dourdan, Falaise, Gisors, Laon, and Lillebonne. ### French rule Though it was not the reason they were built, castles could often be used as prisons. One such instance from the 14th century illustrates this aspect of Château de Chinon's history. Founded in the Holy Land as a crusading military order in the early 12th century, the Knights Templar had, by the close of the 13th century, gained swathes of lands in Europe, particularly France. King Philip IV of France had the members of the order in his kingdom arrested, accusing them of heretical practices. The leaders of the order, including the Grand Master Jacques de Molay, were imprisoned at Château de Chinon, in the Tour du Coudray built by Philip II one century earlier. Graffiti carved by the imprisoned knights can be seen on the walls of the tower. In August 1308, Pope Clement V sent three cardinals to hear the leaders' confessions. The outcome was that in 1312 the pope issued a bull, the Vox in excelso, suppressing the order and its property was given to the Knights Hospitaller. The leaders were sentenced to life imprisonment, apart from Jacques de Molay and Geoffrey de Charney who were burnt at the stake. The Hundred Years' War in the 14th and 15th centuries was fought between the kings of England and France over the succession to the French throne. The war ended in 1453 when the English were finally ejected from France, but in the early 15th century the English under King Henry V made significant territorial gains. The Treaty of Troyes in 1420 made Henry V the heir apparent to the French throne but when the French king, Charles VI, and Henry V died in the space of two months in 1422 the issue of succession was again uncertain. The English supported Henry V's son, Henry VI who was still a child, while the French supported recognised Charles VII, the Dauphin of France. Between 1427 and 1450 Château de Chinon was the residence of Charles, when Touraine was virtually the only territory left to him in France, the rest being occupied by the Burgundians or the English. On 6 March 1429 Joan of Arc arrived at Château de Chinon. She claimed to hear heavenly voices that said Charles would grant her an army to relieve the siege of Orléans. While staying at the castle she resided in the Tour du Coudray. Charles met with her two days after her arrival and then sent her to Poitiers so that she could be cross-examined to ensure she was telling the truth. Joan returned to Chinon in April where Charles granted her supplies and sent her to join the army at Orléans. In 1562 the château came briefly into the possession of the Huguenots and was turned into a state prison by Henry IV of France. Cardinal Richelieu was given the castle to prevent it from coming under the control of unfriendly forces, though he allowed it to fall into ruin. Château de Chinon was abandoned until 1793 when, during the Reign of Terror, the castle was temporarily occupied by royalist Vendeans. Soon after, the castle lapsed back into decay. The 19th century saw increasing public interest in France's heritage and efforts were undertaken to preserve historic buildings. In 1830 the newly crowned Louis Philippe I created the role of Inspector-General of Historic Monuments. Prosper Mérimée, better known as a writer, assumed the position in 1834 and helped halt the decay that had set in at Château de Chinon and instigated repairs to the structure. Since 1840, the castle has been recognised as a monument historique by the French Ministry of Culture. Between 2003 and 2010 the castle was the subject of a massive excavation and restoration project, costing 14.5 million euros. It was hoped that the restored castle would attract 250,000 tourists a year with a visitor centre built in the Fort St-George, which was entirely excavated in advance. Before the visitor centre was built, the Fort St-George was the subject of an archaeological excavation which covered nearly 4,000 square metres (43,000 sq ft), unearthing the entire interior of the fort. The royal lodgings (logis royales) which were roofless for two hundred years, were restored inside and out and given with a mock 15th-century interior. In addition about 150 metres (490 ft) of the ramparts were also restored as well as the Tour du Coudray. Today, it is owned and managed by the Indre-et-Loire General Council and is a major tourist attraction. ## Description Standing on a rocky outcrop above the river Vienne, Château de Chinon has natural defences on three sides and a ditch dug along the fourth. Writing in the 12th century, the chronicler William of Newburgh commented that even before Château de Chinon came under the control of Henry II "its strength was such that nature seemed to vie with human art in fortifying and defending it". That said, in the 12th century Henry II undertook a project of rebuilding the castle and much of the extant remains date from this period. The stone used to build the castle was quarried on the site. The castle is divided, along its length, into three enclosures, each separated by a deep dry moat. There are some similarities with Château Gaillard, built by Richard the Lionheart in the closing years of the 12th century, which also consists of three enclosures and sits on a promontory above a nearby town. The easternmost enclosure is known as Fort St-Georges, the central is the Château du Milieu (the middle castle), while the westernmost is known as the Fort du Coudray. The Fort St-George was built under Henry II and contained a chapel dedicated to St George, England's patron saint. The Château du Coudray was added by Philip II in the early 13th century, while the Château de Milieu was built in the 12th and 14th centuries. The round Tour du Coudray built by Philip II (which has parallels at Dourdan, Falaise, Gisors, Laon, and Lillebonne) guarded the bridge linking the Fort du Coudray and the Château de Milieu. While the curtain wall stands in many places, the buildings within the château do not survive to the same extent, and in many cases little more can be said about them than the location of their foundations and possible use. ## See also - Châteaux of the Loire Valley - List of castles in France
63,821,091	Norman Osborn (Sam Raimi film series)	1,171,106,716	Sam Raimi's Spider-Man film series and Marvel Cinematic Universe character	[ "Action film villains", "Characters created by David Koepp", "Experimental medical treatments in fiction", "Fictional business executives", "Fictional characters from New York City", "Fictional characters with dissociative identity disorder", "Fictional engineers", "Fictional goblins", "Fictional kidnappers", "Fictional mass murderers", "Fictional scientists in films", "Fictional socialites", "Fictional terrorists", "Film and television memes", "Film characters introduced in 2002", "Film supervillains", "Green Goblin", "Male film villains", "Marvel Cinematic Universe characters", "Marvel Comics characters with superhuman strength", "Marvel Comics scientists", "Spider-Man (2002 film series)", "Spider-Man film characters", "Video game bosses" ]	Norman Osborn is a character portrayed by Willem Dafoe in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man film trilogy and later temporarily integrated into the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) media franchise. He is based on the Marvel Comics character of the same name and is also known by his alternate identity, the Green Goblin (also known simply as The Goblin). Osborn first appeared in Spider-Man (2002) as a wealthy industrialist who tests an unstable performance-enhancing serum on himself, developing superhuman strength and a crazed alternate personality. He becomes the Green Goblin and fights Spider-Man, but ultimately dies when he is impaled by his own glider. The character returns, as an alternate version, in Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) when a spell gone wrong breaks open the multiverse and sends him to an alternate reality. Osborn seeks that reality's Peter Parker's help in curing himself and the other universe-displaced visitors, but his mind is taken over by the Green Goblin, who torments Parker and kills his aunt May. After a brutal fight with Parker on the Statue of Liberty, Osborn is cured of the Green Goblin identity and returned to his universe. A hallucination of Osborn appears in Spider-Man 2 (2004) and Spider-Man 3 (2007), haunting his son Harry. Dafoe's portrayal has been praised by critics and audiences, being considered one of the most iconic villains in superhero films. Dafoe and co-stars Tobey Maguire and J. K. Simmons held the Guinness World Record for "the longest career as a live-action Marvel character" before Patrick Stewart retook the record. ## Concept and creation The Green Goblin was originally created by writer Stan Lee and artist Steve Ditko, first appearing in The Amazing Spider-Man \#14 (July 1964) as a character without a human identity unlike other Spider-Man villains, but the issue had suggested his identity would be revealed in the future; the Goblin revealed himself as Norman Osborn at the end of The Amazing Spider-Man \#39 (June 1966), the first of a two-part story arc. The Goblin became one of Spider-Man's most popular enemies during the 1960s and was eventually killed off in the second part of "The Night Gwen Stacy Died" storyline (July 1973). The character resurfaces in The Clone Saga and has been adapted into other media separate from comics. While rewriting Spider-Man (2002) from James Cameron's original "scriptment", David Koepp added the Green Goblin as well as the character Doctor Octopus as a secondary antagonist. Director Sam Raimi felt the Green Goblin and the surrogate father-son theme between Norman Osborn and Peter Parker in the then-recent Ultimate Marvel comics was much more interesting than adding "a third complex origin story" to the film, so Doctor Octopus was removed by Scott Rosenberg (who was hired to rewrite Koepp's material) and eventually became the antagonist of Spider-Man 2 (2004). After being cast, Willem Dafoe concentrated on Osborn due to his belief that the Goblin was an aspect of Osborn and already made by external things like his costume and the film's special effects. Dafoe explained that Osborn was "a very complex character on the page", and that he could relate to him due to "[his] ambition and his desire for perfection and how that perverts so much of his relationship to people". During promotion for Spider-Man, Dafoe came up for an idea to reintroduce Osborn via a hallucination of him haunting his son Harry, which he compared to the ghost of Hamlet's father; he played the hallucination in Spider-Man 2 and Spider-Man 3 (2007). ### Spider-Man: No Way Home Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers began exploring the idea of the multiverse and potentially revisiting characters from past Spider-Man films while writing the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) film Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021). The duo ultimately decided to fully integrate the characters into the film and worked hard to prevent No Way Home from being "fan service" by using the returning characters to progress Peter Parker's (portrayed by Tom Holland) story. Osborn / Goblin was originally not the main villain of the film despite appearing as an antagonist, but was later realized that, after the film lost "other characters", McKenna and Sommers "had to" have him as the villain and rewrote the script to give him a second chance to replicate his actions in Spider-Man, but in a darker way related to Holland's Spider-Man. Goblin would have fought alongside Otto Octavius / Doctor Octopus (portrayed by Alfred Molina) against Spider-Man in a scene on the Alexander Hamilton Bridge; Goblin's introduction was moved into a climactic explosion with his pumpkin bombs, not engaging with Octavius or Spider-Man—but does encounter them. Dafoe felt that the Green Goblin had advanced from his original portrayal and that Osborn and the Goblin had "a few more tricks up [their] sleeves" in No Way Home. Dafoe was digitally de-aged in order to replicate his 2002 likeness. To prevent his appearance in the film from leaking, Dafoe was required to wear cloaks around set with Holland learning of his involvement in the film by meeting him for the first time after accidentally bumping into him. Green Goblin was confirmed to be in the film in the official teaser released in August 2021, with Dafoe confirmed in the official trailer released in November. ### Casting After John Malkovich turned down the opportunity to take the role, Dafoe was cast as Osborn / Goblin in November 2000; Kevin Spacey would have portrayed the Goblin in Cameron's unproduced Spider-Man film. Raimi contacted Dafoe while the latter was filming in Spain and described the film's story to him in "such incredible psychological detail", talking about the relationships without the Spider-Man (portrayed by Tobey Maguire)–Goblin story. Dafoe realized that Raimi was "not cynical about this story", deeply loving the characters and feeling "an obligation as a Spider-Man fan to present these characters truthfully". Dafoe was initially hesitant to reprise the role, but was more open when producer Amy Pascal and director Jon Watts pitched No Way Home to him before he had received a script; he described this as "the same, but different". A rematch between Osborn and Maguire's Spider-Man was considered during the filming of No Way Home, but was ultimately cut by the film's release. ## Characterization and themes Dafoe particularly enjoys the "mirror scene" depicting Osborn's conversation with the Goblin identity after murdering the Oscorp board of directors; before filming the scene with Dafoe, Raimi gave him a copy of Jekyll and Hyde to prepare for the scene, which filmed in one take multiple times before Raimi split it. Dafoe further differentiated the two identities by wearing dental prosthetics providing Osborn's straight teeth, and using his natural crooked teeth when portraying the Goblin. Norman Osborn is portrayed as a workaholic scientist–businessman with a complicated relationship with his son Harry, being a career-focused man who prioritizes science, business, and success and is quite disappointed with Harry. The Green Goblin is subsequently created through Osborn's exposure to gas, being portrayed as a violent, sadistic, and unhinged psychopath that believes his powers place him above normal people, attempting to recruit Spider-Man into joining him. The Goblin was introduced in early Spider-Man comics as an alternate identity separate from Osborn, which was adapted to the films; however, later comics would depict the Goblin as a costumed alias used by Osborn to commit his villainous deeds. ### Thematic analysis Gizmodo's James Whitbrook contrasts Maguire's Peter Parker / Spider-Man with Osborn / Goblin and James Franco's Harry Osborn in the way they choose to exercise their power in the film series, as he notes Parker, Osborn, and Harry appear to hold some form of power. While Parker learns the responsibility with his powers, Osborn gives into fear of losing his position within Oscorp, choosing to pursue an alternate power in the Goblin, attacking his former colleagues and the people he cares about, namely Harry and Parker, while descending further into madness and insanity. Adam Rosenberg from Mashable opined that Dafoe "owned every single one of his scenes" as he "charted Osborn's experimental serum-fueled descent into madness", and that the actor's voice sounded similar to what a reader would hear in their head when reading a comic book villain's speech bubbles. The Goblin was felt by Oliver Vandervoort of Game Rant as "a bit more sinister" in No Way Home compared to his original portrayal, with the character being "a little darker and a little more dangerous" in the film. Praising the decision to have the character maskless in No Way Home, James Troughton at The Gamer called Dafoe's facial expressions "viscerally unsettling", going from a "lost old man desperate for help" to an unhinged killer "as easy as slipping on a pair of gloves", crediting this as giving a slasher edge to a superhero film. Writing for Screen Rant, Jake Gleason credits No Way Home with revealing Osborn as the "most tragic character" in the Spider-Man films by showing his kindness in interactions with Holland's Parker, May Parker, and Octavius as himself. Osborn's reactions to the Goblin's crimes are cited by Gleason as "proof that he is not evil" despite being an "imperfect" father to Harry and letting his "arrogant ambitions spiral out of control". ## Design Amalgamated Dynamics created the original Goblin animatronic headgear for Spider-Man. The suit was originally designed much more faithfully to the comics, allowed for a full range of emotions to be expressed by the wearer, was scrapped after the concept was deemed "too creepy" by studio executives and due to technical difficulties and time constraints. Dafoe insisted on wearing the new, uncomfortable costume as he felt that a stuntman would not convey the character's necessary body language. The 580-piece suit took half an hour to put on. Costume designer James Acheson said that Dafoe told him that he wanted the costume to be flexible enough for him to do splits, further explaining that Dafoe was a yogi and "probably the most flexible actor [Acheson] ever worked with". When they started designing the costume, there was only a puppet of the design and they "picked out the major points where [they] would be hooking wires up to a harness under the costume", which became the basis from which they could lift him from his back or hips as well as do "several different things on wires". Acheson also experimented with a potential helmet-like design for the suit, which was then scrapped. In No Way Home, the character obtains upgrades to his costume which make him more closely resemble his comic book counterpart. The Goblin first appears wearing his 2002 costume before the mask is destroyed by Osborn. The upgraded costume is depicted with a purple undersuit beneath the green armor with the Goblin wearing goggles and incorporating the retractable blades from his glider into his left gauntlet. Screen Rant's Dan Zinski described the suit as tattered and noted the goal of the MCU's costume designs is "to find some middle ground" between the comic book version and the "more realistic". ## Fictional character biography Dr. Norman Osborn is a scientist and the founder of Oscorp Industries, doubling as CEO for the company. He is the father of Harry Osborn, with whom he has a strained relationship. Fellow scientist Otto Octavius's work was funded by Osborn via Oscorp, but he was considered greedy and misguided by Octavius. During a school field trip, Osborn is introduced to Harry's best friend Peter Parker, whose intelligence impresses him. ### Becoming the Green Goblin After meeting Parker, Osborn returns to Oscorp and hears Dr. Mendel Stromm reveal to military officials overseeing a super-soldier serum project that some test subjects have gone insane; Osborn is threatened with a tight deadline and decides to experiment on himself. An alternate, crazed personality–the "Green Goblin"–of Osborn is developed by the process, who kills Stromm and the military officials and Quest Aerospace scientists present at the super-soldier test. However, Quest expands and assumes control of Oscorp, requesting Osborn to step down as CEO. During a festival in Times Square, the Green Goblin kills the Oscorp board of directors, encountering Spider-Man in the festival. The Green Goblin leads his next attack at the Daily Bugle editor-in-chief J. Jonah Jameson for who takes pictures of Spider-Man. Spider-Man appears at the Bugle, but is kidnapped by the Green Goblin, who offers him a partnership and belittles his choice to become a hero, warning that the city will eventually turn against him. The Green Goblin baits Spider-Man to a burning apartment, asking if he accepted his offer, but Spider-Man refuses to partner with him. After Thanksgiving dinner with Parker, his aunt May, Harry, and his girlfriend Mary Jane Watson, Osborn deduces Parker is Spider-Man, prompting the Green Goblin to attack and hospitalize May, and kidnap Watson. The Green Goblin makes Spider-Man choose whether to save Watson or a Roosevelt Island Tramway car full of children, but he saves both. The Green Goblin lands in an abandoned building and brutally beats Spider-Man, but is counterattacked. The Green Goblin thinks to fool Parker by unmasking himself as Osborn, with Osborn stating that Parker was like a son to him while the Green Goblin attempts to impale Parker with the glider. The latter dodges, causing the glider to fatally stab Osborn, who tells Parker not to tell Harry about the Green Goblin's actions as he dies. ### Harry's hallucinations At Osborn's funeral, Harry mourns the loss, vowing vengeance on Spider-Man after witnessing him with his father's body. Sometime later, Osborn's identity as the Green Goblin and death are widely reported on. Two years later, Harry discovers Parker's identity as Spider-Man and is haunted by a hallucination of Osborn demanding to be avenged, but the hallucination's mirror is broken by Harry, who discovers a hidden lair containing Green Goblin's arsenal. Harry becomes the "New Goblin" a year later, with Osborn re-appearing to remind Harry to avenge him and to go after Parker's heart. Harry eventually learns the truth about Osborn's death and gives up his vendetta against Spider-Man, sacrificing himself to save Parker. ## Alternate versions ### Entering an alternate reality In the alternate reality of Earth-616, Dr. Stephen Strange casts a spell to erase people's memories of Peter Parker (later nicknamed "Peter-One")'s identity as Spider-Man after it was revealed by Mysterio. However, Peter-One's frequent alterations causes the spell to bring in people from across the multiverse who knew Parker's identity, including Osborn, who was taken from sometime after he had deduced his Spider-Man's identity in the original timeline. The Green Goblin encounters Peter-One and Octavius at the Alexander Hamilton Bridge. Osborn retakes control and breaks the Green Goblin's mask in an alley, seeking refuge in F.E.A.S.T. after seeing an ad for Spider-Man there. Osborn meets the alternate May Parker, who calls in Peter-One; Osborn realizes that Peter-One is not his Parker, but goes with him to the New York Sanctum to its undercroft. Osborn learns of the multiverse and reunites with Octavius, but learns from Flint Marko that they both died during their final fight with Spider-Man. Osborn is then imprisoned by Strange, who prepares to use the Macchina de Kadavus to send him and the other villains back to meet their fates but is later released after Peter-One traps Strange in the Mirror Dimension, taking his box. Osborn then works with Peter-One to cure himself, Octavius, Marko, Curt Connors, and Max Dillon. After Peter-One cures Octavius, the Green Goblin retakes control of Osborn's mind and turns on Peter-One, convincing Dillon and Marko to reject their cures and escape, engaging in a duel with him across Happy Hogan's apartment. In the lobby, the Green Goblin summons his glider and throws pumpkin bombs, causing the apartment to explode. The glider fatally strikes May before he escapes. After Marko, Dillon, and Connors are cured with Octavius help, the Green Goblin appears and destroys a contained spell–which had previously caused him, Octavius, and the latters to transport from their universes–from its original caster Doctor Strange; the destruction causes the barriers between universes to break, prompting Strange to try to seal them. An enraged Peter-One nearly kills the Green Goblin but is stopped by an older version of Osborn's Parker (nicknamed "Peter-Two"), whom the Green Goblin stabs in the back. Another version of Parker (nicknamed "Peter-Three"), throws Peter-One a cure Parker developed which he injects the Green Goblin with, restoring him to a remorseful Norman Osborn. Afterwards, Strange casts a spell to make the alternate reality forget Peter-One's existence, causing Osborn, Parker, Octavius, and Marko to return to their universe. ## In other media - Norman Osborn / Green Goblin appears in the video game adaptation of the first film, Spider-Man (2002), with Dafoe reprising his role from the film. - The video game Spider-Man: Friend or Foe (2007) explores an alternate timeline where the Spider-Man film villains survived their deaths–including Osborn / Goblin (voiced by Roger L. Jackson), who becomes playable in the game. ## Reception and legacy Dafoe's performance has been praised by critics and audiences, with Dafoe himself calling the role one of his favorite parts to play, having particularly enjoyed portraying the unhinged character due to his dual personalities and his balance between a dramatic and comedic performance. Dafoe's No Way Home co-stars Holland, Jamie Foxx, and Andrew Garfield praised his performance as well as his cackle; Foxx had also called his Green Goblin performance "terrifying" and "personal". Holland and his MCU Spider-Man films co-star Jacob Batalon called Goblin "a landmark villain", praising Dafoe's ability "to bring a difficult character to life" and particularly the mirror scene, before filming No Way Home; Holland had believed the Goblin "[was] difficult to pull off in live-action" in August 2019, a year before his praises with Batalon. A New York Daily News reviewer felt Dafoe put the "scare in archvillain", and Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian deemed him "strong support"; Conversely, critic A. O. Scott of The New York Times wrote that Dafoe's performance was "uninspired and secondhand". While reviewing the films in April 2007, IGN's Richard George commented that Green Goblin's armor, particularly the helmet, was "almost comically bad... Not only is it not frightening, it prohibits expression". Steven Scaife at Vice wrote that Dafoe's Goblin "represents everything that's fun about superhero villains, as well as everything that's great about Raimi's campy films", also commending Dafoe's voice and body language, which helped overcome the bulky Green Goblin costume that he compared to that of a Power Rangers villain. Dafoe's Goblin is acclaimed as one of the greatest superhero film villains, with Vulture ranking the character 19th on the top 25 superhero film villains in 2018, while Collider ranked him the 5th greatest Spider-Man film villain in 2020. The Lantern's Brett Price wrote that Dafoe was "on another level" in No Way Home and not having his mask made him even more intimidating than he was in the 2002 film. Peter Travers of Good Morning America and Jade King at The Gamer praised Dafoe and Molina, with King asserting that the two "stole the show as Green Goblin and Doc Ock" and described the depictions as brilliant. Amelia Emberwing of IGN praised the performances of Dafoe, Molina, and Foxx in No Way Home, while Vulture's Bilge Ebiri said Dafoe "once again gets to have some modest fun with his character's divided self". ### Legacy After Spider-Man had joined the MCU and Sony Pictures partnered with Marvel Studios to co-produce Spider-Man films, Pascal spoke in August 2016 of an attempt to differentiate the new Spider-Man films from previous ones, citing the Goblin's exclusion, "I mean, I don't know how many more times we can do – at least for now – I don't know how many more times we can do the Green Goblin. I've certainly tried to do it fifty". Similarly, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige reflected that the MCU Spider-Man films chose to not reuse Spider-Man characters or elements, outside of the major ones, that were already adapted in previous Sony films, saying "it never occurred to us to do a new Goblin story, or to do an Oscorp story, or to do Doc Ock, or anyone that had been done before". Osborn's line "you know, I'm something of a scientist myself", which became an Internet meme in the years preceding the release of No Way Home, was reprised during the film. Screen Rant's Dustin Brewer claimed the "sparing" use of Goblin in Spider-Man influenced the usage of villains in later superhero films such as the Joker in The Dark Knight (2008), furthering that this approach enables villains to "come and go more sporadically, giving them the ability to cause maximum mayhem every time they come on screen". ### Accolades Dafoe has received several nominations, mostly in a "Best Villain" category, for his portrayal of Norman Osborn / Green Goblin; Dafoe's only win was a Critics' Choice Super Award in 2022 for his No Way Home performance. Separate from their film accolades, Dafoe and Maguire held the Guinness World Record for "the longest career as a live-action Marvel character."
6,890,694	Who Can See It	1,136,656,352	null	[ "1970s ballads", "1973 songs", "George Harrison songs", "Music published by Harrisongs", "Rock ballads", "Song recordings produced by George Harrison", "Songs written by George Harrison" ]	"Who Can See It" is a song by English musician George Harrison, released on his 1973 album Living in the Material World. The lyrics reflect Harrison's uneasy feelings towards the Beatles' legacy, three years after the group's break-up, and serve as his statement of independence from expectations raised by the band's unprecedented popularity. Some music critics and biographers suggest that he wrote the song during a period of personal anguish, following the acclaim he had received as a solo artist with the 1970 triple album All Things Must Pass and his 1971–72 Bangladesh aid project. The revelatory nature of the lyrics has encouraged comparisons between Living in the Material World and John Lennon's primal therapy-inspired 1970 release, Plastic Ono Band. A dramatic ballad in the Roy Orbison vein, the composition features unusual changes in time signature and a melody that incorporates musical tension. Harrison self-produced the recording, which includes heavy orchestration and a choir, both arranged by John Barham. Several commentators consider Harrison's vocal performance on "Who Can See It" to be among the finest of his career, while his production style has been likened to that of Beatles producer George Martin. The other musicians on the track are Nicky Hopkins, Klaus Voormann, Jim Keltner and Gary Wright. Among reviews of the song, "Who Can See It" has been described variously as an "aching, yearning masterpiece" and an "unequivocal statement" on Harrison's identity. In line with his self-image as a musician, regardless of his past as a Beatle, Harrison included "Who Can See It" in the setlist for his 1974 North American tour with Ravi Shankar, the first tour there by a former Beatle since the band's break-up. ## Background and inspiration As with the majority of the songs on his Living in the Material World album, George Harrison wrote "Who Can See It" over 1971–72. In his autobiography, I, Me, Mine, he makes light of the emotion behind the song, describing it as simply "a true story meaning 'Give us a break, squire'". Simon Leng, Harrison's musical biographer, recognises the song as a statement of considerable personal anguish, however. He writes of Harrison having been "deeply traumatized" by the effects of the Beatles' unprecedented popularity, and equally disoriented by his success as a solo artist following their break-up in April 1970. According to Leng, Harrison was in the same state of internal conflict over 1972–73 as John Lennon had been when writing the song "Help!" in 1965, during his self-styled "fat Elvis period". Music critic Stephen Holden highlighted a similar comparison between the two ex-Beatles in July 1973, when he deemed Living in the Material World to be "as personal and confessional" as Lennon's primal therapy-inspired Plastic Ono Band album (1970). During the Beatles' career, Harrison had been the first to tire of Beatlemania and the group's celebrity status, and he had written songs rejecting what Leng terms the "artifice" surrounding the band. Lennon himself described the Beatles' predicament as "four individuals who eventually recovered their individualities after being submerged in a myth". In addition, for Harrison, while he began to match Lennon and Paul McCartney as a songwriter towards the end of the group's career, his relatively junior position in the Beatles was a source of frustration to him, which, according to music journalist Mikal Gilmore, left "deep and lasting wounds". Aside from being released from the psychological pressure of being a Beatle in 1970, Harrison was the one who potentially benefited the most from the group's break-up. His 1970 triple album, All Things Must Pass, was a major commercial and critical success, eclipsing releases by both Lennon and McCartney. According to author Ian Inglis, Harrison became "popular music's first statesman" as a result of both All Things Must Pass and his 1971–72 Bangladesh aid project. The last of these established humanitarianism as a new direction for rock music, in addition to focusing on Harrison the level of attention previously afforded the Beatles. While Leng describes "Who Can See It" as a "plea for understanding from a private man living his life in public", Inglis writes that, after the "euphoria" of his recent achievements as a solo artist, Harrison was forced to confront "some of the more unpleasant realities of his everyday life". ## Composition "Who Can See It" is in the musical key of E. The melody incorporates various augmented and diminished chords, which Harrison describes in I, Me, Mine as "all kinds of suspended chords", since he played them in an open tuning on the guitar. The song starts with a solitary guitar figure and then builds in intensity through the verse and into the chorus, as musical tension matches the emotion of the lyrics. Leng views "Who Can See It" as a "new type of ballad" from Harrison, one that combines a "dramatic edge" with rhythmic sophistication. The time signature shifts throughout the composition, from 4/4 to 6/4 and 5/8, with brief portions in 5/4 and 3/4. In Leng's description, the melody features "sweepingly large chromatic intervals", beginning with the verse's third line – a four-semitone swoop that recalls the ascending melismas commonly used in Indian music. Harrison later remarked, with reference to the boldness of the tune: "['Who Can See It'] reminds me of Roy Orbison for some reason. He could do this good." Among the material Harrison wrote or finished for Living in the Material World, several songs reflect on his years with the Beatles, and in the case of "Who Can See It", with bitterness. In the opening verse, he states: > I've been held up > I've been run down > I can see quite clearly now through those past years > When I played towing the line. Inglis views these lines as a reference to Harrison's working-class upbringing as well as his years as a member of the Beatles. In the chorus that follows, Harrison contends that, having personally lived through these experiences, his sole wish is that his feelings "Should not be denied me now", and he concludes: "I can see my life belongs to me / My love belongs to who can see it." Inglis offers a simple précis of this statement: "he has paid his dues. Now he is his own man ..." In the song's second verse, Harrison sings of having "lived in fear" and witnessed the hatred created by "this sad world". While later discussing his aversion to performing live after 1966, Harrison presented a similar imagery, citing the Beatles' concerns regarding the threat of assassination. He also referred to the band's fame as "very one-sided", since the Beatles "gave their nervous systems" while receiving the adulation of their fans. Leng finds the words to verse two typical of Harrison's tendency towards "internalization of world events" in some of his songs from this period, whereby "hate, conflict and strife" are projected onto the "wider world" in the likes of "Who Can See It" and "The Light That Has Lighted the World". Theologian Dale Allison views the mention of "this sad world" as a further reference to the essentially "tragic" nature of human existence, after "All Things Must Pass" and in anticipation of later Harrison songs such as "Stuck Inside a Cloud", in that "notwithstanding all the success and adulation", ultimately, "we are all alone". Allison writes of the message behind "Who Can See It": "Here he declares his freedom from his Beatle past, his freedom to be himself." ## Recording Harrison had intended to co-produce his long-awaited follow-up to All Things Must Pass with Phil Spector, a mainstay of his career since 1970. Spector's unreliability meant that Harrison was forced to produce Living in the Material World alone – an outcome that music critics Greg Kot and Zeth Lundy find regrettable, in light of how Spector's signature Wall of Sound treatment might have suited ballads such as "Who Can See It" and "The Day the World Gets 'Round". Another regular Harrison collaborator, John Barham, provided orchestral arrangements as before, and noted an "austere quality" in some of the new songs. "George was under stress during Living in the Material World," Barham said later. "I felt that he was going through some kind of a crisis. I think it may have been spiritual, but I cannot be sure." Harrison taped the basic track for "Who Can See It" between October and December 1972, either at the Beatles' Apple Studio in London or at FPSHOT, his home studio in Henley, Oxfordshire. He recorded his vocals during the first two months of the new year, and Barham's orchestration and choir were added in late February. Harrison's twin electric-guitar parts recall the sound of the Beatles' Abbey Road album, through his use of a Leslie rotary effect – a detail that Leng finds significant, given the song's subject matter. In another Beatles comparison, music journalists Alan Clayson and John Metzger consider Harrison's production on Material World to be similar to George Martin's work with the band. Leng writes of "Who Can See It" having been "conceived with an Orbison vocal", and the singing duly reflects Orbison's more dramatic style. Harrison's vocal reaches falsetto in places, while, in Clayson's description, "swerving from muttered trepidation to strident intensity" during the course of the song. Aside from Harrison, the musicians on the recording include Nicky Hopkins (piano), Klaus Voormann (bass) and Jim Keltner (drums). As can be heard in the outtake of "Who Can See It" available unofficially on the Living in the Alternate World bootleg, Gary Wright's original contribution was a prominent harmonium part, superseded by Barham's strings and brass on the released version. Leng nevertheless credits Wright with playing organ on the song. ## Release and reception Apple Records released Living in the Material World at the end of May 1973 in the United States and a month later in Britain. "Who Can See It" appeared as track 5 on side one of the LP format, in between what Leng terms the "perfect pop confection" "Don't Let Me Wait Too Long" and another song that referenced Harrison's Beatle past, "Living in the Material World". Reflecting the album's lyrical themes, Tom Wilkes's art design contrasted a devout spiritual existence with life in the material world, by featuring Hindu religious images such as a painting of Krishna and his warrior prince Arjuna, and a photograph of Harrison and his fellow musicians at a banquet, surrounded by symbols of material wealth and success. The album confirmed Harrison's status as the most commercially successful ex-Beatle, but it drew criticism from some reviewers for the number of slow songs among its eleven tracks, as well as the perceived preachy tone of Harrison's lyrics. According to author Michael Frontani, lines such as "My life belongs to me" in "Who Can See It" "betrayed sentiments of a man increasingly at odds ... with fans and critics who wanted him to be 'Beatle George,' or at least to be less fixated on his spirituality". In his review for Rolling Stone, Stephen Holden wrote that, amid Material World's "miraculous ... radiance", the song represented "passionate testament" and "a beautiful ballad whose ascendant long-line melody is the most distinguished of the album". In Melody Maker, Michael Watts described Living in the Material World as "far, far removed from the Beatles" and "more interesting" lyrically than All Things Must Pass. Watts noted the "large autobiographical insights" provided in Harrison's songwriting, of which "Who Can See It" showed "he's found the way at last". Writing of Harrison's standing on an album he considered "as personal, in its own way, as anything that Lennon has done": Watts said: "Harrison has always struck me before as simply a writer of very classy pop songs; now he stands as something more than an entertainer. Now he's being honest." NME critic Bob Woffinden praised the song also, but suggested it was "ideal material" for someone with a wider vocal range than Harrison. ## Retrospective reviews Some recent reviewers have been less enthusiastic, with PopMatters' Zeth Lundy opining that, rather than Harrison's more "stripped-down" production aesthetic, "Who Can See It" would have benefited from "the hyper-drama of All Things Must Pass' resonant abyss". Writing for Rolling Stone in 2002, Greg Kot similarly bemoaned the "hymn-like calm" of the performance and its falling short of the "transcendent heights" of Harrison's 1970 triple set. Reviewing the 2006 reissue of Living in the Material World for Q magazine, Tom Doyle included it among the album's best three tracks and wrote: "the introspective moods of The Light That Has Lighted The World and Who Can See It, with their ornate instrumentation and weepy vocals, are lovely things." Former Mojo editor Mat Snow describes Material World as "a treat for the ears" and, while conceding Harrison's limitations as a singer compared with Lennon and McCartney, he writes that Harrison "worked hard to ensure the choruses of ... 'Who Can See It' caught the ear with their deep and delicious emotion". In his review of the 2014 reissue of Harrison's Apple catalogue, for Classic Rock, Paul Trynka refers to Material Word as an album that "sparkles with many gems"; of these, he adds, "it's the more restrained tracks – Don't Let Me Wait Too Long, Who Can See It – that entrance: gorgeous pop songs, all the more forceful for their restraint." New Zealand Herald journalist Graham Reid writes of Harrison "sound[ing] battered by recent events and the Beatle legacy" on "Who Can See It", yet he cites the song as a "standout" on an album that "can be very moving". Among Beatles biographers, the Roy Orbison influence in "Who Can See It" is frequently noted, as is the fact that Harrison's lead vocal is one of the best of his career. In addition to admiring the album's disciplined, George Martin-like production, Alan Clayson has written of the "hitherto unprecedented audacity" of the vocals found throughout Material World, adding: "He may have lacked the Big O's operatic pitch, but 'Who Can See It' was among George's most magnificent performances on record. Veering cleanly into falsetto on other tracks, too, never had his pipes been so adept." Elliot Huntley describes "Who Can See It" as a "beautiful ballad" and an "aching, yearning masterpiece". In his chapter on George Harrison in the book The Dawn of Indian Music in the West, Peter Lavezzoli is another who highlights Harrison's singing on this "gorgeous Roy Orbison-esque ballad". While praising a vocal that "positively bursts with passion", Leng identifies the song's "prevailing emotions" as "bitterness and anger" and notes: "If any Beatles fan was laboring under the misapprehension that George had enjoyed the [Beatles] episode as much as they had, this song tells the exact opposite story." Ian Inglis writes that the "rather ponderous" arrangement on "Who Can See It" limits its "entertainment" value but, like "The Light That Has Lighted the World", the song is an "unequivocal statement of who he is". ## Live performance In line with his stated refusal to play the role of "Beatle George" at the time, "Who Can See It" was among the songs rehearsed and played on Harrison's North American tour with Ravi Shankar in November–December 1974. Given the composition's "intensity of sentiment", Leng views it as a notable inclusion in the concert setlist. Harrison dropped the song in a program reshuffle following the opening show, however, due to his laryngitis-ravaged vocals cords being unable to carry such a demanding tune. The tour was the first North American tour by an ex-Beatle, a fact that encouraged expectations from many critics and concert-goers that were at odds with Harrison's aim – which was to present a musically diverse show featuring a minimum of his Beatles-era songs. In an attempt to justify himself, Harrison took to quoting from the chorus of "Who Can See It" during interviews, as an example of Gandhi's advice to "create and preserve the image of your choice". ## Personnel - George Harrison – vocals, electric guitars - Nicky Hopkins – piano - Gary Wright – organ - Klaus Voormann – bass - Jim Keltner – drums - John Barham – string and brass arrangements, choral arrangement
180,351	1975 Cricket World Cup	1,172,956,049	Cricket World Cup Men	[ "1975 Cricket World Cup", "1975 in English cricket", "Cricket World Cup tournaments", "International cricket competitions from 1970–71 to 1975", "International sports competitions hosted by England", "June 1975 sports events in the United Kingdom" ]	The 1975 Cricket World Cup (officially called the Prudential Cup '75) was the inaugural men's Cricket World Cup, and the first major tournament in the history of One Day International (ODI) cricket. Organised by the International Cricket Conference (ICC), it took place in England between 7 June and 21 June 1975. The tournament was sponsored by Prudential Assurance Company and had eight participating countries: the six Test-playing teams of the time – Australia, England, India, New Zealand, Pakistan, the West Indies – and the two leading Associate nations at the time – Sri Lanka and East Africa. The teams were divided into two groups of four, with each team playing each other in their group once; the top two from each group qualified for the semi-finals, with the winners of these matches meeting in the final. Each match consisted of 60 overs per team and was played in traditional white clothing and with red balls; all were played and ended in daylight. England and New Zealand finished as the top two teams in Group A, while the West Indies finished top of the Group B table ahead of Australia as the four teams qualified through to the semi-finals. After Australia defeated England and the West Indies defeated New Zealand in the semi-finals, the West Indies which came into the tournament as favourites, defeated Australia in the final at Lord's by 17 runs to become the first World Cup winners. New Zealand batsman, Glenn Turner was the top run-scorer for the tournament with 333 runs, whilst Australian bowler Gary Gilmour was the top wicket-taker with 11 wickets despite only playing in the final two matches. ## Background The first multilateral cricket competition at international level was the 1912 Triangular Tournament in England. This was played between the three test nations at the time – England, Australia and South Africa. The concept was later dropped because of inclement weather and a lack of public interest. The first one-day match to occur was in 1962 when four English county cricket teams filled in a gap to play in a limited overs knockout competition. It was won by Northamptonshire who defeated Leicestershire by five wickets. The limited-over format had been used in what sponsors marketed as a 'World Cricket Cup' in England in 1966 and 1967, contested between England, a Rest of the World XI, and a touring team (the West Indies in 1966 and Pakistan in 1967). The marketing of the event was clearly influenced by the hosting of the 1966 FIFA World Cup in the same country. The 1966 'World Cricket Cup' was won by England, that in 1967 by the Rest of the World. A report in the Cricketer implied that the last such match in this "Triangular Tournament", between Pakistan and the Rest of the World was neither well-attended nor taken entirely seriously: "It was a pity that a larger crowd was not present ... Sobers took the Cup and the World Xl took the gold medals. They must have enjoyed their holiday". It was not until 1971 that the first official One Day International (ODI) took place at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) as a replacement for the third test of the 1970–71 Ashes series between Australia and England. This was due to a deluge of rain that had affected the match for the first three days of the test. The match was a forty over match with each over being eight deliveries. After England made 190 from 39.4 overs, Australia chased the target at a steady rate to secure the match with 42 balls remaining. Two years later at Lord's during the 1973 Women's Cricket World Cup, plans were made for a men's tournament to take place in 1975. The tournament was planned to involve all the Test nations at the time in two group stages with the top two in each group qualifying for the knockout stage with the final at Lord's. ## Format The format of the 1975 Cricket World Cup had the eight teams split into two groups of four, with each team playing the rest of their group once. These matches took place from 7 to 14 June. The top two teams from each group then advanced to the semi-finals on 18 June, where the winners qualified for the final at Lord's on 21 June. If any of the matches had rain throughout the day, the teams could use one of their two reserve days that had been set for each match. The first World Cup saw seven venues being used across England. ## Participants Eight teams were invited to compete at the World Cup. Six of those nations were full members of the International Cricket Council (ICC), while the other two – Sri Lanka and East Africa – were invited to fill the remaining two spots. South Africa was meant to be one of the teams in the tournament, but due to the apartheid laws in the country, the team had to withdraw from competing until the 1992 edition. ## Venues The announcement of the venues began on 26 July 1973 when the ICC revealed that the tournament would be played with Lord's selected as the venue for the final. The rest of the venues were revealed on 5 November 1974 with the scheduling for the tournament being announced alongside the five county tournaments that would take place during the 1975 season. Headingley and The Oval were confirmed as the semi-final hosts. ## Pre-tournament ### Squads ### Preparations Heading into the first Cricket World Cup, the Ladbrokes betting agency had the West Indies as the favourites at 9–4. This was followed by England at 11–4 with Pakistan and Australia in third and fourth respectively. East Africa was last in the betting odds at 1500–1. Before the tournament, most of the teams played in warm-up matches against English county sides to get used to the English conditions with most of the national teams getting wins. Only East Africa, Sri Lanka and India lost at least one warm-up match before the tournament. Only Australia did not have any warm-up matches in England; their tour of Canada saw them lose to Eastern Canada and draw with Toronto before heading to England. Eight days before the World Cup, the ICC declared in a unanimous decision that any of the balls that went over a batsman's head would be called wide due to the fast short-pitched bowling. ## Group stage ### Summary The opening round of matches took place on 7 June with four matches being played. The match at Lord's saw England deliver the highest score by a team in the 60 over match with 334 runs being scored. Dennis Amiss top scored for the English with 137 from 147 balls helped by Keith Fletcher and Chris Old who each recorded a half-century. In response, Sunil Gavaskar batted through the entire innings for only 36 runs in which Gulabrai Ramchand thought that he was doing some batting practice. Australia opened their campaign with a win against Pakistan at Headingley with a 73-run victory. This was due to Dennis Lillee's five-wicket haul which brought Pakistan's hope of a win crashing down as they collapsed from 181 for four to be all out for 205. Earlier, Ross Edwards top scored for Australia with 80 as he aided the Australians in getting 94 runs from the last 13 overs to bring Australia to 278 for seven from their 60 overs. The other two matches saw easy wins for the West Indies and New Zealand. For Glenn Turner, he occupied the crease during the whole New Zealand innings as he top scored with 171 as New Zealand won by 181 runs over East Africa. The West Indies took a nine-wicket victory over Sri Lanka who became the first team to score under 100 runs in a One Day International. Despite missing two players due to operation – Asif Iqbal – and examinations – Imran Khan – Pakistan was not fazed by the missing players in the second round of games with the team scoring 266 for seven from their 60 overs with standing captain Majid Khan top scoring for Pakistan with 60. In response, the West Indies fell to 166 for eight which included a period of three wickets for only 10 runs as Bernard Julien, Clive Lloyd and Keith Boyce all losing their wickets. But the last wicket pair of Deryck Murray and Andy Roberts stole the match away as the West Indies won by a wicket off the final over. The other match in Group B saw Australia claim their second victory, but it was not all smooth with the Australian captain Ian Chappell remarking in an interview that the English media was trying to unsettle Australia's plans due to the Jeff Thomson no-ball problem with Chappell saying: "I've seen this sort of thing before in England". On the field, Alan Turner scored a century as Australia ended with 328 with Sri Lanka falling 52 runs short as John Mason from The Daily Telegraph stated that they might not have many new admirers with their short ball stuff sending two Sri Lankan batsman to hospital. Group A saw two convincing wins to England and India. At Trent Bridge, Keith Fletcher top scored for England with 131 as he guided the English to their second victory and going to the lead of the group table with an 80-run win over New Zealand. The other match in Group A saw 720 spectators observe India record a 10-wicket victory with Madan Lal taking three wickets for India in which East Africa fell only 120. With the match sold out four days in advance, the West Indies took on Australia to see who would finish top of Group B. With the ball swinging in the air, the pair of Rod Marsh and Ross Edwards guided Australia to 192 with a 99-run partnership for the sixth wicket after Australia fell to 61/5. In response, the West Indies went on to take a seven-wicket victory with Alvin Kallicharran top scoring with 78, which included a period of 31 runs of nine Dennis Lillee deliveries as the West Indies finished top of Group B. Pakistan ended their tournament with a 192-run victory over Sri Lanka at Trent Bridge with half centuries to Zaheer Abbas, Majid Khan and Sadiq Mohammad. In Group A, New Zealand sealed their spot in the semi-finals with a four-wicket victory over India off the back of a century from Glenn Turner as he hit twelve fours on his way to an unbeaten innings of 114. The other match in Group A saw England clinch a 196-run victory over East Africa; England scored 290/5 from their 60 overs off the back of a 158-run opening partnership between Dennis Amiss and Barry Wood before a bowling attack led by John Snow (taking 4 for 11 from his 12 overs) ran through the East Africans, who were bowled out for 94 in 52.3 overs. Only Ramesh Sethi offered much resistance, lasting for 32 overs to score 30. ### Group A ### Group B ## Knockout stage The knockout stage of the Cricket World Cup consisted of two single-elimination rounds leading to a final. If the match was delayed due to rain there were two reserve days to play out the match. ### Semi-finals The first semi-final was between England and Australia at Headingley. For Australia, their one change in bringing in Gary Gilmour for Ashley Mallett proved critical in booking Australia's spot into the final. This was due to the grassy pitch that both captains would criticise after the match. After Australia elected to field first, Gilmour took six wickets for 14 runs as he had England at 37 for seven after he bowled his 12 overs. Mike Denness attempted to bring England back but would lose his wicket as England fell for 93. In the run-chase, Australia collapsed to 39 for six before Gilmour partnered with Doug Walters as they chased the remaining runs to earn Australia a berth in the final. The second semi-final was between the West Indies and New Zealand at The Oval. Batting first, New Zealand reached 92 for only one loss at the lunch break. After lunch though, they collapsed to 158 with Geoff Howarth top scoring for New Zealand with 51, while Bernard Julien was the top wicket taker with four wickets. In the run chase, a 125-run second wicket partnership between Alvin Kallicharran (top scoring with 72) and Gordon Greenidge (55 runs) laid the foundation for a five-wicket victory with Richard Collinge being the only bowler to be troublesome for the West Indies with figures of three for 28 runs from his twelve overs. ### Final The final match on 21 June was sold out three days beforehand. With the West Indies being favourites for the match, they were asked by Ian Chappell to bat first and would go on to score 291 for eight wickets from 60 overs. After being given a second chance from a Ross Edwards dropped chance at mid-wicket, Clive Lloyd went on to top score for the West Indies with 102. Gary Gilmour was the best of the Australian bowlers with five wickets for 48 runs. In response, Ian Chappell scored a half-century to set up the foundation for Australia before three run-outs from the hands of Viv Richards put the pressure on Australia as they collapsed to 233 for nine. A final-wicket partnership of 41 from Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson brought Australia within 18 runs of victory. But a fifth run-out of the innings saw Australia bowled out for 274 and would see the West Indies win by 17 runs, claiming the first men's World Cup. ## Statistics Glenn Turner of New Zealand ended the tournament as the leading run scorer for the 1975 edition with his 333 runs coming in four games which included a unbeaten 171 against East Africa, which was also the highest score of the tournament. In second place was English player Dennis Amiss with Pakistan's Majid Khan rounding out the top three. Australian player Gary Gilmour was the tournament's leading wicket taker with 11 wickets from his two games, which included the best tournament figures in the semi-finals when he took six wickets for 14 against England. Bernard Julien and Keith Boyce (both from the West Indies) finished in second place, both getting 10 wickets for the tournament. ### Most runs ### Most wickets
243,513	Alprazolam	1,173,400,733	Benzodiazepine medication	[ "Anxiolytics", "Chloroarenes", "GABAA receptor positive allosteric modulators", "Pfizer brands", "Triazolobenzodiazepines", "Wikipedia medicine articles ready to translate" ]	Alprazolam, sold under the brand name Xanax, is a fast-acting, potent tranquilizer of moderate duration within the triazolobenzodiazepine group of chemicals called benzodiazepines. Alprazolam is most commonly used in management of anxiety disorders, specifically panic disorder or generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). Other uses include the treatment of chemotherapy-induced nausea, together with other treatments. GAD improvement occurs generally within a week. Alprazolam is generally taken orally (by mouth). Common side effects include sleepiness, depression or suppressed emotions, mild to severe decreases in motor skills, hiccups, dulling or declining of cognition as well as alertness or general awareness of one’s surroundings or even behavior, dry mouth (mildly), decreased heart rate, suppression (physiological inhibition) of general central nervous system activity (opposite of physiological excitation), impairment of judgment (usually in higher than therapeutic doses), marginal to severe decreases in memory formation, decreased ability to process new information, as well as partial to complete amnesia depending on dosage. Some of the sedation and tiredness may improve within a few days. Alprazolam withdrawal may occur if use is suddenly decreased; therefore, gradually decreasing the dosage over weeks or months may be required to mitigate the debilitating withdrawal symptoms or possible physical health complications of withdrawal. Cold turkey abstinence is therefore almost universally advised against for all benzodiazepines, with even tapering sometimes requiring attentive medical supervision and care. Alprazolam, like other benzodiazepines, acts through the GABA<sub>A</sub> receptor, which is considered to be the main mechanism of action responsible for its primary effects and its physiologically inhibiting components on the body’s central nervous system. Alprazolam was invented at the Upjohn Company and patented in 1971 and approved for medical use in the United States in 1981. Alprazolam is a Schedule IV controlled substance and is a common drug of abuse. It is available as a generic medication. In 2020, it was the 37th most-commonly-prescribed medication in the United States, with more than 16 million prescriptions. ## Medical uses Alprazolam is mostly used in management of anxiety disorders, panic disorders, and nausea due to chemotherapy. Alprazolam is indicated for the treatment of generalized anxiety disorder and panic disorder with or without agoraphobia in adults. ### Panic disorder Alprazolam is effective in the relief of moderate to severe anxiety and panic attacks. Alprazolam is not recommended in Australia for the treatment of panic disorder because of concerns regarding tolerance, dependence, and abuse. Most evidence shows that the benefits of alprazolam in treating panic disorder last only four to ten weeks. However, people with panic disorder have been treated on an open basis for up to eight months without apparent loss of benefit. Alprazolam is recommended by the World Federation of Societies of Biological Psychiatry (WFSBP) for treatment-resistant cases of panic disorder where there is no history of tolerance or dependence. ### Anxiety disorders Anxiety associated with depression is responsive to alprazolam. Clinical studies have shown that the effectiveness is limited to four months for anxiety disorders. However, the research into antidepressant properties of alprazolam is poor and has only assessed its short-term effects against depression. In one study, some long term, high-dosage users of alprazolam developed reversible depression. In the US, alprazolam is FDA-approved for the management of anxiety disorders, a condition corresponding most closely to the American Psychological Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR) diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder, or the short-term relief of symptoms of anxiety. In the UK, alprazolam is recommended for short-term treatment, from two to four weeks, of severe acute anxiety. ### Nausea due to chemotherapy Alprazolam may be used in combination with other medications for chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting. ## Contraindications Benzodiazepines require special precaution if used in children and in alcohol- or drug-dependent individuals. Particular care should be taken in pregnant or elderly people, people with substance use disorder history, particularly alcohol dependence, and people with comorbid psychiatric disorders. Alprazolam should be avoided or carefully monitored by medical professionals in individuals with myasthenia gravis, acute narrow-angle glaucoma, severe liver deficiencies such as cirrhosis, severe sleep apnea, pre-existing respiratory depression, marked neuromuscular respiratory, acute pulmonary insufficiency, chronic psychosis, hypersensitivity, allergy to alprazolam or other benzodiazepines, and borderline personality disorder, where it may induce suicidality and dyscontrol. Like all central nervous system depressants, alprazolam in larger-than-normal doses can cause significant deterioration in alertness and increase drowsiness, especially in those unaccustomed to the drug's effects. Elderly individuals should be cautious in the use of alprazolam due to the possibility of increased susceptibility to side-effects, especially loss of coordination and drowsiness. ## Side effects Sedative drugs, including alprazolam, have been associated with an increased risk of death. Possible side effects include: - Anterograde amnesia and concentration problems - Ataxia and Dysarthria - Disinhibition - Drowsiness, dizziness, lightheadedness, fatigue, unsteadiness, impaired coordination, and vertigo - Dry mouth (infrequent) - Hallucinations (rare) - Jaundice (very rare) - Seizure (less common) - Skin rash, respiratory depression, and constipation - Suicidal ideation or suicide - Urinary retention (infrequent) - Muscle weakness In September 2020, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) required the boxed warning be updated for all benzodiazepine medicines to describe the risks of abuse, misuse, addiction, physical dependence, and withdrawal reactions consistently across all the medicines in the class. ### Paradoxical reactions Although unusual, the following paradoxical reactions have been shown to occur: - Aggression - Mania, agitation, hyperactivity, and restlessness - Rage and hostility - Twitches and tremor ### Food and drug interactions Alprazolam is primarily metabolized via CYP3A4. Combining CYP3A4 inhibitors such as cimetidine, erythromycin, norfluoxetine, fluvoxamine, itraconazole, ketoconazole, nefazodone, propoxyphene, and ritonavir delay the hepatic clearance of alprazolam, which may result in its accumulation and increased severity of its side effects. Imipramine and desipramine have been reported to increase an average of 31% and 20% respectively by the concomitant administration of alprazolam tablets. Combined oral contraceptive pills reduce the clearance of alprazolam, which may lead to increased plasma levels of alprazolam and accumulation. Alcohol is one of the most common interactions; alcohol and alprazolam taken in combination have a synergistic effect on one another, which can cause severe sedation, behavioral changes, and intoxication. The more alcohol and alprazolam taken, the worse the interaction. Combination of alprazolam with the herb kava can result in the development of a semi-comatose state. Plants in the genus Hypericum, including St. John's wort, conversely can lower the plasma levels of alprazolam and reduce its therapeutic effect. ### Pregnancy and breastfeeding Benzodiazepines cross the placenta, enter the fetus, and are also excreted in breast milk. Chronic administration of diazepam, another benzodiazepine, to nursing mothers has been reported to cause their infants to become lethargic and to lose weight. The use of alprazolam during pregnancy is associated with congenital abnormalities, and use in the last trimester may cause fetal drug dependence and withdrawal symptoms in the post-natal period as well as neonatal flaccidity and respiratory problems. However, in long-term users of benzodiazepines, abrupt discontinuation due to concerns of teratogenesis has a high risk of causing extreme withdrawal symptoms and a severe rebound effect of the underlying mental health disorder. Spontaneous abortions may also result from abrupt withdrawal of psychotropic medications, including benzodiazepines. ### Overdose The maximum recommended daily dose is 10 milligrams per day. Overdoses of alprazolam can be mild to severe depending on the quantity ingested and if other drugs are taken in combination. Alprazolam overdoses cause excess central nervous system (CNS) depression. ### Dependence and withdrawal The potential for misuse among those taking it for medical reasons is controversial, with some expert reviews stating that the risk is low and similar to that of other benzodiazepine drugs. Others state that there is a substantial risk of misuse and dependence in both patients and non-medical users and that the short half-life and rapid onset of action may increase the risk of misuse. Compared to the large number of prescriptions, relatively few individuals increase their dose on their own initiative or engage in drug-seeking behavior. Alprazolam, like other benzodiazepines, binds to specific sites on the GABA<sub>A</sub> (gamma-aminobutyric acid) receptor. When bound to these sites, which are referred to as benzodiazepine receptors, it modulates the effect of GABA<sub>A</sub> receptors and, thus, of GABAergic neurons. Long-term use causes adaptive changes in the benzodiazepine receptors, making them less sensitive to stimulation and thus making the drugs less potent. Withdrawal and rebound symptoms commonly occur and necessitate a gradual reduction in dosage to minimize withdrawal effects when discontinuing. Not all withdrawal effects are evidence of true dependence or withdrawal. Recurrence of symptoms such as anxiety may simply indicate that the drug was having its expected anti-anxiety effect and that, in the absence of the drug, the symptom has returned to pretreatment levels. If the symptoms are more severe or frequent, the person may be experiencing a rebound effect due to the removal of the drug. Either of these can occur without the person actually being drug dependent. Alprazolam and other benzodiazepines may also cause the development of physical dependence, tolerance, and benzodiazepine withdrawal symptoms during rapid dose reduction or cessation of therapy after long-term treatment. There is a higher chance of withdrawal reactions if the drug is administered in a higher dosage than recommended, or if a person stops taking the medication altogether without slowly allowing the body to adjust to a lower-dosage regimen. In 1992, Romach and colleagues reported that dose escalation is not a characteristic of long-term alprazolam users and that the majority of long-term alprazolam users change their initial pattern of regular use to one of symptom control only when required. Some common symptoms of alprazolam discontinuation include malaise, weakness, insomnia, tachycardia, lightheadedness, and dizziness. Those taking more than 4 mg per day have an increased potential for dependence. This medication may cause withdrawal symptoms upon abrupt withdrawal or rapid tapering, which in some cases have been known to cause seizures, as well as marked delirium similar to that produced by the anticholinergic tropane alkaloids of Datura (scopolamine and atropine). The discontinuation of this medication may also cause a reaction called rebound anxiety. In a 1983 study, only 5% of patients who had abruptly stopped taking long-acting benzodiazepines after less than 8 months demonstrated withdrawal symptoms, but 43% of those who had been taking them for more than 8 months did. With alprazolam – a short-acting benzodiazepine – taken for 8 weeks, 65% of patients experienced significant rebound anxiety. To some degree, these older benzodiazepines are self-tapering. The benzodiazepines diazepam and oxazepam have been found to produce fewer withdrawal reactions than alprazolam, temazepam, or lorazepam. Factors that determine the risk of psychological dependence or physical dependence and the severity of the benzodiazepine withdrawal symptoms during dose reduction of alprazolam include: dosage used, length of use, frequency of dosing, personality characteristics of the individual, previous use of cross-dependent/cross-tolerant drugs (alcohol or other sedative-hypnotic drugs), current use of cross-dependent/-tolerant drugs, use of other short-acting, high-potency benzodiazepines, and method of discontinuation. ## Pharmacology Alprazolam is a positive allosteric modulator of the gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) type A receptor. When it binds to the receptor, effects of GABA are enhanced leading to inhibition of neurons in the brain. This results in effects including reduced anxiety, muscle relaxant, antidepressant and anticonvulsant activity. The activity of alprazolam in the central nervous system is dose dependent. ### Mechanism of action Alprazolam is classed as a high-potency triazolobenzodiazepine: a benzodiazepine with a triazole ring attached to its structure. As a benzodiazepine, alprazolam produces a variety of therapeutic and adverse effects by binding to the GABA<sub>A</sub> benzodiazepine receptor site and modulating its function; GABA receptors are the most prolific inhibitory receptor within the brain. The GABA chemical and receptor system mediates inhibitory or calming effects of alprazolam on the nervous system. Binding of alprazolam to the GABA<sub>A</sub> receptor, a chloride ion channel, enhances the effects of GABA, a neurotransmitter. When GABA binds the GABA<sub>A</sub> receptor the channel opens and chloride enters the cell which makes it more resistant to depolarisation. Therefore, alprazolam has a depressant effect on synaptic transmission to reduce anxiety. The GABA<sub>A</sub> receptor is made up of 5 subunits out of a possible 19, and GABA<sub>A</sub> receptors made up of different combinations of subunits have different properties, different locations within the brain, and, importantly, different activities with regard to benzodiazepines. Alprazolam and other triazolobenzodiazepines such as triazolam that have a triazole ring fused to their diazepine ring appear to have antidepressant properties. This is perhaps due to the similarities shared with tricyclic antidepressants, as they have two benzene rings fused to a diazepine ring. Alprazolam causes a marked suppression of the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis. The therapeutic properties of alprazolam are similar to other benzodiazepines and include anxiolytic, anticonvulsant, muscle relaxant, hypnotic and amnesic; however, it is used mainly as an anxiolytic. Giving alprazolam, as compared to lorazepam, has been demonstrated to elicit a statistically significant increase in extracellular dopamine D1 and D2 concentrations in the striatum. ### Pharmacokinetics Alprazolam is taken orally, and is absorbed well – 80% of alprazolam binds to proteins in the serum (the majority binding to albumin). The concentration of alprazolam peaks after one to two hours. Alprazolam is metabolized in the liver, mostly by the enzyme cytochrome P450 3A4 (CYP3A4). Two major metabolites are produced: 4-hydroxyalprazolam and α-hydroxyalprazolam, as well as an inactive benzophenone. The low concentrations and low potencies of 4-hydroxyalprazolam and α-hydroxyalprazolam indicate that they have little to no contribution to the effects of alprazolam. The metabolites and some unmetabolized alprazolam are filtered out by the kidneys and are excreted in the urine. ## Chemistry ### Physical properties Alprazolam is a triazole and benzodiazepine derivative substituted with a phenyl group at position 6, with a chlorine atom at position 8 and with a methyl group at position 1. It is an analogue of triazolam, the difference between them being the absence of a chlorine atom in the ortho position of the phenyl ring. It is slightly soluble in chloroform, soluble in alcohol, slightly soluble in acetone and insoluble in water. It has a melting point of 228–229.5 °C (442.4–445.1 °F; 501.1–502.6 K). ### Synthesis For the synthesis of alprazolam the same method can be used as for triazolam, excepting that it starts from 2-amino-5-chlorobenzophenone. However, an alternative easier synthesis starting with 2,6-dichloro-4-phenylquinoline has been suggested, in which it reacts with hydrazine giving 6-chloro-2-hydrazino-4-phenylquinoline. Boiling the mixture with triethyl orthoacetate results in cyclization with the formation of the triazole ring. The product undergoes oxidative degradation in the presence of periodate and ruthenium dioxide in acetone solution, giving 2-[4-(3'-methyl-1,2,4-triazolo)]-5-chlorobenzophenone. Oxy-methylation with formaldehyde results in a product that is treated with phosphorus tribromide, when 2-[4-(3'-methyl-5'-bromomethyl-1,2,4-triazolo)]-5-chlorobenzophenone is obtained. By substituting the bromine atom with an amino group conferred by ammonia, it forms alprazolam triazolobenzophenone, following which an intermolecular heterocyclization takes place to obtain alprazolam. ### Detection Quantification of alprazolam in blood and plasma samples may be necessary to confirm a diagnosis of intoxication in hospitalized patients, or to provide evidence in the case of crimes e.g., impaired driving arrest, or to assist in a thorough forensic investigation, e.g., in a medicolegal death investigation. Blood or plasma alprazolam concentrations are usually in a range of 10–100 μg/L in persons receiving the drug therapeutically, 100–300 μg/L in those arrested for impaired driving, and 300–2,000 μg/L in victims of acute overdosage. Most of the commercial immunoassays used for the benzodiazepine class of drugs cross-react with alprazolam, but confirmation and quantitative determination are usually done by chromatographic techniques. ## Forms of alprazolam Alprazolam regular release and orally disintegrating tablets are available as 0.25 mg, 0.5 mg, 1 mg, and 2 mg tablets, while extended release tablets are available as 0.5 mg, 1 mg, 2 mg, and 3 mg. Liquid alprazolam is available in a 1 mg/mL oral concentrate. Inactive ingredients in alprazolam tablets and solutions include microcrystalline cellulose, corn starch, docusate sodium, povidone, sodium starch glycolate, lactose monohydrate, magnesium stearate, colloidal silicon dioxide, and sodium benzoate. In addition, the 0.25 mg tablet contains D&C Yellow No. 10 and the 0.5 mg tablet contains FD&C Yellow No. 6 and D&C Yellow No. 10. ## Society and culture ### Patent Alprazolam is covered under , which was filed on 29 October 1969, granted on 19 October 1976, and expired in September 1993. ### Recreational use There is a risk of misuse and dependence in both patients and non-medical users of alprazolam; alprazolam's high affinity binding, high potency, and rapid onset increase its abuse potential. The physical dependence and withdrawal syndrome of alprazolam also add to its addictive nature. In the small subgroup of individuals who escalate their doses there is usually a history of alcohol or other substance use disorders. Despite this, most prescribed alprazolam users do not use their medication recreationally, and the long-term use of benzodiazepines does not generally correlate with the need for dose escalation. However, based on US findings from the Treatment Episode Data Set (TEDS), an annual compilation of patient characteristics in substance abuse treatment facilities in the United States, admissions due to "primary tranquilizer" (including, but not limited to, benzodiazepine-type) drug use increased 79% from 1992 to 2002, suggesting that misuse of benzodiazepines may be on the rise. In 2011, The New York Times reported, "The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last year reported an 89 percent increase in emergency room visits nationwide related to nonmedical benzodiazepine use between 2004 and 2008." Alprazolam is one of the most commonly prescribed and misused benzodiazepines in the United States. A large-scale nationwide U.S. government study conducted by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration concluded that, in the U.S., benzodiazepines are recreationally the most frequently used pharmaceuticals due to their widespread availability, accounting for 35% of all drug-related visits to hospital emergency and urgent care facilities. Men and women are equally likely to use benzodiazepines recreationally. The report found that alprazolam is the most common benzodiazepine for recreational use, followed by clonazepam, lorazepam, and diazepam. The number of emergency department visits due to benzodiazepines increased by 36% between 2004 and 2006. > Regarding the significant increases detected, it is worthwhile to consider that the number of pharmaceuticals dispensed for legitimate therapeutic uses may be increasing over time, and DAWN estimates are not adjusted to take such increases into account. Nor do DAWN estimates take into account the increases in the population or in ED use between 2004 and 2006. Those at a particularly high risk for misuse and dependence are people with a history of alcoholism or drug abuse and/or dependence and people with borderline personality disorder. The poly-drug use of powerful depressant drugs poses the highest level of health concerns due to a significant increase in the likelihood of experiencing an overdose, which may cause fatal respiratory depression. A 1990 study found that diazepam has a higher misuse potential relative to many other benzodiazepines and that some data suggest that alprazolam and lorazepam resemble diazepam in this respect. Anecdotally, injection of alprazolam has been reported, causing dangerous damage to blood vessels, closure of blood vessels (embolization) and decay of muscle tissue (rhabdomyolysis). Alprazolam is not very soluble in water—when crushed in water it does not fully dissolve (40 μg/ml of H<sub>2</sub>O at pH 7). There are also reports of alprazolam being snorted. Due to the low weight of a dose, alprazolam, in one case, was distributed on blotter paper in a manner similar to LSD. Misuse of alprazolam and other benzodiazepines has been shown to cause cognitive impairment. Alprazolam has typically caused anterograde amnesia effects (inability to recall new events), but a study conducted on mice by the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Drug Research at Punjabi University has also determined that Alprazolam can produce retrograde amnesic effects (inability to remember events occurring before amnesia). Additionally, studies on the long-term cognitive effects of benzodiazepines found that long-term users of benzodiazepines still displayed cognitive deficits after 6 months of abstinence from constant usage. ### Popular culture Slang terms for alprazolam vary from place to place. Some of the more common terms are modified versions of the trade name "Xanax", such as Xannies (or Xanies) and the phonetic equivalent of Zannies; references to their drug classes, such as benzos or downers; or remark upon their shape or color (most commonly a straight, perforated tablet or an oval-shaped pill): bars, ladders, Xanbars, Xans, Z-bars, handle bars, beans, footballs, planks, poles, sticks, blues, or blue footballs. The 2022 film Take Your Pills: Xanax provides an overview of the drug's history and usage. ### Availability Alprazolam is available in English-speaking countries under the following brand names: - Alprax, Alprocontin, Alzam, Alzolam, Anzilum, Apo-Alpraz, Helex, Kalma, Mylan-Alprazolam, Niravam, Novo-Alprazol, Nu-Alpraz, Pacyl, Restyl, Tranax, Trika, Xycalm, Xanax, Xanor, Zolam, Zopax. In December 2013, in anticipation of the rescheduling of alprazolam to Schedule 8 in Australia, Pfizer Australia announced they would be discontinuing the Xanax brand in Australia as it was no longer commercially viable. ### Legal status Alprazolam has varied legal status depending on jurisdiction: - In the United States, alprazolam is a prescription drug and is assigned to Schedule IV of the Controlled Substances Act by the Drug Enforcement Administration. - Under the UK drug misuse classification system, benzodiazepines are Class C drugs (Schedule 4). In the UK, alprazolam is not available on the NHS and can only be obtained on a private prescription. - In Ireland, alprazolam is a Schedule 4 medicine. - In Sweden, alprazolam is a prescription drug in List IV (Schedule 4) under the Narcotics Drugs Act (1968). - In the Netherlands, alprazolam is a List 2 substance of the Opium Law and is available for prescription. - In Germany, alprazolam can be prescribed normally in doses up to 1 mg. Higher doses are scheduled as Anlage III drugs and require a special prescription form. - In Australia, alprazolam was originally a Schedule 4 (Prescription Only) medication; however, as of February 2014, it has become a Schedule 8 medication, subjecting it to more rigorous prescribing requirements. - In the Philippines, alprazolam is legally classified as a "dangerous drug" under the Comprehensive Dangerous Drugs Act of 2002, along with other schedule drugs listed in the 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances. The importation of dangerous drugs including alprazolam, requires authorization from the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency. Internationally, alprazolam is included under the United Nations Convention on Psychotropic Substances as Schedule IV.
16,881	Kashrut	1,171,771,814	Jewish dietary laws	[ "Hebrew words and phrases in Jewish law", "Kashrut", "Ritual slaughter" ]	Kashrut (also kashruth or kashrus, [] Error: : no text (help)) is a set of dietary laws dealing with the foods that Jewish people are permitted to eat and how those foods must be prepared according to Jewish law. Food that may be consumed is deemed kosher (/ˈkoʊʃər/ in English, Yiddish: כּשר), from the Ashkenazi pronunciation of the term that in Sephardic or Modern Hebrew is pronounced kashér (), meaning "fit" (in this context: "fit for consumption"). Although the details of the laws of kashrut are numerous and complex, they rest on a few basic principles: - Only certain types of mammals, birds and fish meeting specific criteria are kosher; the consumption of the flesh of any animals that do not meet these criteria, such as pork, frogs, and shellfish, is forbidden except for locusts, which are the only kosher invertebrate. - Kosher mammals and birds must be slaughtered according to a process known as shechita; blood may never be consumed and must be removed from meat by a process of salting and soaking in water for the meat to be permissible for use. - Meat and meat derivatives may never be mixed with milk and milk derivatives: separate equipment for the storage and preparation of meat-based and dairy-based foods must be used. Every food that is considered kosher is also categorized as follows: - "Meat" products (also called b'sari or fleishig) are those that contain kosher meat, such as beef, lamb or venison, kosher poultry such as chicken, goose, duck or turkey, or derivatives of meat, such as animal gelatin; non-animal products that were processed on equipment used for meat or meat-derived products must also be considered as meat (b'chezkat basar) - "Dairy" products (also called c'halavi or milchig) contain milk or any derivatives such as butter or cheese; non-dairy products that were processed on equipment used for milk or milk-derived products must also be considered as milk (b'chezkat chalav) - Pareve products contain neither meat, milk nor their respective derivatives; they include foods such as kosher fish, eggs from permitted birds, grains, produce and other edible vegetation. They remain pareve if they are not mixed with or processed using equipment that is used for any meat or dairy products. While any produce that grows from the earth, such as fruits, grains, vegetables and mushrooms, is always permissible, laws regarding the status of certain agricultural produce, especially that grown in the Land of Israel, such as tithes and produce of the Sabbatical year, impact their permissibility for consumption. Most of the basic laws of kashrut are derived from the Torah's books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy. Their details and practical application, however, are set down in the Oral Torah (eventually codified in the Mishnah and Talmud) and elaborated on in the later rabbinical literature. Although the Torah does not state the rationale for most kashrut laws, some suggest that they are only tests of obedience, while others have suggested philosophical, practical and hygienic reasons. Over the past century, many kashrut certification agencies have started to certify products, manufacturers, and restaurants as kosher, usually authorizing the use of a proprietary symbol or certificate, called a hechsher, to be displayed by the food establishment or on the product, which indicates that they are in compliance with the kosher laws. This labeling is useful for many people, including those whose religions expect adherence to a similar set of dietary laws, people with allergies to dairy foods, or vegans, who use the various kosher designations to determine whether a food contains meat or dairy-derived ingredients. The laws of Kashrut are a major area covered in traditional Rabbinic Ordination; see and . And numerous scholarly and popular works exist on these topics, covering both practice and theory. ## Explanations ### Philosophical Jewish philosophy divides the 613 commandments (or mitzvot) into three groups—laws that have a rational explanation and would probably be enacted by most orderly societies (mishpatim), laws that are understood after being explained but would not be legislated without the Torah's command (eidot), and laws that do not have a rational explanation (chukim). Some Jewish scholars say that kashrut should be categorized as laws for which there is no particular explanation since the human mind is not always capable of understanding divine intentions. In this line of thinking, the dietary laws were given as a demonstration of God's authority, and man must obey without asking why. Although Maimonides concurs that all the statutes of the Torah are decrees, he is of the view that whenever possible, one should seek out reasons for the Torah's commandments. Some theologians have said that the laws of kashrut are symbolic in character: kosher animals represent virtues, while non-kosher animals represent vices. The 1st-century BCE Letter of Aristeas argues that the laws "have been given [...] to awake pious thoughts and to form the character". This view reappears in the work of the 19th-century Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch. The Torah prohibits "cooking the kid (goat, sheep, calf) in its mother's milk". While the Torah does not provide a reason, it has been suggested that the practice was perceived as cruel and insensitive. Hasidic Judaism believes that everyday life is imbued with channels connecting with Divinity, the activation of which it sees as helping the Divine Presence to be drawn into the physical world; Hasidism argues that the food laws are related to the way such channels, termed 'sparks of holiness' ', interact with various animals. These 'sparks of holiness' are released whenever a Jew manipulates any object for a 'holy reason' (which includes eating); however, not all animal products are capable of releasing their 'sparks of holiness'. The Hasidic argument is that animals are imbued with signs that reveal the release of these sparks, and the signs are expressed in the biblical categorization of ritually 'clean' and ritually 'unclean'. ### Medical Although the reason for kashrut is that it is a decree from the Torah, there have been attempts to provide scientific support for the view that Jewish food laws have an incidental health benefit. One of the earliest is that of Maimonides in The Guide for the Perplexed. In 1953, David Macht, an Orthodox Jew and proponent of the theory of biblical scientific foresight, conducted toxicity experiments on many kinds of animals and fish. His experiment involved lupin seedlings being supplied with extracts from the meat of various animals; Macht reported that in 100% of cases, extracts from ritually 'unclean' meat inhibited the seedling's growth more than that from ritually 'clean' meats. At the same time, these explanations are controversial. Scholar Lester L. Grabbe, writing in the Oxford Bible Commentary on Leviticus, says "[a]n explanation now almost universally rejected is that the laws in this section have hygiene as their basis. Although some of the laws of ritual purity roughly correspond to modern ideas of physical cleanliness, many of them have little to do with hygiene. For example, there is no evidence that the 'unclean' animals are intrinsically bad to eat or to be avoided in a Mediterranean climate, as is sometimes asserted." ## Rules ### Prohibited foods The laws of kashrut can be classified according to the origin of the prohibition (Biblical or rabbinical) and whether the prohibition concerns the food itself or a mixture of foods. Biblically prohibited foods include: - Non-kosher animals—any mammals without certain identifying characteristics (cloven hooves and rumination); any birds of prey; any fish without fins or scales (thus excluding catfish, for instance). All invertebrates are non-kosher apart from certain types of locust, on which most communities lack a clear tradition. No reptiles or amphibians are kosher. - Carrion (nevelah)—meat from a kosher animal that has not been slaughtered according to the laws of shechita. This prohibition includes animals that have been slaughtered by non-Jews. - Injured (terefah)—an animal with a significant defect or injury, such as a fractured bone or particular types of lung adhesions. - Blood (dam)—the blood of kosher mammals and fowl is removed through salting, with special procedures for the liver, which is very rich in blood. - Particular fats (chelev)—particular parts of the abdominal fat of cattle, goats and sheep must be removed by a process called nikkur. - The twisted nerve (gid hanasheh)—the sciatic nerve, as according to Genesis 32:32 the patriarch Jacob's was damaged when he fought with an angel, so may not be eaten and is removed by nikkur. - A limb of a living animal (ever min ha-chai)—according to Jewish law, God forbade Noah and his descendants to consume flesh torn from a live animal. Hence, Jewish law considers this prohibition applicable even to non-Jews, and therefore, a Jew may not give or sell such meat to a non-Jew. - Untithed food (tevel)—produce of the Land of Israel requires the removal of certain tithes, which in ancient times were given to the kohanim (priests), Levites and the poor (terumah, maaser rishon and maasar ani respectively) or taken to the Old City of Jerusalem to be eaten there (maaser sheni). - Fruit during the first three years (orlah)—according to Leviticus 19:23, fruit from a tree in the first three years after planting may not be consumed (both in the Land of Israel and the diaspora). This applies also to the fruit of the vine—grapes, and wine produced from them. - New grain (chadash)—the Bible prohibits newly grown grain (planted after Passover the previous year) until the second day of Passover; there is debate as to whether this law applies to grain grown outside the Land of Israel. - Wine of libation (yayin nesekh)—wine that may have been dedicated to idolatrous practices. Biblically prohibited mixtures include: - Mixtures of meat and milk (basar be-chalav)—this law derives from the broad interpretation of the commandment not to "cook a kid in its mother's milk"; other non-kosher foods are permitted for non-dietary use (e.g. to be sold to non-Jews), but Jews are forbidden to benefit from mixtures of meat and milk in any way. - Different species of plants grown together (kilayim)—in the Land of Israel different species of plants are to be grown separately and not in close proximity according to Leviticus 19:19 and Deuteronomy 22:9–11. - A specific subdivision of this law is kil'ei ha-kerem, the prohibition of planting any grain or vegetable near a grapevine; this law applies to Jews throughout the world, and a Jew may not derive benefit from such produce. Rabbinically prohibited foods include: - Non-Jewish milk (chalav akum)—milk that may have an admixture of milk from non-kosher animals (see below for current views on this prohibition). - Non-Jewish cheese (gevinat akum)—cheese that may have been produced with non-kosher rennet. - Non-Jewish wine (stam yeinam)—wine that while not produced for idolatrous purposes may otherwise have been poured for such a purpose or alternatively when consumed will lead to intermarriage. - Food cooked by a non-Jew (bishul akum)—this law was enacted for concerns of intermarriage. (Minor) - Non-Jewish bread (pat akum)—this law was enacted for concerns of intermarriage. - Health risk (sakanah)—certain foods and mixtures are considered a health risk, such as mixtures of fish and meat. ### Permitted and forbidden animals Only meat from particular species is permissible. Mammals that both chew their cud (ruminate) and have cloven hooves can be kosher. Animals with one characteristic but not the other (the camel, the hyrax, and the hare because they have no cloven hooves, and the pig because it does not ruminate) are specifically excluded. In 2008, a rabbinical ruling determined that giraffes and their milk are eligible to be considered kosher. The giraffe has both split hooves and chews its cud, characteristics of animals considered kosher. Findings from 2008 show that giraffe milk curdles, meeting kosher standards. Although kosher, the giraffe is not slaughtered today because the process would be very costly. Giraffes are difficult to restrain, and their use for food could cause the species to become endangered. Non-kosher birds are listed outright in the Torah, but the exact zoological references are disputed and some references refer to families of birds (24 are mentioned). The Mishnah refers to four signs provided by the sages. First, a dores (predatory bird) is not kosher. Additionally, kosher birds possess three physical characteristics: an extra toe in the back (which does not join the other toes in supporting the leg), a zefek (crop), and a korkoban (gizzard) with a peelable lumen. However, individual Jews are barred from merely applying these regulations alone; an established tradition (masorah) is necessary to allow birds to be consumed, even if it can be substantiated that they meet all four criteria. The only exception to this is the turkey. There was a time when certain authorities considered the signs sufficient, so Jews started eating this bird without a masorah because it possesses all the signs (simanim) in Hebrew. Fish must have fins and scales to be kosher. Shellfish and other non-fish water fauna are not kosher. (See kosher species of fish.) Insects are not kosher, except for certain species of kosher locust. Any animal that eats other animals, whether they kill their food or eat carrion, is generally not kosher, as well as any animal that has been partially eaten by other animals. ### Separation of meat and milk Meat and milk (or derivatives) may not be mixed in the sense that meat and dairy products are not served at the same meal, served or cooked in the same utensils, or stored together. Observant Jews have separate sets of dishes, and sometimes different kitchens, for meat and milk, and wait anywhere between one and six hours after eating meat before consuming milk products. The milchig and fleishig (literally "milky" and "meaty") utensils and dishes are the commonly referred-to Yiddish delineations between dairy and meat ones, respectively. Shelomo Dov Goitein writes, "the dichotomy of the kitchen into a meat and a milk section, so basic in an observant Jewish household, is [...] never mentioned in the Geniza." Goitein believed that in the early Middle Ages Jewish families kept only one set of cutlery and cooking ware. According to David C. Kraemer, the practice of keeping separate sets of dishes developed only in the late 14th and 15th centuries. It is possible observant Jews before then waited overnight for the meat or dairy gravy absorbed in a pot's walls to become insignificant (lifgam) before using the pot for the other foodstuff (meat or dairy). ### Kosher slaughter Mammals and fowl must be slaughtered by a trained individual (a shochet) using a special method of slaughter, shechita. Shechita slaughter severs the jugular vein, carotid artery, esophagus, and trachea in a single continuous cutting movement with an unserrated, sharp knife. Failure of any of these criteria renders the meat of the animal non-kosher. The body of the slaughtered animal must be checked after slaughter to confirm that the animal had no medical condition or defect that would have caused it to die of its own accord within a year, which would make the meat unsuitable. These conditions (treifot) include 70 different categories of injuries, diseases, and abnormalities whose presence renders the animal non-kosher. It is forbidden to consume certain parts of the animal, such as certain fats (chelev) and the sciatic nerves from the legs, the process of excision being done by experts before the meat is sold. As much blood as possible must be removed through the kashering process; this is usually done through soaking and salting the meat, but the liver, as it is rich in blood, is grilled over an open flame. Fish (and kosher locusts, for those who follow the traditions permitting them) must be killed before being eaten, but no particular method has been specified in Jewish law. Legal aspects of ritual slaughter are governed not only by Jewish law but civil law as well. Some believe that this ensures the animal dies instantly without unnecessary suffering, but many animal rights activists view the process as cruel, claiming that the animal may not lose consciousness immediately, and activists have called for it to be banned. #### Preparation of meats When an animal is ritually slaughtered (shechted) the raw meat is traditionally cut, rinsed and salted, prior to cooking. Salting of raw meat draws out the blood that lodges on the inner surface of the meat. The salting is done with coarse grain salt, commonly referred to as kosher salt, after which the meat is laid over a grating or colander to allow for drainage, remaining so for the duration of time that it takes to walk one biblical mile (approximately 18–24 minutes). Afterwards, the residue of salt is rinsed away with water, and the meat cooked. Meat that is roasted requires no prior salting, as fire causes a natural purging of blood. Turei Zahav ("Taz"), a 17th-century commentary on the Shulchan Arukh, ruled that the pieces of meat can be "very thick" when salting. The Yemenite Jewish practice, however, follows Saadiah Gaon, who required that the meat not be larger than half a "rotal" (i.e. roughly 216 grams (7.6 oz)) when salting. This allows the effects of the salt to penetrate. Some Orthodox Jewish communities require the additional stricture of submersing raw meat in boiling water prior to cooking it, a practice known as ḥaliṭah (Hebrew: חליטה), "blanching." This was believed to constrict the blood lodged within the meat, to prevent it from oozing out when the meat was eaten. The raw meat is left in the pot of boiling water for as long as it takes for the meat to whiten on its outer layer. If someone wanted to use the water for soup after making ḥaliṭah in the same pot, they could simply scoop out the film, froth and scum that surface in the boiling water. Ḥaliṭah is not required when roasting meat over a fire, as the fire constricts the blood. ### Kosher utensils Utensils used for non-kosher foods become non-kosher, and make even otherwise kosher food prepared with them non-kosher. Some such utensils, depending on the material they are made from, can be made suitable for preparing kosher food again by immersion in boiling water or by the application of a blowtorch. Food prepared in a manner that violates the Shabbat (Sabbath) may not be eaten; although in certain instances it is permitted after the Shabbat is over. ### Passover laws Passover has stricter dietary rules, the most important of which is the prohibition on eating leavened bread or derivatives of this, which are known as chametz. This prohibition is derived from Exodus 12:15. Utensils used in preparing and serving chametz are also forbidden on Passover unless they have been ritually cleansed (kashered). Observant Jews often keep separate sets of meat and dairy utensils for Passover use only. In addition, some groups follow various eating restrictions on Passover that go beyond the rules of kashrut, such as not eating kitniyot, gebrochts or garlic. ### Produce of the Land of Israel Biblical rules also control the use of agriculture produce, for example, with respect to their tithing, or when it is permitted to eat them or to harvest them, and what must be done to make them suitable for human consumption. For produce grown in the Land of Israel a modified version of the biblical tithes must be applied, including Terumat HaMaaser, Maaser Rishon, Maaser Sheni, and Maasar Ani (untithed produce is called tevel); the fruit of the first three years of a tree's growth or replanting are forbidden for eating or any other use as orlah; produce grown in the Land of Israel on the seventh year obtains k'dushat shvi'it, and unless managed carefully is forbidden as a violation of the Shmita (Sabbatical Year). Some rules of kashrut are subject to different rabbinical opinions. For example, many hold that the rule against eating chadash (new grain) before the 16th of the month Nisan does not apply outside the Land of Israel. ### Vegetables Although plants and minerals are nearly always kosher, vegetarian restaurants and producers of vegetarian foods are required to obtain a hechsher, certifying that a rabbinical organization has approved their products as being kosher, because the hechsher usually certifies that certain vegetables have been checked for insect infestation and steps have been taken to ensure that cooked food meets the requirements of bishul Yisrael. Vegetables such as spinach and cauliflower must be checked for insect infestation. The proper procedure for inspecting and cleaning varies by species, growing conditions, and views of individual rabbis. ### Pareve foods A pareve food is one which is neither meat nor dairy. Fish fall into this category, as well as any food that is not animal-derived. Eggs are also considered pareve despite being an animal product. Some processes convert a meat- or dairy-derived product into a pareve one. For example, rennet is sometimes made from stomach linings, yet is acceptable for making kosher cheese. Gelatins derived from kosher animal sources (which were ritually slaughtered) are also pareve. Other gelatin-like products from non-animal sources such as agar agar and carrageenan are pareve by nature. Fish gelatin, like all kosher fish products, is pareve. Jewish law generally requires that bread be kept pareve (i.e., not kneaded with meat or dairy products nor made on meat or dairy equipment). Kashrut has procedures by which equipment can be cleaned of its previous non-kosher or meat/dairy use, but those may be inadequate for vegetarians, those with allergies, or adherents to other religious laws. For example, dairy manufacturing equipment can be cleaned well enough that the rabbis grant pareve status to products manufactured with it but someone with a strong allergic sensitivity to dairy products might still react to the dairy residue. This is why some products that are legitimately pareve carry "milk" warnings. ### Cannabis For cannabis grown in Israel, the plants must observe shmittah, but this does not apply to cannabis from elsewhere. At least one brand of cannabis edibles is certified to follow the laws of kashrut. ### Tobacco Although it is not a food product, some tobacco receives a year-long kosher for Passover certification. This year-long certification means that the tobacco is certified also for Passover where different restrictions may be in place. Tobacco may, for example, come into contact with some chametz grains that are strictly forbidden during Passover and the certification is a guarantee that it is free from this type of contamination. In Israel, this certification is given by a private kashrut rabbinic group Beit Yosef, but the Chief Rabbinate has objected to granting of any certification by rabbis because of health risks from tobacco. ### Genetically modified foods With the advent of genetic engineering, a whole new type of food has been brought into the world, and scholars in both academia and Judaic faith have differing viewpoints on whether these new strains of foods are to be considered kosher or not. The first genetically modified animal approved by the FDA for human consumption is the AquAdvantage salmon and, while salmon is normally an acceptably kosher food, this modified organism has a gene from a non-kosher organism. In 2015, the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards of the Rabbinical Assembly released a document regarding genetically modified organisms, stating that modification of gene sequences via the introduction of foreign DNA in order to convey a specific capability in the new organism is allowable, that entirely new species should not be intentionally created, and that the health implications of genetically modified foods must be considered on an individual basis. Some put forth that this intermixing of species is against the teachings of the Talmud and thus against Jewish Law and non-kosher. Others argue that the one in sixty parts law of kashrut is of significance, and that the foreign gene accounts for less than 1/60 of the animal and thus the modified salmon is kosher. ## Supervision and marketing ### Hashgacha Certain foods must be prepared in whole or in part by Jews. This includes grape wine, certain cooked foods (bishul akum), cheese (g'vinat akum), and according to some also butter (chem'at akum), dairy products (Hebrew: חלב ישראל chalav Yisrael "milk of Israel"), and bread (Pas Yisroel). ### Product labeling standards Although reading the label of food products can identify obviously non-kosher ingredients, some countries allow manufacturers to omit identification of certain ingredients. Such "hidden" ingredients may include lubricants and flavorings, among other additives; in some cases, for instance, the use of natural flavorings, these ingredients are more likely to be derived from non-kosher substances. Furthermore, certain products, such as fish, have a high rate of mislabeling, which may result in a non-kosher fish being sold in a package labeled as a species of kosher fish. Producers of foods and food additives can contact Jewish religious authorities to have their products certified as kosher: this involves a visit to the manufacturing facilities by an individual rabbi or a committee from a rabbinic organization, who will inspect the production methods and contents and, if everything is sufficiently kosher a certificate would be issued. Manufacturers sometimes identify the products that have received such certification by adding particular graphical symbols to the label. These symbols are known in Judaism as hechsherim. Due to differences in kashrut standards held by different organizations, the hechsheirim of certain Jewish authorities may at times be considered invalid by other Jewish authorities. The certification marks of the various rabbis and organisations are too numerous to list, but one of the most commonly used in the United States of America is that of the Union of Orthodox Congregations, who use a U inside a circle ("O-U"), symbolising the initials of Orthodox Union. In Britain, commonly used symbols are the "KLBD" logo of the London Beth Din and the "MK" logo of the Manchester Beth Din. A single K is sometimes used as a symbol for kosher, but since many countries do not allow letters to be trademarked (the method by which other symbols are protected from misuse), it only indicates that the company producing the product claims that it is kosher. Many of the certification symbols are accompanied by additional letters or words to indicate the category of the product, according to Jewish law; the categorization may conflict with legal classifications, especially in the case of food that Jewish law regards as dairy, but legal classification does not. - D—Dairy - DE—Dairy equipment - M—Meat, including poultry - Pareve—Food that is neither meat nor dairy - Fish - P—Passover-related (P is not used for Pareve) In many cases constant supervision is required because, for various reasons such as changes in manufacturing processes, products that once were kosher may cease to be so. For example, a kosher lubricating oil may be replaced by one containing tallow, which many rabbinic authorities view as non-kosher. Such changes are often coordinated with the supervising rabbi or supervising organization to ensure that new packaging does not suggest any hechsher or kashrut. In some cases, however, existing stocks of pre-printed labels with the hechsher may continue to be used on the now non-kosher product. An active grapevine among the Jewish community discusses which products are now questionable, as well as products which have become kosher but whose labels have yet to carry the hechsher. Some newspapers and periodicals also discuss kashrut products. Products labeled kosher-style are non-kosher products that have characteristics of kosher foods, such as all-beef hot dogs, or are flavored or prepared in a manner consistent with Ashkenazi practices, like dill pickles. The designation usually refers to delicatessen items. ### History of kosher supervision and marketing Food producers often look to expand their markets or marketing potential, and offering kosher food has become a way to do that. The uniqueness of kosher food was advertised as early as 1849. In 1911 Procter & Gamble became the first company to advertise one of their products, Crisco, as kosher. Over the next two decades, companies such as Lender's Bagels, Maxwell House, Manischewitz, and Empire evolved and gave the kosher market more shelf-space. In the 1960s, Hebrew National hotdogs launched a "we answer to a higher authority" campaign to appeal to Jews and non-Jews alike. From that point on, "kosher" became a symbol for both quality and value. The kosher market quickly expanded, and with it more opportunities for kosher products. Menachem Lubinsky, founder of the Kosherfest trade fair, estimates as many as 14 million kosher consumers and \$40 billion in sales of kosher products in the U.S. In 2014 the Israeli Defense Forces decided to allow female kosher supervisors to work in its kitchens on military bases, and the first women kosher inspectors were certified in Israel. ### Legal usage Advertising standards laws in many jurisdictions prohibit the use of the phrase kosher in a product's labeling unless the producer can show that the product conforms to Jewish dietary laws; however, different jurisdictions often define the legal qualifications for conforming to Jewish dietary laws differently. For example, in some places the law may require that a rabbi certify the kashrut nature, in others the rules of kosher are fully defined in law, and in others still it is sufficient that the manufacturer only believes that the product complies with Jewish dietary regulations. In several cases, laws restricting the use of the term kosher have later been determined to be illegal religious interference. ### Costs In the United States, the cost of certification for mass-produced items is typically minuscule and is usually more than offset by the advantages of being certified. In 1975 The New York Times estimated the cost per item for obtaining kosher certification at 6.5 millionths of a cent (\$0.000000065) per item for a General Foods frozen-food item. According to a 2005 report by Burns & McDonnell, most U.S. national certifying agencies are non-profit, only charging for supervision and on-site work, for which the on-site supervisor "typically makes less per visit than an auto mechanic does per hour". However, re-engineering an existing manufacturing process can be costly. Certification usually leads to increased revenues by opening up additional markets to Jews who keep kosher, Muslims who keep halal, Seventh-day Adventists who keep the main laws of Kosher Diet, vegetarians, and the lactose-intolerant who wish to avoid dairy products (products that are reliably certified as pareve meet this criterion). The Orthodox Union, one of the largest kashrut organizations in the United States, claims that "when positioned next to a competing non-kosher brand, a kosher product will do better by 20%". In some European Jewish communities, kosher supervision of meat includes a "tax" used to fund Jewish education in the community, which makes kosher meat more expensive than the cost of supervision alone would imply. ## Society and culture ### Adherence Many Jews partially observe kashrut, by abstaining from pork or shellfish or by not drinking milk with meat dishes. Some keep kosher at home but eat in non-kosher restaurants. In 2012, one analysis of the specialty food market in North America estimated that only 15% of kosher consumers were Jewish. Kosher meat is regularly consumed by Muslims when halal is not available. Muslims, Hindus, and people with allergies to dairy foods often consider the kosher-pareve designation as an assurance that a food contains no animal-derived ingredients, including milk and all of its derivatives. However, since kosher-pareve foods may contain honey, eggs, or fish, vegans cannot rely on the certification. About a sixth of American Jews or 0.3% of the American population fully keep kosher, and many more of them do not strictly follow all of the rules but still abstain from some prohibited foods (especially pork). The Seventh-day Adventist Church, a Christian denomination, preaches a health message which expects adherence to the kosher dietary laws. Surveys conducted in 2013 and 2020 found that 22% of American Jews by religion claimed to keep kosher in their homes. Pork consumption in particular seems to be a bigger taboo than other non-Kosher eating practices among Jews, with 41% claiming to at least abstain from eating pork. American Jews are generally less strict about Kosher laws when compared to Israeli Jews. Nearly three times as many Israeli Jews reported that they commit to keeping kosher in their homes and 84% will not eat pork. ### Linguistics #### Etymology In Ancient Hebrew the word kosher (Hebrew: כשר) means be advantageous, proper, suitable, or succeed, according to the Brown–Driver–Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon. In Modern Hebrew it generally refers to kashrut but it can also sometimes mean "proper". For example, the Babylonian Talmud uses kosher in the sense of "virtuous" when referring to Darius I as a "kosher king"; Darius, a Persian king (reigned 522–486 BCE), fostered the building of the Second Temple. In colloquial English, kosher often means "legitimate", "acceptable", "permissible", "genuine", or "authentic". The word kosher can also form part of some common product names. #### Kosher salt Sometimes kosher is used as an abbreviation of koshering, meaning the process for making something kosher; for example, kosher salt is a form of salt with irregularly shaped crystals, making it particularly suitable for preparing meat according to the rules of kashrut, because the increased surface area of the crystals absorbs blood more effectively. In this case the type of salt refers to kosher style salt. Salt may also be kosher certified salt, or both. Certified kosher salt follows kashrut guidelines. Sometimes the term "coarse kosher salt" is used to designate salt that is both kosher style and kosher certified. The term "fine kosher salt" is sometimes used for salt that is certified kosher but not kosher style. #### Pickles Kosher can occur as a synonym for Jewish tradition; for example, a kosher dill pickle is simply a pickle made in the traditional manner of Jewish New York City pickle-makers, using a generous addition of garlic to the brine, and is not necessarily compliant with the traditional Jewish food laws. ## Suriname A treef (Surinamese Dutch, derived from Sranan Tongo trefu) is a food taboo. In Suriname certain groups of people have long adhered to belief in treef, especially among people of African descent. The consumption of certain foods is prohibited, in the belief that it could cause major diseases, particularly leprosy. These prohibitions can vary individually, but it is inextricably related to conditions in the family. A treef is inherited from the father's side, but it can be revealed in a dream, often by a woman. In addition, a woman must take into account special food taboos during pregnancy. There is great importance attached to the treef; if a child observes the treef of his father, and yet experiences a skin condition, this is seen as a strong indication that the child was begotten by the woman with another man. Finally treef also be acquired later in life by wearing certain charms that compel you to abstain from certain foods. The word is derived from Hebrew, due to influence of Sephardi Jews who came to Suriname in the 17th century. This is also the source of Sranan kaseri 'ritually clean, kosher'. ## Other uses Although the term kosher relates mainly to food, it sometimes occurs in other contexts. Some Orthodox retailers sell kosher cell phones—stripped-down devices with limited features. ## See also - Abomination (Judaism) - Ahimsa (non-violence to living beings) - Buddhist cuisine - Buddhist vegetarianism - Christian dietary laws - Comparison of Islamic and Jewish dietary laws - Hindu dietary laws - Islamic dietary laws - Halāl - Jewish cuisine - Eco-Kashrut - Israeli cuisine - Jewish vegetarianism - Jewish Veg - Kosher certification agency - Sabbath food preparation - Jhatka - Kosher tax - Kosher tax conspiracy theory - Products without kosher certification requirements - Taoist diet - Treef - Trefa banquet
44,089,758	Curve-shortening flow	1,171,928,387	Motion of a curve based on its curvature	[ "Geometric flow" ]	In mathematics, the curve-shortening flow is a process that modifies a smooth curve in the Euclidean plane by moving its points perpendicularly to the curve at a speed proportional to the curvature. The curve-shortening flow is an example of a geometric flow, and is the one-dimensional case of the mean curvature flow. Other names for the same process include the Euclidean shortening flow, geometric heat flow, and arc length evolution. As the points of any smooth simple closed curve move in this way, the curve remains simple and smooth. It loses area at a constant rate, and its perimeter decreases as quickly as possible for any continuous curve evolution. If the curve is non-convex, its total absolute curvature decreases monotonically, until it becomes convex. Once convex, the isoperimetric ratio of the curve decreases as the curve converges to a circular shape, before collapsing to a single point of singularity. If two disjoint simple smooth closed curves evolve, they remain disjoint until one of them collapses to a point. The circle is the only simple closed curve that maintains its shape under the curve-shortening flow, but some curves that cross themselves or have infinite length keep their shape, including the grim reaper curve, an infinite curve that translates upwards, and spirals that rotate while remaining the same size and shape. An approximation to the curve-shortening flow can be computed numerically, by approximating the curve as a polygon and using the finite difference method to calculate the motion of each polygon vertex. Alternative methods include computing a convolution of polygon vertices and then resampling vertices on the resulting curve, or repeatedly applying a median filter to a digital image whose black and white pixels represent the inside and outside of the curve. The curve-shortening flow was originally studied as a model for annealing of metal sheets. Later, it was applied in image analysis to give a multi-scale representation of shapes. It can also model reaction–diffusion systems, and the behavior of cellular automata. The curve-shortening flow can be used to find closed geodesics on Riemannian manifolds, and as a model for the behavior of higher-dimensional flows. ## Definitions A flow is a process in which the points of a space continuously change their locations or properties over time. More specifically, in a one-dimensional geometric flow such as the curve-shortening flow, the points undergoing the flow belong to a curve, and what changes is the shape of the curve, its embedding into the Euclidean plane determined by the locations of each of its points. In the curve-shortening flow, each point of a curve moves in the direction of a normal vector to the curve, at a rate proportional to the curvature. For an evolving curve represented by a two-parameter function C(s,t) where s parameterizes the arc length along the curve and t parameterizes a time in the evolution of the curve, the curve-shortening flow can be described by the parabolic partial differential equation $\frac{\partial C}{\partial t} = \frac{\partial^2 C}{\partial s^2} = \kappa n,$ a form of the heat equation, where κ is the curvature and n is the unit normal vector. Because the ingredients of this equation, the arc length, curvature, and time, are all unaffected by translations and rotations of the Euclidean plane, it follows that the flow defined by this equation is invariant under translations and rotations (or more precisely, equivariant). If the plane is scaled by a constant dilation factor, the flow remains essentially unchanged, but is slowed down or sped up by the same factor. ### Non-smooth curves In order for the flow to be well defined, the given curve must be sufficiently smooth that it has a continuous curvature. However, once the flow starts, the curve becomes analytic, and remains so until reaching a singularity at which the curvature blows up. For a smooth curve without crossings, the only possible singularity happens when the curve collapses to a point, but immersed curves can have other types of singularity. In such cases, with some care it is possible to continue the flow past these singularities until the whole curve shrinks to a single point. For a simple closed curve, using an extension of the flow to non-smooth curves based on the level-set method, there are only two possibilities. Curves with zero Lebesgue measure (including all polygons and piecewise-smooth curves) instantly evolve into smooth curves, after which they evolve as any smooth curve would. However, Osgood curves with nonzero measure instead immediately evolve into a topological annulus with nonzero area and smooth boundaries. The topologist's sine curve is an example that instantly becomes smooth, despite not even being locally connected; examples such as this show that the reverse evolution of the curve-shortening flow can take well-behaved curves to complicated singularities in a finite amount of time. ### Non-Euclidean surfaces The curve-shortening flow, and many of the results about the curve-shortening flow, can be generalized from the Euclidean plane to any two-dimensional Riemannian manifold. In order to avoid additional types of singularity, it is important for the manifold to be convex at infinity; this is defined to mean that every compact set has a compact convex hull, as defined using geodesic convexity. The curve-shortening flow cannot cause a curve to depart from its convex hull, so this condition prevents parts of the curve from reaching the boundary of the manifold. ### Space curves The curve-shortening flow has also been studied for curves in three-dimensional Euclidean space. The normal vector in this case can be defined (as in the plane) as the derivative of the tangent vector with respect to arc length, normalized to be a unit vector; it is one of the components of the Frenet–Serret frame. It is not well defined at points of zero curvature, but the product of the curvature and the normal vector remains well defined at those points, allowing the curve-shortening flow to be defined. Curves in space may cross each other or themselves according to this flow, and the flow may lead to singularities in the curves; every singularity is asymptotic to a plane. However, spherical curves and curves which can be orthogonally projected into a regular convex planar curve are known to remain simple. The curve shortening flow for space curves has been used as a way to define flow past singularities in plane curves. ### Beyond curves It is possible to extend the definition of the flow to more general inputs than curves, for instance by using rectifiable varifolds or the level-set method. However, these extended definitions may allow parts of curves to vanish instantaneously or fatten into sets of nonzero area. A commonly studied variation of the problem involves networks of interior-disjoint smooth curves, with junctions where three or more of the curves meet. When the junctions all have exactly three curves meeting at angles of 2π/3 (the same conditions seen in an optimal Steiner tree or two-dimensional foam of soap bubbles) the flow is well-defined for the short term. However, it may eventually reach a singular state with four or more curves meeting at a junction, and there may be more than one way to continue the flow past such a singularity. ## Behavior ### Avoidance principle, radius, and stretch factor If two disjoint smooth simple closed curves undergo the curve-shortening flow simultaneously, they remain disjoint as the flow progresses. The reason is that, if two smooth curves move in a way that creates a crossing, then at the time of first crossing the curves would necessarily be tangent to each other, without crossing. But, in such a situation, the two curves' curvatures at the point of tangency would necessarily pull them apart rather than pushing them together into a crossing. For the same reason, a single simple closed curve can never evolve to cross itself. This phenomenon is known as the avoidance principle. The avoidance principle implies that any smooth closed curve must eventually reach a singularity, such as a point of infinite curvature. For, if a given smooth curve C is surrounded by a circle, both will remain disjoint for as long as they both exist. But the enclosing circle shrinks under the curvature flow, remaining circular, until it collapses, and by the avoidance principle C must remain contained within it. So, if C were to never reach a singularity, it would be trapped at a single point at the time when the circle collapses, which is impossible for a smooth curve. This can be quantified by observing that the radius of the smallest circle that encloses C must decrease at a rate that is at least as fast as the decrease in radius of a circle undergoing the same flow. `quantifies the avoidance principle for a single curve in terms of the ratio between the arc length (of the shorter of two arcs) and Euclidean distance between pairs of points, sometimes called the stretch factor. He shows that the stretch factor is strictly decreasing at each of its local maxima, except for the case of the two ends of a diameter of a circle in which case the stretch factor is constant at π. This monotonicity property implies the avoidance principle, for if the curve would ever touch itself the stretch factor would become infinite at the two touching points.` ### Length As a curve undergoes the curve-shortening flow, its length L decreases at a rate given by the formula $\frac{dL}{dt} = -\int \kappa^2 \, ds,$ where the integral is taken over the curve, κ is the curvature, and s is arc length along the curve. The integrand is always non-negative, and for any smooth closed curve there exist arcs within which it is strictly positive, so the length decreases monotonically. More generally, for any evolution of curves whose normal speed is f, the rate of change in length is $\frac{dL}{dt} = -\int f\kappa \, ds,$ which can be interpreted as a negated inner product between the given evolution and the curve-shortening flow. Thus, the curve-shortening flow can be described as the gradient flow for length, the flow that (locally) decreases the length of the curve as quickly as possible relative to the L<sup>2</sup> norm of the flow. This property is the one that gives the curve-shortening flow its name. ### Area For a simple closed curve, the area enclosed by the curve shrinks, at the constant rate of 2π units of area per unit of time, independent of the curve. Therefore, the total time for a curve to shrink to a point is proportional to its area, regardless of its initial shape. Because the area of a curve is reduced at a constant rate, and (by the isoperimetric inequality) a circle has the greatest possible area among simple closed curves of a given length, it follows that circles are the slowest curves to collapse to a point under the curve-shortening flow. All other curves take less time to collapse than a circle of the same length. The constant rate of area reduction is the only conservation law satisfied by the curve-shortening flow. This implies that it is not possible to express the "vanishing point" where the curve eventually collapses as an integral over the curve of any function of its points and their derivatives, because such an expression would lead to a forbidden second conservation law. However, by combining the constant rate of area loss with the avoidance principle, it is possible to prove that the vanishing point always lies within a circle, concentric with the minimum enclosing circle, whose area is the difference in areas between the enclosing circle and the given curve. ### Total absolute curvature The total absolute curvature of a smooth curve is the integral of the absolute value of the curvature along the arc length of the curve, $K=\int\|\kappa\| \,ds.$ It can also be expressed as a sum of the angles between the normal vectors at consecutive pairs of inflection points. It is 2π for convex curves and larger for non-convex curves, serving as a measure of non-convexity of a curve. New inflection points cannot be created by the curve-shortening flow. Each of the angles in the representation of the total absolute curvature as a sum decreases monotonically, except at the instants when two consecutive inflection points reach the same angle or position as each other and are both eliminated. Therefore, the total absolute curvature can never increase as the curve evolves. For convex curves it is constant at 2π and for non-convex curves it decreases monotonically. ### Gage–Hamilton–Grayson theorem If a smooth simple closed curve undergoes the curve-shortening flow, it remains smoothly embedded without self-intersections. It will eventually become convex, and once it does so it will remain convex. After this time, all points of the curve will move inwards, and the shape of the curve will converge to a circle as the whole curve shrinks to a single point. This behavior is sometimes summarized by saying that every simple closed curve shrinks to a "round point". This result is due to Michael Gage, Richard S. Hamilton, and Matthew Grayson. proved convergence to a circle for convex curves that contract to a point. More specifically Gage showed that the isoperimetric ratio (the ratio of squared curve length to area, a number that is 4π for a circle and larger for any other convex curve) decreases monotonically and quickly. proved that all smooth convex curves eventually contract to a point without forming any other singularities, and proved that every non-convex curve will eventually become convex. provide a simpler proof of Grayson's result, based on the monotonicity of the stretch factor. Similar results can be extended from closed curves to unbounded curves satisfying a local Lipschitz condition. For such curves, if both sides of the curve have infinite area, then the evolved curve remains smooth and singularity-free for all time. However, if one side of an unbounded curve has finite area, and the curve has finite total absolute curvature, then its evolution reaches a singularity in time proportional to the area on the finite-area side of the curve, with unbounded curvature near the singularity. For curves that are graphs of sufficiently well-behaved functions, asymptotic to a ray in each direction, the solution converges in shape to a unique shape that is asymptotic to the same rays. For networks formed by two disjoint rays on the same line, together with two smooth curves connecting the endpoints of the two rays, an analogue of the Gage–Hamilton–Grayson theorem holds, under which the region between the two curves becomes convex and then converges to a vesica piscis shape. ### Singularities of self-crossing curves Curves that have self-crossings may reach singularities before contracting to a point. For instance, if a lemniscate (any smooth immersed curve with a single crossing, resembling a figure 8 or infinity symbol) has unequal areas in its two lobes, then eventually the smaller lobe will collapse to a point. However, if the two lobes have equal areas, then they will remain equal throughout the evolution of the curve, and the isoperimetric ratio will diverge as the curve collapses to a singularity. When a locally convex self-crossing curve approaches a singularity as one of its loops shrinks, it either shrinks in a self-similar way or asymptotically approaches the grim reaper curve (described below) as it shrinks. When a loop collapses to a singularity, the amount of total absolute curvature that is lost is either at least 2π or exactly π. ### On Riemannian manifolds On a Riemannian manifold, any smooth simple closed curve will remain smooth and simple as it evolves, just as in the Euclidean case. It will either collapse to a point in a finite amount of time, or remain smooth and simple forever. In the latter case, the curve necessarily converges to a closed geodesic of the surface. Immersed curves on Riemannian manifolds, with finitely many self-crossings, become self-tangent only at a discrete set of times, at each of which they lose a crossing. As a consequence the number of self-crossing points is non-increasing. Curve shortening on a sphere can be used as part of a proof of the tennis ball theorem. This theorem states that every smooth simple closed curve on the sphere that divides the sphere's surface into two equal areas (like the seam of a tennis ball) must have at least four inflection points. The proof comes from the observation that curve shortening preserves the smoothness and area-bisection properties of the curve, and does not increase its number of inflection points. Therefore, it allows the problem to be reduced to the problem for curves near the limiting shape of curve shortening, a great circle. ### Huisken's monotonicity formula According to Huisken's monotonicity formula, the convolution of an evolving curve with a time-reversed heat kernel is non-increasing. This result can be used to analyze the singularities of the evolution. ## Specific curves ### Curves with self-similar evolution Because every other simple closed curve converges to a circle, the circle is the only simple closed curve that keeps its shape under the curve-shortening flow. However, there are many other examples of curves that are either non-simple (they include self-crossings) or non-closed (they extend to infinity) and keep their shape. In particular, - Every line stays unchanged by the curve-shortening flow. Lines are the only curves that are unaffected by the curve-shortening flow, although there exist more complex stable networks of curves, such as the hexagonal tiling of the plane. - The grim reaper curve y = − log cos x moves upwards without changing its shape. In the same way, any curve similar to the grim reaper is translated by the curve-shortening flow, shifted in the direction of the symmetry axis of the curve without changing its shape or orientation. The grim reaper is the only curve with this property. It is also called the hairpin model in the physics literature. - A family of self-crossing closed curves, derived from projections of torus knots, shrink homothetically but remain self-similar under the curve-shortening flow. These have come to be known as the Abresch–Langer curves, after the work of , although they were mentioned earlier by and rediscovered independently by . These curves are locally convex, and therefore can be described by their support functions. Suitably scaled versions of these support functions obey the differential equation $h''+h=\frac{1}{h},$ which has positive periodic solutions (corresponding to curves with self-similar evolution) for any period that is strictly between π and $\pi\sqrt{2}$. - Other curves, including some infinite spirals, remain self-similar with more complicated motions including rotation or combinations of rotation, shrinking or expansion, and translation. - For networks of smooth curves, meeting in threes at junctions with angles of 2π/3, the self-similar shrinking solutions include a double bubble surrounding two equal areas, a lens shape (vesica piscis) bounded by two congruent arcs of circles together with two collinear rays having their apexes at the corners of the lens, and a "fish-shaped" network bounded by a line segment, two rays, and a convex curve. Any other self-similar shrinking networks involve a larger number of curves. Another family of networks grows homothetically and remains self-similar; these are tree-like networks of curves, meeting at angles of 2π/3 at triple junctions, asymptotic to a fan of two or more rays that meet at a common endpoint. The two-ray case of these shapes is an unbounded smooth curve; for three or more rays the evolution of these shapes may be defined using generalized variants of the curve-shortening flow such as the one for varifolds. A given fan of four or more rays may be asymptotic to more than one different solution of this type, so these solutions do not provide a unique definition for the curve-shortening flow starting from a fan of rays. ### Ancient solutions An ancient solution to a flow problem is a curve whose evolution can be extrapolated backwards for all time, without singularities. All of the self-similar solutions that shrink or stay the same size rather than growing are ancient solutions in this sense; they can be extrapolated backwards by reversing the self-similarity transformation that they would undergo by the forwards curve-shortening flow. Thus, for instance, the circle, grim reaper, and Abresch–Langer curves are all ancient solutions. There are also examples which are not self-similar. An explicit example is the Angenent oval solution after the work of . This family of curves may be parameterized by specifying the curvature as a function of the tangent angle using the formula $k(\theta,t)=\sqrt{\cos 2\theta-\operatorname{coth} 2t}$ and have as their limiting shape under reverse evolution a pair of grim reaper curves approaching each other from opposite directions. In the Cartesian coordinate system, they may be given by the implicit curve equation $\cosh y - e^{-t}\cos x = 0.$ In the physics literature, the same shapes are known as the paperclip model. The Angenent oval and shrinking circle solutions are the only ancient solutions whose timeslices bound bounded convex sets. The Grim Reaper, stationary halfspace and stationary strip solutions are the only examples whose timeslices bound unbounded convex sets. There exist many further (nonembedded) locally convex examples as well as many further (nonconvex) embedded examples. ## Numerical approximations In order to compute the curve-shortening flow efficiently, both a continuous curve and the continuous evolution of the curve need to be replaced by a discrete approximation. ### Front tracking Front tracking methods have long been used in fluid dynamics to model and track the motion of boundaries between different materials, of steep gradients in material properties such as weather fronts, or of shock waves within a single material. These methods involve deriving the equations of motion of the boundary, and using them to directly simulate the motion of the boundary, rather than simulating the underlying fluid and treating the boundary as an emergent property of the fluid. The same methods can also be used to simulate the curve-shortening flow, even when the curve undergoing the flow is not a boundary or shock. In front tracking methods for curve shortening, the curve undergoing the evolution is discretized as a polygon. The finite difference method is used to derive formulas for the approximate normal vector and curvature at each vertex of the polygon, and these values are used to determine how to move each vertex in each time step. Although the curve-shortening flow is defined by the motion of a curve perpendicularly to itself, some parameterizations of the curve-shortening flow may allow the vertices that approximate the curve to move non-perpendicularly. In effect, this allows the vertices to move along the curve, as the curve evolves. Choosing a careful reparameterization can help redistribute the vertices more evenly along the curve in situations where perpendicular motion would cause them to bunch up. write that these methods are fast and accurate but that it is much more complicated to extend them to versions of the curve-shortening flow that apply to more complicated inputs than simple closed curves, where it is necessary to deal with singularities and changes of topology. For most such methods, warns that "The conditions of stability cannot be determined easily and the time step must be chosen ad hoc." Another finite differencing method by modifies the formula for the curvature at each vertex by adding to it a small term based on the Laplace operator. This modification is called elliptic regularization, and it can be used to help prove the existence of generalized flows as well as in their numerical simulation. Using it, the method of Crandall and Lions can be proven to converge and is the only numerical method listed by Cao that is equipped with bounds on its convergence rate. For an empirical comparison of the forward Euler, backward Euler, and more accurate Crank–Nicolson finite difference methods, see . ### Resampled convolution `suggest a numerical method for computing an approximation to the curve-shortening flow that maintains a discrete approximation to the curve and alternates between two steps:` - Resample the current curve by placing new sample points at a uniform spacing, as measured by normalized arc length. - Convolve the locations of the points with a Gaussian function with small standard deviation, in effect replacing each point's location with a weighted average of the locations of nearby points along the curve, with Gaussian weights. The standard deviation of the Gaussian should be chosen to be small enough that, after this step, the sample points still have nearly-uniform spacing. As they show, this method converges to the curve-shortening distribution in the limit as the number of sample points grows and the normalized arc length of the convolution radius shrinks. ### Median filtering `describe a scheme operating on a two-dimensional square grid – effectively an array of pixels.` The curve to be evolved is represented by assigning the value 0 (black) to pixels exterior to the curve, and 1 (white) to pixels interior to the curve, giving the indicator function for the interior of the curve. This representation is updated by alternating two steps: - Convolve the pixelated image with a heat kernel to simulate its evolution under the heat equation for a short time step. The result is a Gaussian blur of the image, or equivalently the Weierstrass transform of the indicator function, with radius proportional to the square root of the time step. - Set every pixel with numerical value less than 1/2 to 0, and every pixel with numerical value greater than 1/2 to 1, thresholding the image back to its original values in new positions. In order for this scheme to be accurate, the time step must be large enough to cause the curve to move by at least one pixel even at points of low curvature, but small enough to cause the radius of blurring to be less than the minimum radius of curvature. Therefore, the size of a pixel must be O(min κ/max κ<sup>2</sup>), small enough to allow a suitable intermediate time step to be chosen. The method can be generalized to the evolution of networks of curves, meeting at junctions and dividing the plane into more than three regions, by applying the same method simultaneously to each region. Instead of blurring and thresholding, this method can alternatively be described as applying a median filter with Gaussian weights to each pixel. It is possible to use kernels other than the heat kernel, or to adaptively refine the grid so that it has high resolution near the curve but does not waste time and memory on pixels far from the curve that do not contribute to the outcome. Instead of using only the two values in the pixelated image, a version of this method that uses an image whose pixel values represent the signed distance to the curve can achieve subpixel accuracy and require lower resolution. ## Applications ### Annealing metal sheets An early reference to the curve-shortening flow by motivates it as a model for the physical process of annealing, in which heat treatment causes the boundaries between grains of crystallized metal to shift. Unlike soap films, which are forced by differences in air pressure to become surfaces of constant mean curvature, the grain boundaries in annealing are subject only to local effects, which cause them to move according to the mean curvature flow. The one-dimensional case of this flow, the curve-shortening flow, corresponds to annealing sheets of metal that are thin enough for the grains to become effectively two-dimensional and their boundaries to become one-dimensional. ### Shape analysis In image processing and computer vision, suggest applying the curve-shortening flow to the outline of a shape derived from a digital image, in order to remove noise from the shape and provide a scale space that provides a simplified description of the shape at different levels of resolution. The method of Mokhtarian and Mackworth involves computing the curve-shortening flow, tracking the inflection points of the curve as they progress through the flow, and drawing a graph that plots the positions of the inflection points around the curve against the time parameter. The inflection points will typically be removed from the curve in pairs as the curve becomes convex (according to the Gage–Hamilton–Grayson theorem) and the lifetime of a pair of points corresponds to the salience of a feature of the shape. Because of the resampled convolution method that they describe for computing a numerical approximation of the curve-shortening flow, they call their method the resampled curvature scale space. They observe that this scale space is invariant under Euclidean transformations of the given shape, and assert that it uniquely determines the shape and is robust against small variations in the shape. They compare it experimentally against several related alternative definitions of a scale space for shapes, and find that the resampled curvature scale space is less computationally intensive, more robust against nonuniform noise, and less strongly influenced by small-scale shape differences. ### Reaction–diffusion In reaction–diffusion systems modeled by the Allen–Cahn equation, the limiting behavior for fast reaction, slow diffusion, and two or more local minima of energy with the same energy level as each other is for the system to settle into regions of different local minima, with the fronts delimiting boundaries between these regions evolving according to the curve-shortening flow. ### Cellular automata In a cellular automaton, each cell in an infinite grid of cells may have one of a finite set of states, and all cells update their states simultaneously based only on the configuration of a small set of neighboring cells. A Life-like cellular automaton rule is one in which the grid is the infinite square lattice, there are exactly two cell states, the set of neighbors of each cell are the eight neighbors of the Moore neighborhood, and the update rule depends only on the number of neighbors with each of the two states rather than on any more complicated function of those states. In one particular life-like rule, introduced by Gerard Vichniac and called the twisted majority rule or annealing rule, the update rule sets the new value for each cell to be the majority among the nine cells given by it and its eight neighbors, except when these cells are split among four with one state and five with the other state, in which case the new value of the cell is the minority rather than the majority. The detailed dynamics of this rule are complicated, including the existence of small stable structures. However, in the aggregate (when started with all cells in random states) it tends to form large regions of cells that are all in the same state as each other, with the boundaries between these regions evolving according to the curve-shortening flow. ### Construction of closed geodesics The curve-shortening flow can be used to prove an isoperimetric inequality for surfaces whose Gaussian curvature is a non-increasing function of the distance from the origin, such as the paraboloid. On such a surface, the smooth compact set that has any given area and minimum perimeter for that area is necessarily a circle centered at the origin. The proof applies the curve-shortening flow to two curves, a metric circle and the boundary of any other compact set, and compares the change in perimeter of the two curves as they are both reduced to a point by the flow. The curve-shortening flow can also be used to prove the theorem of the three geodesics, that every smooth Riemannian manifold topologically equivalent to a sphere has three geodesics that form simple closed curves. ## Related flows Other geometric flows related to the curve-shortening flow include the following ones. - For simulating the behavior of crystals or other anisotropic materials, it is important to have variants of the curve-shortening flow for which the speed of flow depends on the orientation of a curve as well as on its curvature. One way of doing this is to define the energy of a curve to be the integral of a smooth function γ of its normal vectors, and form the gradient flow of this energy, according to which the normal speed at which the curve flows is proportional to an anisotropic analog of the curvature. This flow can be simulated by discretizing the curve as a polygon. In numerical experiments, initial curves appear to converge to the Wulff shape for γ before shrinking to a point. Alternatively, one can let the curve flow with speed a(θ)κ + b(θ) where κ is the (usual) curvature and a and b are smooth functions of the orientation θ. When a(θ + π) = a(θ) and b(θ + π) = −b(θ) (so that the flow is invariant under point reflection), the resulting flow can be shown to obey the avoidance principle and an analog of the Gage–Hamilton–Grayson theorem. - The affine curve-shortening flow was first investigated by and . In this flow, the normal speed of the curve is proportional to the cube root of the curvature. The resulting flow is invariant (with a corresponding time scaling) under the affine transformations of the Euclidean plane, a larger symmetry group than the similarity transformations under which the curve-shortening flow is invariant. Under this flow, an analogue of the Gage–Hamilton–Grayson theorem applies, under which any simple closed curve eventually becomes convex and then converges to an ellipse as it collapses to a point. - Transforming a curve with equal normal speeds at all points has been called the grassfire transform. Curves evolved in this way will in general develop sharp corners, the trace of which forms the medial axis of the curve. A closely related curve evolution which moves straight segments of a polygonal curve at equal speeds but allows concave corners to move more quickly than unit speed instead forms a different type of topological skeleton of the given curve, its straight skeleton. - For surfaces in higher dimensions, there is more than one definition of curvature, including extrinsic (embedding-dependent) measures such as the mean curvature and intrinsic measures such as the scalar curvature and Ricci curvature. Correspondingly, there are several ways of defining geometric flows based on curvature, including the mean curvature flow (in which the normal speed of an embedded surface is its mean curvature), the Ricci flow (an intrinsic flow on the metric of a space based on its Ricci curvature), the Gauss curvature flow, and the Willmore flow (the gradient flow for an energy functional combining the mean curvature and Gaussian curvature). The curve-shortening flow is a special case of the mean curvature flow and of the Gauss curvature flow for one-dimensional curves. - In real-time path planning for mobile robots, a modified version of the curve-shortening flow with additional forces has been used to find paths that strike a balance between being short and staying clear of obstacles. - Inspired by the curve-shortening flow on smooth curves, researchers have studied methods for flowing polygons so that they stay polygonal, with applications including pattern formation and synchronization in distributed systems of robots. Length-preserving polygonal flows can be used to solve the carpenter's rule problem. - In computer vision, the active contour model for edge detection and image segmentation is based on curve shortening, and evolves curves based on a combination of their curvature and the features of an image.
28,071,338	Olivia. In the Lab. With the Revolver.	1,094,715,814	null	[ "2010 American television episodes", "Fringe (season 2) episodes" ]	"Olivia. In the Lab. With the Revolver." is the 16th episode of the second season of the American science-fiction drama television series Fringe, and the 37th episode overall. In terms of production, it is the season’s sixteenth episode, "Unearthed" being held over from the first season. In the episode, Olivia (Anna Torv) investigates a man with a possible connection to her who has the lethal ability to spread cancer by touch. The episode was written by Matthew Pitts and directed by Brad Anderson. In addition to featuring recurring guest actors Kevin Corrigan and Omar Metwally, the episode marked the only (uncredited) guest appearance from actress/model Diane Kruger. First broadcast in the United States on April 8, 2010 on Fox, "Olivia. In the Lab. With the Revolver." received generally positive reviews, with one critic praising the mixture of mythology and standalone elements for the episode. ## Plot In Providence, Rhode Island, lawyer Miranda Green (Diane Kruger) takes a lunch meeting with sickly young man James Heath (Omar Metwally). While he claims to have been with her in preschool, she does not remember him. She does believe that her firm can help him against those who made him sick. Driving back to her office, Miranda spontaneously develops tumors all over her body and dies in her car. Olivia (Anna Torv) has a sleepless night owing to her recent discovery that Peter (Joshua Jackson) was abducted from the "Over There" universe by a grief-stricken Walter (John Noble). She goes to the bowling alley, managed by Sam Weiss (Kevin Corrigan), where he tells her she is one of the best people he knows, and he is sure she will do the right thing. In the case, it transpires that victims of attacks similar to Miranda Green’s have been connected to the Cortexiphan trials in Jacksonville, Florida. Olivia visits Nina Sharp (Blair Brown) at Massive Dynamic's headquarters and demands a full list of the subjects, knowing she herself is one of them. Nina claims not to have any such list. They also discuss Peter, and Nina guesses that Olivia is looking for a reason not to tell him. Heath confronts Olivia in the hall of her apartment building. When he sees her badge, he attacks her, but Olivia fends him off with a candlestick. He tells her the story of how he was sick with cancer as a child, and a man visited him in the hospital, claiming he could help him fight the disease. But instead of getting better, he got worse and contagious. At the end of the episode, Olivia has decided not to tell Peter about his origins. Walter says that he has made the opposite decision, and that the truth must be known. ## Production The episode was written by production staffer Matthew Pitts, a former assistant to series co-creator J. J. Abrams, while former Fringe producer Brad Anderson served as director. "Olivia. In the Lab. With the Revolver." featured the first guest appearances by actor Omar Metwally and German model/actress Diane Kruger. Kruger was in a relationship with star Joshua Jackson at the time, and requested that her part be as a "gooey monster", where her "eyes are popped out" of her head. Kruger's character Miranda Green became the first victim of Metwally's character James Heath, though her character died from malignant tumors on her body rather than what she commented. Metwally later made his second appearance in the first part of the second season finale, "Over There". The episode contains a deleted scene between Broyles and Olivia discussing the James Heath case, which was available on the second season's DVD as a special feature. As with other Fringe episodes, Fox and Science Olympiad released a lesson plan for grade school children based upon the science depicted in "Olivia. In the Lab. With the Revolver."; the lesson's intention was for "students [to] learn about the science behind cancer, with a focus on the causes and prevention of skin cancer." ## Cultural references The title of this episode references the board game Clue, in which players state who they think the murderer is by saying, for example, "Colonel Mustard. In the Billiard Room. With the screwdriver". During the episode's first sequence, lawyer Miranda Greene's partner in a car-phone conversation mentions the name "Gorlomi," which was the assumed identity of Brad Pitt's character Aldo Raine in the 2009 movie Inglourious Basterds, also starring Diane Kruger. ## Reception ### Ratings On its initial American broadcast on April 8, 2010, the episode was watched by an estimated 6.33 million viewers. It scored a 3.9/6 rating among all households, and a 2.3/7 rating for those aged 18–49. Fringe dropped from 6.7 million to 6.1 million viewers in its second half hour, but because it aired against repeats of the normally competitive CSI: Crime Scene Investigation from CBS and ABC's Grey's Anatomy, Fringe came in second place for the night. ### Reviews The episode was viewed positively by CJ Stewart at The Celebrity Cafe, who stated "Overall, this was an exciting return to the familiar story structure that Fringe started out with, and yet it also moved along this season’s main story arch, with the writers doing an excellent job of that with plenty of references to the series’ mythos for fans to pick out. It’s always exciting when a serial drama like this throws us longtime viewers a few bones, isn’t it?" The Los Angeles Times''' Andrew Hanson thought there were too many "Really"? moments, such as Olivia recalling the height notches in Jacksonville when playing a game of Clue. Hanson also believed the episode seemed too long, especially when compared to the "best episode ever" ("Peter"), which aired the previous week. Writing for The A.V. Club, Noel Murray graded the episode with a B+, explaining that after the previous week's episode, "Olivia. In The Lab. With The Revolver." was a "return to normalcy". Murray appreciated the episode's use of a secret that "eats at people when they can’t bring themselves to air it out", particularly spotlighting the "look of panic" on Walter's face when Olivia and Peter leave his lab. Ken Tucker from Entertainment Weekly also appreciated the balance between mythology and single-episode elements. "This week’s episode stood up as a perfectly comprehensible hour even if you were new to the series, thanks to its medical mystery and fun side-moments such as Walter making brightly colored taffy. But is [sic] also wove in characters and names from previous episodes — Nick Lane, Nancy Lewis — and raised the tantalizing suggestion that the illness James Heath suffered from might be a malady that’s also afflicting parts of the alternate universe." MTV columnist Josh Wigler positively noted "Mysteries of the week are always compelling when they have interplay with the overarching mythology of Fringe,'' which was exactly the case in tonight's installment." He also liked the "interesting dynamic" between the still-clueless Peter and the Fringe team about his unknown past. Ramsey Isler from IGN rated the episode 7.8/10; he compared it to "Peter", believing that this week's episode's had "a tough act to follow... this story definitely isn't as good, but it did keep us going along an interesting path to more answers." The IGN writer praised Walter going back to his old jokes while at the same time possessing "an undercurrent of fear and shame in his personality as he deals with Olivia's knowledge of Peter's secret", but disliked the first half's "slow, procedural" elements as well as the cancer make-up. Despite these small critiques, Isler "liked most of this installment", expressing delight that there were a rare two mythology episodes in a row and that there were subtle references to previous episodes such as Nick Lane in "Bad Dreams". Some reviewers liked the episode title but were disappointed that more elements from the boardgame had not been incorporated into the episode.
1,955,961	Smells Like Nirvana	1,170,663,420	1992 single by "Weird Al" Yankovic	[ "\"Weird Al\" Yankovic songs", "1992 singles", "1992 songs", "Cultural depictions of Kurt Cobain", "Grunge songs", "Music videos directed by Jay Levey", "Nirvana (band)", "Scotti Brothers Records singles", "Songs about musicians", "Songs about rock music", "Songs with lyrics by \"Weird Al\" Yankovic" ]	"Smells Like Nirvana" is a song parody written and performed by American musician "Weird Al" Yankovic. A parody of Nirvana's song "Smells Like Teen Spirit", it was released as the lead single from Yankovic's Off the Deep End album in April 1992. "Smells Like Nirvana" was written during a three-year career low for Yankovic after the financial failure of his film UHF, but captured the quickly-rising popularity of grunge and Nirvana's success. The song was written to ridicule the fact that many people could hardly understand Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain's lyrics in the original song. After being unable to contact Nirvana conventionally, Yankovic called Cobain while the band was on the set of Saturday Night Live, where Cobain quickly gave permission to record the parody. Recording the song was a change for Yankovic and his band. Usually, the group were forced to record several overdubs. "Smells Like Nirvana", however, was relatively straightforward in its musical composition. To promote the single, Yankovic created an associated video for the song that parodied and closely mirrored the original "Smells Like Teen Spirit" video, even going so far as to hire several of the same actors and use the same set. "Smells Like Nirvana" was met with critical praise and helped to re-energize Yankovic's career. Cobain considered the parody as a sign that they had "made it" as a band. The song is one of Yankovic's most successful singles and was his second top 40 hit in the United States, reaching number 35 on both the Billboard Hot 100 and the U.S. Mainstream Rock Tracks. The song's video was nominated for a 1992 MTV Video Music Award for Best Male Video. ## Background Prior to writing "Smells Like Nirvana", Yankovic's music career had suffered from the poor financial performance of his 1989 feature film, UHF and the associated soundtrack. Yankovic called that "the beginning of three years where it was kind of hard for me to recover". He started work on a new studio album around 1990. To revitalize his career, he considered creating a parody of a Michael Jackson song, which had proven successful twice before with "Eat It" and "Fat". He had composed a parody of Jackson's "Black or White", titled "Snack All Night", but Jackson said he was uncomfortable with the parody, given that the original song was intended to be a political statement. Yankovic would later believe that Jackson's refusal was, retrospectively, a blessing; he felt that "Snack All Night" was not one of his better works. While he had compiled other original songs for a new album, he feared the lack of a good parody song would doom the album to failure and held off from releasing anything until an idea presented itself. The band Nirvana started to become popular in the music scene at the time, creating "big, seismic shifts in pop culture" according to Yankovic. Yankovic felt that the band's 1991 album Nevermind, which featured "Smells Like Teen Spirit", was "really great", but feared that at its release the band was not popular enough to warrant a parody. By early 1992, Nevermind had reached platinum certification and led the Billboard charts, which led Yankovic to start working on a parody. Yankovic decided to base his parody on the publicity around Nevermind, much of which dealt with the inability to comprehend the songs' lyrics, both in their phrasing and the manner in which they were sung by lead vocalist Kurt Cobain. He noted, "I try not to go the obvious route all the time, but sometimes the most obvious is actually the best." Yankovic had initial difficulty getting permission for the parody, as his manager claimed he was unable to contact the group numerous times. When Yankovic learned that Nirvana would be performing on the January 11, 1992, show of Saturday Night Live, he called his UHF co-star, Victoria Jackson, at the time a regular cast member of the show. Jackson managed to give the phone to Cobain so that Yankovic could make his request. Cobain agreed, though initially he inquired if the song would be about food, a common theme in many of Yankovic's songs. Yankovic explained that the song would be about Cobain's incomprehensible lyrics, to which Cobain replied, according to Yankovic, "Oh, sure, of course, that's funny." ## Recording and lyrics Recorded around January 27, 1992 at Santa Monica Sound Records, in Santa Monica, California, the song was the final one recorded for the album, as Yankovic generally records the songs that will be released as singles last. Recording took between three and four days. The band worked to match the same fluctuating tempos that were in the original song; Jon Schwartz, Yankovic's drummer, noted that "the [drum] part was pretty loose. [...] Tempos were up and down. We adjusted the tempos on our song to meet the Nirvana version. It's by no means steady." Compared to previous parodies, where upwards of 20-some instruments had to be mixed together, the simpler composition of "Teen Spirit" made it much easier for the band to complete the song. Yankovic later noted that recording the song's vocals was particularly difficult, because he was singing "for eight to 12 hours a day", which caused strain on his vocal cords. For the verse where Yankovic mumbles the lyrics to the song, he placed several cookies in his mouth to achieve the garbled effect. During the parody's musical interlude, Yankovic gargled water to the tune of the original's guitar solo. The solo also features kazoos and a tuba, with the latter being played by Tommy Johnson. Lyrically, "Smells Like Nirvana" mocks the original song's incomprehensible words. The opening verse begins "What is this song/All about?/Can't figure any lyrics out". At one point, Yankovic purposely garbles the lyrics: "It's hard to bargle nawdle zouss [sic]/With all these marbles in my mouth". He admitted in an interview that he woke up "in the middle of the night" and wrote down the phrase "bargle nawdle zouss", thinking that it would "be important someday." ## Music video The music video, directed by Yankovic's manager Jay Levey, is a near shot-for-shot parody of the original video for "Smells Like Teen Spirit", which depicts the band playing at a high school concert while it descends into riot. Yankovic is present on guitar and vocals as Kurt Cobain, with Steve Jay on bass as Krist Novoselic, and Jon "Bermuda" Schwartz on drums as Dave Grohl. All three wear clothing and long-haired wigs to imitate the look of Nirvana in "Smells Like Teen Spirit". Yankovic's video uses many of the same props, actors and camera angles; in particular, the video was shot in the same Culver City, California sound stage as Nirvana's video, several of the cheerleaders and audience members were from the original video, and Tony De La Rosa reprises his role as the janitor. Levey stated that they were able to recreate much of the same setting with help of the producers of the original Nirvana video once they were aware that the song had Cobain's blessing. Yankovic had a brief conversation with Samuel Bayer, the original director of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in preparation for the video shoot. Although Yankovic noted that "he was certainly going along with it", he felt that Bayer was "the least enthused" because "he was a true artíste" and was reluctant to see his work parodied. The video includes actor Dick Van Patten in a guest role. Van Patten, being one of the few celebrities that could be reached through immediate contacts, was a last-minute addition by Yankovic. According to Yankovic, Van Patten became "kind of [their] good luck charm", and he would appear in a few of Yankovic's future videos. Professional skateboarder Tony Hawk also appears as one of the many extras as a result of the Birdhouse Skateboards team providing "skater/punks" for the video, although Yankovic was not aware of this until a 2009 Twitter post by Hawk. Schwartz attempted to recreate Grohl's wild headbanging during filming, leaving him with a stiff neck several days afterward. ## Reception ### Release and reception The single for "Smells Like Nirvana" was released on April 2, 1992, while the album containing it, Off the Deep End, saw its release on April 14, 1992. The single was backed with a song called "Waffle King", a song detailing a man who becomes famous through making waffles and ends up letting the fame get to his head. This song was originally intended to appear on Off the Deep End, but was excluded due to Yankovic's fear that the song "I Was Only Kidding" would have a lyric that wouldn't be funny by the time the following album was released. While the song later ended up on the following album, Alapalooza, Yankovic put it as the b-side to "Smells Like Nirvana" "in case there wasn't going to be a next album". The single charted on several Billboard charts, making it Yankovic's most successful single since his single "Eat It", which charted in 1984. The song debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on April 25, 1992. It peaked at number 35 and remained on the chart for two weeks. The single also charted on the Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks, also peaking at number 35 and remaining for two weeks. The single was also popular in the other countries. In Canada, the single charted at number 48. In the United Kingdom, the single entered the charts on April 7, 1992, and peaked at number 58, spending only one week on the charts. In Australia, "Smells Like Nirvana" was released on June 14, 1992, and spent six weeks on the charts. It peaked at number 24. After its release, "Smells Like Nirvana" was considered, at the time, the largest comeback in Yankovic's career. The song was well-received by the media. AllMusic reviewer Barry Weber wrote that the song illustrated "the kind of brilliant writing Yankovic was still capable of doing". Anthony Violanti, a reporter for The Buffalo News, called the song "the high point" of one of Yankovic's concerts. Nirvana famously enjoyed the parody. Cobain is claimed to have considered that Nirvana had "made it" with the success of Yankovic's parody. In his personal journals that were later published, he calls Yankovic "America's modern pop-rock genious [sic]". Grohl is also reported to have realized his band was truly successful when Yankovic asked for permission to record the parody. According to an executive for Nirvana's label, DGC Records, "Smells Like Nirvana" was responsible for selling an additional million copies of Nirvana's album Nevermind. The video was nominated for the 1992 MTV Video Awards for "Best Male Video", although it did not win. At the awards ceremony, Nirvana was initially asked to perform, but they declined. The offer was then extended to Yankovic, before Nirvana relented. Yankovic later joked that "I might've been a bargaining chip". ### Legacy After Cobain died by suicide in 1994, Yankovic and his band were hesitant to play the extremely popular "Smells Like Nirvana" during live shows. For several months after Cobain's death, Yankovic would first perform a somber tribute to Cobain prior to playing the song itself. Shortly after Cobain's death, Yankovic was scheduled to play a show in Seattle, where Nirvana first became famous. Due to this connection, Yankovic was hesitant to perform the spoof, as he worried about how the audience might react to the parody. However, Yankovic was urged by journalists to go through with the performance, as they said that the song would be "cathartic" for the area. Ultimately, the performance "went over extremely well". Yankovic continues to play "Smells Like Nirvana" live, stating that "Kurt was a fan of the song" and "he would have wanted it that way." In The Simpsons episode "That '90s Show", set primarily in flashback to the 1990s, Homer Simpson is shown creating one of the first grunge bands while trying to cope with Marge's infidelity; the band, called "Sadgasm", becomes highly popular. At one point, Homer writes a new song called "Shave Me"—itself a loose parody of Nirvana's real single "Rape Me". Homer's song is then parodied as "Brainfreeze" in both song and video by "Weird Al" Yankovic, who voices himself. Homer takes Yankovic's parody as a sign that his band has become successful, but his depressed state after breaking up with Marge leaves him unable to enjoy the song's humor; he gloomily bemoans, "He who is tired of Weird Al, is tired of life". The sequence of events was written to parallel much of the history of "Smells Like Nirvana", including Kurt Cobain's reaction to the parody. ## Live performances During live performances, Yankovic dons clothing similar to what Cobain wore in the video for "Smells Like Teen Spirit". This includes a left-handed electric guitar, a shirt similar to Cobain's, and a blonde wig. The costuming for the performance is critical; Schwartz explained that "if anything's missing, Al won't do it". The rest of Al's band also participates. Steve Jay, who plays bass, uses two bass straps to emulate and exaggerate "Novoselic's low-hanging bass". He explained that he positions his instrument "to where I can just barely touch the strings". The members of the band also mock-mosh. Jim West, the band's guitarist, noted that moshing is usually tame, but that there "were a few collisions where people got hurt, but not the audience, just the band." A couple of local female dancers also accompany Al and his band performing cheerleading routines. Sometimes during the third verse, after Yankovic sings "And I forgot the next verse," he drops out for the next few lines, pretending to actually forget the lyrics. ## Track listing US pressing 1. "Smells Like Nirvana" – 3:42 2. "Trigger Happy" – 3:46 3. "Waffle King" – 4:26 US cassette single 1. "Smells Like Nirvana" – 3:42 2. "Waffle King" – 4:26 ## Personnel - "Weird Al" Yankovic – vocals, background vocals, production, arrangement - Jim West – guitar - Steve Jay – bass guitar - Jon "Bermuda" Schwartz – drums - Tommy Johnson – tuba - Tony Papa – engineering ## Charts ## Certifications
25,077,592	Being Tom Cruise	1,160,159,497	null	[ "Channel 4 comedy", "Scientology in popular culture", "Tom Cruise" ]	"The Church of Scientology Presents: Being Tom Cruise, Why Scientology Isn't In Any Way Mental" is a satirical spoof documentary from the series Star Stories, parodying the life of Tom Cruise and his relationship with the Church of Scientology. It is episode 2 of the second series of Star Stories, and first aired on Channel 4 on 2 August 2007. The show recounts Cruise's time with a group of some of his early acting friends. After filming Top Gun, Cruise (Kevin Bishop) is introduced to Scientology by John Travolta (Steve Edge), who convinces him to join the organization by smashing Cruise over the head with a shovel. He meets Nicole Kidman (Dolly Wells) and they start a relationship. After dating Penélope Cruz, Cruise is introduced to Katie Holmes (Laura Patch) by Travolta. Holmes agrees to marry Cruise, and the program ends with a voiceover asking the viewer to visit a Scientology website and purchase expensive products. The program received positive reception, and The Guardian and the Evening Times highlighted it as the "pick of the day". The Daily Mirror described it as a "brilliant spoof", and The Sunday Times characterized the show as "Comedy so broad it barely fits on the screen, it is hard not to be amused". The Herald Sun called it a "ruthless but spot-on parody". ## Plot The parody of Tom Cruise (Kevin Bishop) is framed through the viewpoint of the actor's association with the Church of Scientology. The show recounts the actor's days with a group of actors known as the Brat Pack, and his relationships with brothers Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen, Kiefer Sutherland, (Rhys Thomas) as well as with Patrick Swayze (Steve Edge), an actor from this crowd. (Brat Pack is a nickname given to a group of young actors and actresses who frequently appeared together in teen-oriented coming-of-age films in the 1980s; Cruise has been referred to as a member due to his role in the film The Outsiders.) While filming Top Gun, Cruise is afraid he looks "a bit gay" next to his co-stars. His co-stars subsequently turn into the Village People. Cruise has alien spirit guides who appear as "a pair of giant blobs who speak with Welsh accents". They comment on Top Gun, "It's no ET but it's got something." Cruise is introduced to Scientology by John Travolta (Steve Edge), who presents it as a "legitimate alien-race-based religion". After Travolta bashes him over the head with a shovel, Cruise remarks: "Ouch. . . wait a minute. Scientology. It all makes perfect sense now." Ewan McGregor tries to convince Cruise to convert to the Jedi methodology. Meanwhile, Kidman decides to immigrate to the U.S. and marry Cruise to become “Hollywood king and queen”. When Cruise first meets Nicole Kidman (Dolly Wells), he asks her to sit down so that he will appear taller. She later fixes his teeth and he gets cast in Top Gun. Cruise performs his "dangling-from-the ceiling routine" from Mission: Impossible – while in bed with Kidman. Cruise asks Kidman how he can prove he is not gay, and she recommends that they make the film Eyes Wide Shut. Stanley Kubrick is portrayed as a sleazy film director, and the program shows a newspaper headline giving a critical review of Eyes Wide Shut. Cruise later gets a call from Sam Neill revealing Kidman’s plan and they subsequently divorce. The show portrays Cruise's relationship with Penélope Cruz, who is seen wearing a mantilla. Travolta introduces Cruise to his third wife Katie Holmes (Laura Patch) who is depicted as a robotic Stepford Wife. "Greetings, Earth Man, I am here to serve you," says Holmes to Cruise upon their first meeting. After Cruise asks Holmes to marry him, she states, "Affirmative". The show makes fun of Cruise's couch jumping incident on The Oprah Winfrey Show. (This spoof is in reference to a 2005 appearance by Cruise on the Oprah program, where he "jumped around the set, hopped onto a couch, fell to one knee and repeatedly professed his love for his new girlfriend.") At the wedding of Cruise and Holmes, an alien bride and groom are displayed on the top of the couple's wedding cake, and the show spoofs the couple's wedding vows. A voiceover at the end of the program tells the viewer to visit scientologyisgreat.com and purchase £4,000 worth of books. ## Production Production on the second series of Star Stories was announced by Channel 4 in January 2007, and in addition to Tom Cruise, others set for parodying included Simon Cowell, Britney Spears and "the 1990s chart battle between Oasis and Blur". The show was episode two of the second series of Star Stories. The episode was first broadcast on Channel 4 on 2 August 2007. On its website, Channel 4 promoted the episode with the description, "Hollywood's smallest actor (after Danny DeVito) expounds on Aliens from Outer Space and the best career choices ever." In August 2007, the series was set to be remade into a new version in the U.S. ### Legal issues Multiple publications commented on the potential legal implications of parodying both Tom Cruise and Scientology. "Given the Church of Scientology's full-throttle reaction to any criticism or mickey-taking, the Star Stories boys are sure to find themselves in the firing line," wrote a reviewer for the Evening Times. A review in The Sunday Times commented, "Taking their careers in their hands, the Star Stories team tackle the notoriously litigious Tom Cruise ... The lawyers must still be having a nice lie down after watching." In an interview with The Northern Echo, Star Stories actor Kevin Bishop discussed the legal issues involved with making the series: "We're not allowed to say anything about anyone that isn't true. It can be quite tricky. Sometimes we've had to change lines even when the filming is all finished. We go back to the recording studio and put one line over another line. ... The only reason I reckon we've not been sued is because actually we've not said anything that technically we can't." He said the series was "well looked after" by attorneys. In a 2009 interview with The Independent, Bishop recounted an experience when he gave a copy of the program to television producers in the United States: "I gave some American producers the Star Stories DVD and those that could be bothered to watch it saw the Tom Cruise one. One guy went 'you can't do that it's Tom Cruise man? [we’ve done it] 'yeah but you can't do that on TV' [it's already gone out] 'what you’re talking about Scientology, are you fucking nuts?? [er, look we’ve done it it's been on telly and everyone loved and we've had no complaints] has Tom Cruise seen this?!" ## Reception The Guardian and the Evening Times highlighted the Star Stories parody as the "pick of the day". Martin Skeggs of The Guardian commented, "There's everything you ever wanted to know about the world's number one film star, including how he was introduced to Scientology (John Travolta whacked him over the head with a shovel), the time he met Nicole Kidman and asked her if she would mind sitting down to make him look taller". He characterized the parody as, "A toned down version of real life, then." Barry McDonald of the Evening Times described the episode as "equally cruel and sidesplittingly hilarious". He commented, "This is as close to must-watch television as you're likely to get and a testament to the quality of comedy writing on display." In a later review of the program for the Evening Times when it was shown again on re-runs, McDonald wrote, "I don't care if it's been shown several times before, this is one of the shows which you just have to see again." Aidan Smith of Scotland on Sunday wrote favorably of the show, and noted, "Fearlessly, in view of how paranoid Scientologists are, the latest target was Tom Cruise. I especially liked the scene where the tiny screen giant winched himself, Mission Impossible-style, on to Nicole Kidman while she slugged from a tinnie like a good Sheila." The Daily Mirror described the program as "far too funny". A review in The Daily Mirror was positive, commenting, "If you want to see a brilliant spoof about Tom Cruise's faith in Scientology and his relationship with Katie Holmes, look no further than C4's Star Stories." She commented, "It's so absurd, even Tom will laugh." The Advertiser described Star Stories as "a surprisingly funny sendup of movie stars and pop groups", and noted of the episode's title, "This week's episode is titled Being Tom Cruise - How Scientology isn't in Any Way Mental, which should give you some idea of the vein of humour mined." The Sunday Times observed, "Just when you thought you might go a week without seeing a mention of brand Beckham, here is a documentary on their best friends, brand Tom Cruise, as recorded by the least reverential writers and least convincing lookalikes on the planet. Scientologists might prefer something on the Sci-fi channel." Victoria Segal, Sally Kinnes and Sarah Dempster of The Sunday Times highlighted the episode in their "Critics' Choice" column. They commented that the show's producers "[give] their own account of his career, his love life and his religion: It's all about aliens. Comedy so broad it barely fits on the screen, it is hard not to be amused". Cameron Adams of the Herald Sun highlighted the program as his "Top Choice". Adams commented, "This ruthless but spot-on parody re-enacts Cruise's life and career through Hollywood gossip, rumour and exaggeration (his father is a midget, Katie Holmes a robot, Nicole Kidman a beer-swilling bogan), but is an antidote to every interview he's ever done." Writing for The Newcastle Herald, Anita Beaumont commented, "This is really silly stuff, but it is amusing enough to enliven a fairly dull night of TV." The Sunday Mirror wrote that the program "was as subtle as a sledge hammer". Simon Hoggart of The Spectator called the program "a magnificently over-the-top anti-celebrity festival". ## See also - Relationship of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes - Scientology in popular culture - Tom Cruise: Unauthorized (1998) - Tom Cruise: All the World's a Stage (2006) - Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography (2008) - Trapped in the Closet (South Park)
229,270	Widerstehe doch der Sünde, BWV 54	1,105,657,635	Church cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach	[ "1714 compositions", "Church cantatas by Johann Sebastian Bach" ]	Widerstehe doch der Sünde (Just resist sin), BWV 54, is a church cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach. He composed the solo cantata for alto in Weimar between 1711 and 1714, and probably performed it on the seventh Sunday after Trinity, 15 July 1714. It is Bach's first extant church cantata for a solo voice. The text of the short work was written by Georg Christian Lehms, for two arias and a connecting recitative. The topic is to resist sin, based on the Epistle of James. The text was published in a 1711 collection, dedicated to the Sunday Oculi. It is not known when Bach composed the work but is assumed that he performed it as part of his monthly cantata productions in 1714 on the seventh Sunday after Trinity, 15 July. The solo voice is accompanied by strings: two violin parts, two viola parts and continuo. The composition begins with a striking dissonant chord. ## History and words The history of the composition is not clear. The text was written by Georg Christian Lehms for Oculi, the third Sunday in Lent, and published in 1711 in Gottgefälliges Kirchen-Opffer. It concentrates on avoiding sin, based on the Epistle of James. The first line of movement 3 quotes . Bach may have composed the cantata already before taking up regular cantata compositions in Weimar. He was appointed concertmaster of the Weimar court capelle of the co-reigning dukes Wilhelm Ernst and Ernst August of Saxe-Weimar, on 2 March 1714. As concertmaster, he assumed the principal responsibility for composing new works, specifically cantatas for the Schlosskirche (palace church), on a monthly schedule. The Bach scholar Alfred Dürr suggested that Bach performed the cantata for the Seventh Sunday after Trinity of 1714. The prescribed readings for the Sunday are from the Epistle to the Romans, "the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life" (), and from the Gospel of Mark, the feeding of the 4000 (). The cantata text relates to the epistle of both Sundays, but shows no connection to either Gospel. While Dürr assumes that Bach first performed the cantata on 15 July 1714, other scholars arrive at different dates. John Eliot Gardiner and others assume Oculi that year which would make it the earliest cantata performed after the promotion. It is his first extant church cantata for a solo voice, followed by Mein Herze schwimmt im Blut, BWV 199, for soprano. The cantata is the first of four written for a single alto soloist, the others, all composed in 1726, being Geist und Seele wird verwirret, BWV 35, Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust, BWV 170, and Gott soll allein mein Herze haben, BWV 169, two of which also have texts by Lehms. It is not clear what sort of alto singer (boy contralto? adult male falsettist? high tenor?) might have been the intended or actual first performer of "Widerstehe doch der Sünde", especially given its low range and tessitura compared with other alto solo writing by Bach such as Geist und Seele wird verwirret, BWV 35 or Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust, BWV 170. If the cantata was written early in Bach's (second) Weimar period, then perhaps the soloist could have been Adam Immanuel Weldig, the only falsettist in the Weimar court chapel in 1708 (the other five singers being a bass, two tenors and two teenage discantists). However, Weldig's designation as "falsettist" may indicate that he was a soprano and not an alto. Weldig left Weimar in 1713 so could not have sung if the first performance was as late as 1714 as suggested by Dürr. ## Scoring and structure The cantata, structured in three movements, is scored as chamber music for a solo alto voice, two violins (Vl), two violas (Va), and basso continuo (Bc). The duration is given as 14 minutes. The manuscript title page reads: "Cantata.à 2 Violini, 2 Viole, Alto, Solo, è Cont.: del J.S.B.". In the following table of the movements, the scoring follows the Neue Bach-Ausgabe. The keys and time signatures are taken from Alfred Dürr, using the symbols for common time (4/4) and alla breve (2/2). The continuo, playing throughout, is not shown. ## Music ### 1 The first movement, "Widerstehe doch der Sünde" (Just resist sin) is a da capo aria, which opens with a surprising dissonance and leaves its key of E-flat major open until a cadence in measure 8. Dürr describes it as a call to resistance and compares it to the beginning of the recitative "Siehe, ich stehe vor der Tür", a call to be ready, in the cantata for Advent Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland, BWV 61, composed in 1714. Gardiner comments: "It is a deliberate shock tactic to rouse his listeners to the need to 'stand firm against all sinning, or its poison will possess you'". Bach used the first aria again in his St Mark Passion. ### 2 The recitative "Die Art verruchter Sünden" (The way of vile sins) is secco, accompanied by the continuo. The words "So zeigt sich nur ein leerer Schatten und übertünchtes Grab" (It shows itself as only an empty shadow and a whitewashed grave) are expressed in "pale" harmonies. The final lines are arioso and illustrate in Sie ist als wie ein scharfes Schwert, das uns durch Leib und Seele fährt (It is like a sharp sword, that pierces through body and soul) the movement of the sword by fast runs in the continuo. ### 3 The final aria "Wer Sünde tut, der ist vom Teufel" (He who sins is of the devil) is again a da capo aria, but shows elements of a four-part fugue for the voice, the violins in unison, the violas in unison and the continuo. Gardiner describes the theme as "insinuating chromatic" and the "contorted counter-subject to portray the wily shackles of the devil". ## Recordings The sortable listing is taken from the selection provided by Aryeh Oron on the Bach-Cantatas website. The sortable table is based on the listing on the Bach Cantatas website. The type of orchestra is roughly shown as a large group by red background, and as an ensemble playing period instruments in historically informed performance by green background.
15,583,656	Wedgemere station	1,158,587,045	Railway station in Winchester, Massachusetts, US	[ "Buildings and structures in Winchester, Massachusetts", "MBTA Commuter Rail stations in Middlesex County, Massachusetts", "Stations along Boston and Maine Railroad lines" ]	Wedgemere station is an MBTA Commuter Rail station in the southeast portion of Winchester, Massachusetts. Wedgemere is served by all Lowell Line trains, as well as a small number of Haverhill Line trains which run via the Wildcat Branch. The station consists of two platforms serving the line's two tracks on an elevated grade. The 1957-built station building, largely unused, is adjacent to the inbound platform. After several years of work, the station was made fully accessible in February 2013. ## History ### Boston and Lowell Railroad The Boston and Lowell Railroad (B&L) opened to on June 24, 1835. Many of the present stations on the line opened soon after; the B&L opened Bacon's Factory station (soon renamed Bacon's Bridge) at Bacon Street in northwestern Medford by 1846. (That section of Medford became part of Winchester in 1851.) The nearby stone arch bridge over the Aberjona River was destroyed by an ice jam during spring runoff in 1852. The station was soon renamed Symmes Bridge, then renamed Mystic in 1858. After 1887, the B&L was leased to its former rival, the Boston and Maine Railroad, as its New Hampshire Main Line. ### Boston & Maine By the end of the 19th century, the station was known by its modern name, Wedgemere, after the surrounding neighborhood, and had a small station building on the east (outbound) side of the tracks. In the early 1900s, the B&M built a larger station building with an extended canopy on the west side of the tracks, which served for the next half-century. In the early 1950s, the B&M began planning a project to raise the tracks of the New Hampshire Main and the southern end of the Woburn Branch for a mile through Winchester, eliminating troublesome grade crossings downtown. Construction began in 1955; boxy two-story brick stations opened at Wedgemere and in 1957. The ticket office in the new station was closed in 1960 after just three years in service; thereafter, passengers bought tickets on the train. The station building hosted a coffee shop from 2008 to 2014. ### MBTA era and accessibility From the introduction of Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) funding in 1965 until the mid-2000s, Wedgemere station remained essentially static. The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 required transit agencies to make certain stations handicapped accessible. A number of high-ridership stations on the MBTA Commuter Rail system were upgraded, but due to its relatively low ridership, Wedgemere was not chosen as a key station for upgrades. Wedgemere had older low-level platforms, and access from the street was via stairs only. Beginning in 2008, a local family lobbied the MBTA to make the station accessible; in July 2009, the Federal Transit Administration granted the MBTA permission to build mini-high platforms. (Full-length high level platforms would not have been possible because the Lowell Line is a designated freight corridor; full-length platforms cause operational difficulties with freight trains. Wedgemere does not have room for a dedicated freight passing track like Anderson RTC.) In February 2010, the MBTA announced that \$2 million in federal stimulus funds had been allotted to the project, part of a grant that also funded construction of the John W. Olver Transit Center and repairs to the Red Line tunnels between Harvard and Alewife. The work was then intended to be finished by the end of 2010. After delays due to concerns over nearby wetlands and the appearance of the ramps from street level, the Town of Winchester granted approval in March 2011. In April 2011, the MBTA began soliciting bids for the primary construction work on the station, worth \$1.525 million. The scope of work included construction of the mini-high platforms and ramps from street level, as well as adding lighting, rehabilitating the low level platforms, and creating accessible parking spaces. After bids came in higher than expected, a \$2.503 million contract was awarded in July 2011 with notice to proceed in August. Construction was to be completed in mid-September 2011 ahead of the October deadline for stimulus funds, but a problem with town permitting in early September delayed the completion of the project. Construction resumed in November. The mini-high platforms, ramps, and new parking spaces opened on February 1, 2013, making the station fully accessible. Finishing work on platform reconstruction, lighting, and landscaping lasted the spring of 2013, culminating in a reopening ceremony in June. Until May 2023, and Wedgemere were flag stops outside of weekday peak hours. Effective May 22, 2023, they were made regular scheduled stops at all times.
23,867,393	Wonder World Tour	1,158,883,394	2009 concert tour by Miley Cyrus	[ "2009 concert tours", "Miley Cyrus concert tours" ]	The Wonder World Tour was the second concert tour by American singer Miley Cyrus. The tour was held in support of her second studio album Breakout (2008) and first extended play (EP) The Time of Our Lives (2009). It began in September 2009 and concluded on December 29, visiting cities in the United States and United Kingdom; thus, the Wonder World Tour became Cyrus' first world tour. It also became Cyrus' first tour not to incorporate performances as Hannah Montana, although "Let's Get Crazy" and "Spotlight", both songs credited to Montana, were performed. Alternative band Metro Station served as opening act for all tour venues. It was sponsored by Wal-Mart and promoted by AEG Live. All tickets from the Wonder World Tour were sold using paperless ticketing, in order to prevent ticket scalping similar to what had occurred during Cyrus' previous tour. One dollar from each ticket sold was donated to the City of Hope National Medical Center, an organization devoted to the fight against cancer. The Wonder World Tour has been described as part of Cyrus' transitional period, with more elaborate and edgier characteristics. Each concert was divided into seven segments, each of which bared different themes, the subject of matter for the tour's title. The show opened with Cyrus performing rock-oriented songs. It also featured her and backup dancers being suspended above the stage with aerial rigging various times. At one point, she mounted a Harley-Davidson motorcycle as it was elevated and made its path across the venue. Cyrus also rendered a tribute to the deceased singer Michael Jackson and performed two Hannah Montana-credited songs as herself. The tour received positive to mixed reception from critics. Some praised it and deemed it a spectacle, while others believed it lacked profundity and portrayal of Cyrus' personality. The Wonder World Tour was commercially successful despite the financial recession that was present in 2009. It was able to sell-out all European dates in ten minutes and marks the largest attendance at The O<sub>2</sub> Arena in London. During the first leg of the tour, one bus overturned several times on a highway. The accident resulted in the injury of one person and the death of another. The cause of the accident is yet to be specified, yet multiple theories for it exist. A filtered version of the Wonder World Tour was broadcast on the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) on June 18, 2010 and received a total of over 2.6 million viewers. The full-length concert film was released on the limited, deluxe edition of Cyrus' third studio album Can't Be Tamed (2010). ## Background Cyrus is a singer-songwriter and actress who starred on the Disney Channel television series Hannah Montana as Miley Stewart, a girl with a secret double life as the popstar Hannah Montana. Through the television series, Cyrus developed fame as a teen idol and released music credited to Hannah Montana. Cyrus' debut studio album, titled Meet Miley Cyrus, was released as the second disc of the Hannah Montana 2: Meet Miley Cyrus (2007) double-disc album. In order to promote the album, Cyrus embarked on her debut tour, the Best of Both Worlds Tour (2007–08), a North American tour where she performed both under character, as Hannah Montana, and as herself. With the release of Cyrus' second studio album, Breakout (2008), her first not be affiliated with the Hannah Montana franchise, and an extended play (EP) The Time of Our Lives (2009), Cyrus decided to embark on tour again with the Wonder World Tour, however, without incorporating performances as Hannah Montana, a step which the media interpreted as furthering her distance from the Hannah Montana franchise. The concert tour was announced alongside Cyrus' joint apparel line with Max Azria on June 3, 2009, through various outlets, including Miley's Twitter account, a press release, and MileyWorld, Cyrus' official fan club. It was confirmed that the tour would be sponsored by American retailing company Wal-Mart and promoted by AEG Live. It would expand throughout the United States, from September 14, 2009 in Portland, Oregon to December 2, 2009 in Miami, Florida, with a total of forty-five dates. Alternative rock band Metro Station, where Cyrus' older brother, Trace Cyrus, integrates in, was confirmed as the opening act for all dates. Two days later, a European leg, with nine dates in the United Kingdom, was announced, marking Cyrus' first concerts to visit another continent. On June 16, 2009, two more dates were annexed, and one final date was annexed in October 2009, in order to meet demand. All tickets for the Wonder World Tour were sold exclusively through paperless ticket delivery, meaning that fans did not receive a physical concert ticket for their entry into the event. Ticket buyers were required to bring the credit card used to make the purchase and photo identification to the concert venue in order to gain entry. All groups were to enter the concert together, and ushers issued seat locator slips. The method of ticket sales was relatively new at the time, although Ticketmaster first experimented it with AC/DC's Black Ice World Tour (2008–10). However, it marked the first time for an arena tour to sell all tickets through paperless ticketing. This was done in response to the extensive ticket scalping that occurred during the Best of Both Worlds Tour and in order to give fans the opportunity to purchase good tickets at face value. Cyrus' manager and president of Morey Management Group, Jason Morey, stated, "The focus was, 'How do we take all the information we gathered last time out and do a better job of it?' It was important to us to address the issue of demand. We thought that of every single option that was available out there, this was a really viable option, to go with the paperless ticketing." As with the Best of Both Worlds Tour, one dollar from each ticket purchased was donated to the City of Hope National Medical Center, a center dedicated to the prevention, treatment and research for the cure of cancer. ## Development The tour was titled the Wonder World Tour because of its diversity in themes and styles. Cyrus believed the tour was good transition for solidifying a more rock music-based career. She described the tour to be edgy and "more of a mature show", with the target audience being teenagers relatively her age, which was sixteen at the time. However, performances that would please younger audiences were added to the setlist. It was conceptualized to be a more elaborate than Cyrus' previous tour and to reflect Cyrus as an individual. The reason for this to occur was because Cyrus felt more confident as a vocalist to perform stunts and use props while singing. Also, more resources were available, for more companies were willing to invest in the tour. Ideas were suggested by different individuals and were tested during filmed rehearsals in order to decide which would make the final cut. "Each person has their own character and their own story. So, we've added everyone's kind of specialty into our show [...] This is not just a concert, it is an absolute show", Cyrus said. After having completed filming for The Last Song (2010) in Tybee Island, Georgia, Cyrus returned to Los Angeles for tour rehearsals at The Forum in mid-August. Due to filming The Last Song, Cyrus was only able to rehearse for three weeks although the average rehearsal period for musicians is about three months. Jamal Sims was hired as the tour's director and main choreographer. Octavious Terry served as an assistant for directing, meanwhile Dondraico Johnson assisted choreography. They, along with twelve other members, composed the tour's creative team. In total, the Wonder World Tour included 124 traveling workers, 19 truckloads of equipment, and 15 buses. The stage was quite different from that of the Best of Both Worlds Tour. It consisted of a rectangular main stage, which featured staircases that elevated the center of the stage, and a narrow runway, which connected the main stage to a B-stage that ran the length of the main stage. Regarding the stage, Cyrus noted that it was "something not many people get to have. I'm able to move around to each side so there's no one person who feels like they don't have the best seat. Every seat is the best seat." Six LED multi-screen video units were located throughout the stage; the three largest were placed as the upstage wall, while the other three were hung by rigs above the stage. The center unit consisted of three screens that faced outward; two others were hung right and left to the center unit, both were double faced toward the center of the venue at a 45° angle, while the backside faced the upper-seat audience. The structure of the video panels was designed by Sims to ensure that all seats within the 270° angle at each venue received an equal view of the video screens. Video content and lighting were designed by Seán Burke; the latter was provided by Production Resource Group (PRG). The tour used seven individual rigs for performers and props to become airborne. For dancers to be flown to the center of each upstage, a winch, which dropped 18 inches off the face of the panel, was placed in the rig. Cyrus' flying required two winches, one for a vertical lift and one for a horizontal move that coursed the audience and back to the stage. Four elevators, or trap doors, were located throughout the stage, some of which had the option of a 4×4 or an 8×8 foot opening. All of the fly rigs and elevators were built and operated by Show Group Production Services (SGPS)/Showrig. The challenge that presented the most difficulty for SGPS was time constraint, as there were only three weeks of rehearsal. Brian White, co-owner of SGPS, explained, > There wasn’t a lot of time, but the good news was that it was at the [L.A.] Forum, which gave us a lot of height to fly things around, and there was also a lot of room to lay stuff out on the floor. The other good thing was that our offices are only 10 minutes away. So if I had to send a welder down there to make some changes I could do it pretty fast. The biggest thing we had going for us was a great crew. We had some really good people out there." [...] I’d say that about 90 percent of what we built on Miley Cyrus fit the first time in rehearsal. The only reason we had to retro fit anything was because of last minute design changes that came about once everything was up and they could see it all. Special effects and pyrotechnics were provided by Pyritz Pyrotechnics Group. Terry Ritz, founder of the organization, and his partner Steve Aleff had created various ideas based on the tour soundtrack that was provided to them by the Wonder World Tour's personnel. They met with the tour's choreographer, band manager, and lighting designer, asking them to bring their "hopes, wishes, and dreams." Out of these meetings, the show was completed and a lighting crew, who monitored the stage with a four-camera monitor system when cues were executed, was selected. The pyrotechnics for the show were described as more elegant and subtle, being composed of pink flames with accentuation of silver and white glitter. Because of the extensive automation executed throughout the concert, two personnel were in charge of running it. Neville Emerton ran the automation from under the stage, and Sean Conner ran all of the flying moves from a position at the front of each venue. Meanwhile, assistant stage manager Seth Posner called cues for each concert. "Normally, in a rock show you don’t need someone calling the show. In this one we had to take a more theatrical approach with someone calling cues every step of the way because there was so much going on at once between props and automation", explained production manager Omar Abderrahman. One of the props that required much attention on the part of Posner was a car made to resemble a tractor, designed and built by effects designer and stage manager Scott "Stryker" Christensen. Because it came along late in the design process, the main elevator was not built to handle the weight of the car, though it was eventually reinforced to support the weight and movement of the car. The car was also modified; it was made electric, instead of using a combustion engine, for fire-safety and changed to turn around by adjusting its turning radius to automate steering with all four wheels. In order to translate the concert tour overseas to the United Kingdom, the Wonder World Tour paired with Sound Moves, a company that was already providing minor support for the North American leg of the tour. ## Concert synopsis The main show commenced with Cyrus emerging from the bottom of the stage inside a large, crystal-like glacier. She wore a black leather hot pantsuit, a tank top, and a white fur vest with a silver sequined hood as she escaped the cocoon to perform the concert's opening number, "Breakout". Numerous backup dancers accompanied her and, towards the conclusion, she performed atop movable scaffolding. After removing the fur vest, Cyrus performed "Start All Over" atop the scaffolding and continued the remainder of the first segment of the show with "7 Things" and "Kicking and Screaming". Cyrus then executed the show's second segment with a performance of "Bottom of the Ocean", which featured an aquatic theme for the stage and Cyrus donning a silver, flowing evening gown that bared a bejeweled bodysuit underneath. The performance ended with Cyrus diving into the stage, succeeded by a simulation of her underwater on the video screens. Cyrus returned to the stage for the show's third segment atop a tractor-resembling car to perform "Fly on the Wall". During the performance, Cyrus wore an extravagant white dress with a feathered skirt. Backup dancers were flown up into contact with panels in order to resemble a fly on a window; meanwhile, Cyrus was flown across the arena. Once back in the stage, Cyrus and backup dancers performed a brief dance interlude of Michael Jackson's "Thriller" (1984). Replacing the feathered bottom with a tutu, Cyrus performed the Hannah Montana-credited song "Let's Get Crazy" and "Hoedown Throwdown". The latter was followed by a video in which will.i.am of The Black Eyed Peas spoke about Cyrus, as she left the stage. When the video was completed, the dancers performed a remix of the Black Eyed Peas' "Boom Boom Pow" (2009). The show's fourth segment opened with "These Four Walls", in which Cyrus wore a black high-low dress. The song was performed in B-stage with various acoustic musicians. The show proceeded with "When I Look at You", a performance that featured the trailer for Cyrus' film The Last Song (2010) and her performing with a grand piano. It concluded with "Obsessed", which the singer performed atop a simple suspension bridge. She re-entered the stage, clothed by a black tee, red cheetah-patterned hot pants, and black boots, to perform the second Hannah Montana-credited song "Spotlight" and, later, "G.N.O. (Girl's Night Out)", replacing the prior hot pants with black ones and adding a denim vest. She followed with a cover of Arrows' "I Love Rock 'n' Roll", where Cyrus mounted a red Harley-Davidson Dyna Fat Bob FXDF 2010 that was suspended above the stage and traveled in a semi-oval path across the venue. Performances of "Party in the U.S.A.", which made use of a luggage cart, and "Hovering", which featured Cyrus' older brother Trace Cyrus, rounded off the segment. The sixth segment of the show featured Cyrus performing "Simple Song", in which she dressed in a long, white shirt and a black tuxedo, in order to simulate a music conductor. Midway through the performance, Cyrus stepped onto an elevator that rose eight feet from the stage. She exited the stage and returned for the final section. During the encore, Cyrus dressed in a white tank top and shorts, boots, and a metallic vest to perform "See You Again", later removing the vest to conclude the concert with "The Climb". Immediately after finishing, she exited through a passageway in the stage as fireworks were fired above. ## Critical reception Mikael Wood of The Los Angeles Times, in reference to Hannah Montana, commented, "Once again, make-believe Miley was more compelling than the real thing." Wood believed Cyrus possessed charisma, commenting that she portrayed superstar authority, but failed because she was unable or unwilling to "give her fans a deeper idea of who she is and what her music means. For all its eye-popping detail, the concert offered nothing that viewers of her TV show or buyers of her records don't already know about her." Dave Paulson of The Tennessean stated, "Cyrus' spectacle sets her apart from nearly every other A-list act touring today. She's not a renowned vocalist by any stretch, but her show's choreography barely provides a moment for her to catch her breath, and she's still able to deliver." Michael Hann of the United Kingdom-based Guardian was impressed by the concert, praising the setlist and deeming it enjoyable for both children and adults. He continued, "Good as the best songs are, though, they take a backseat to the staging [...] The one misstep is when a trailer for her next movie is shown during a costume change. It's a tacky moment and doesn't reflect the attention to detail that makes the rest of it a laugh-out-loud delight." Lael Loewenstein of Variety magazine said, "Cyrus knows how to deliver the goods without losing her core audience." Loewenstein deemed the concert a mission accomplished because of inevitable hits and Cyrus' charisma, drive, spunk, and a merely-limited vocal range. Erik Ensrst of The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel praised the show, stating that it was "a pure visual spectacle", but commented that producers forgot a place for Cyrus' personality. Jim Harrington of The Oakland Tribune described the show as a human embodiment of Britney Spears' "I'm Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman" (2002). He presumed that the tour was a conscious transition for fans who did not want Cyrus to separate herself from the Hannah Montana franchise. Kirsty Cameron of The Daily Telegraph wrote, "Despite her relatively young age, Cyrus showed her unfailing capability as performer. With the help of her back-up dancers, Cyrus provided her audience with choreographed set pieces and a different spectacle for each song." James Reed of The Boston Globe noted that the Wonder World Tour presented Cyrus as both a "PG-rated tween pop star and an edgy rocker eager". He stated that although she played both roles well, it was apparent that she was more at ease with the latter. Reed also felt the concert did little to display Cyrus' personality and ability to engage with the audience. "We know she's got impressive vocal chops, but now we need to feel what she's trying to put across in her songs, something beyond the standard 'You guys are awesome!' banter." Scott Iwasaki of Deseret News reviewed a concert in which Cyrus was ill. He mentioned that because of her illness, her voice went flat. Iwasaki also expressed his viewpoint that "if there [were] any worries that Miley Cyrus would become another Britney Spears train wreck, those worries were quelled during Tuesday night's show. She kept the show family-friendly and, although obviously sick, looked like she had a good time." Marlin Levison of The Star Tribune believed the concert lacked much profundity until the last performance. ## Commercial performance The Wonder World Tour was commercially successful and represented stability in the touring industry, despite the financial recession. In North America, the tour sold out twenty-nine out of forty-five concert dates and grossed over US \$45.2 million. The tour was able to remain as one of the hottest tours in the United States during its expansion. The Wonder World Tour's entire, ten-date European leg sold out in only ten minutes. In order to meet demand, an eleventh date was added and scheduled for December 29, 2009. In December 2009, the tour ranked atop Billboard's Hot Tours, based on the tour's European performances. For the month, box office grossed US \$21.9 million for eleven shows in four markets. The five concerts held at The O<sub>2</sub> Arena in London produced ticket sales that topped \$11 million (£6.8 million). On December 19, 2009, with an audience of 16,196, Cyrus broke the record for the largest attendance at The O<sub>2</sub> Arena; a record that surpassed the previously tied records by Beyoncé's I Am... World Tour (2009–10), Bon Jovi's Lost Highway Tour (2007–08), and Coldplay's Viva la Vida Tour (2008–10). In total, the tour grossed over \$67.1 million, \$15 million which were earned by Cyrus. ## Bus accident On November 20, 2009, in its attempt to arrive at the destination of Greensboro, North Carolina, one of the buses for the Wonder World Tour overturned on a Virginian highway. The accident occurred around 8:15 A.M. in Dinwiddie County, about 40 miles south of Richmond, Virginia. The bus ran off the left side of Interstate 85, struck an embankment, rolled onto its right side. An eye witness of the accident explained that the bus appeared to have drifted off the road for a fairly long stretch before tipping over. The bus had nine passengers aboard, including members of the lighting crew, though Cyrus was not on board during the incident. Most of the passengers on the bus suffered only minor injuries and escaped the crashed bus through the broken front windshield. One person, Assistant Stage Manager Martin Zilio, required medical attention and was hospitalized overnight. Zilio recovered from his injuries and was later able to return to work on the tour. One person, bus driver Bill "Uncle Bill" Douglas, a 53-year-old of Austin, Texas, died at the scene of the accident. In response to the accident, the Cyrus family released a statement via Cyrus' official website; it stated, "We are deeply saddened by the loss of Bill 'Uncle Bill' Douglas. Members of our tour are like members of our family. Our thoughts and prayers go out to his family in the midst of this tragedy. He will truly be missed." Omar Abderrahman, the tour's production manager, said, "That was real tough. It's always a tragedy to lose anyone. Uncle Bill was a great driver and a good friend. He’d done a lot of tours with me, and we’re all going to miss him." Although the cause for the accident remains undefined, authorities confirmed the roads were wet from overnight rain. However, CBS News reported that speed and weather were not attributed as factors for the accident's occurrence. Despite the incident, the tour's following concert on November 22, 2009 at the Greensboro Coliseum in Greensboro, North Carolina proceeded as scheduled. During the concert, Cyrus dedicated the performance of "The Climb" to Douglas as overhead screens displayed a video commemorating him. ## Broadcast and recordings The concerts held on December 13, 14, 19, 20, and 29, 2009 at The O<sub>2</sub> Arena in London were filmed. On May 26, 2010, it was announced that the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) would broadcast an hour-long television special entitled Miley Cyrus: Live from London on June 18, 2010, as part of promotion for Cyrus' third studio album Can't Be Tamed (2010). The special was executively produced by Leticia "Tish" Cyrus, Cyrus' mother, and Jason Morey, Cyrus' manager. It was directed by Russell Thomas and produced by Jim Parsons. Miley Cyrus: Live from London was described by Cyrus' official website with the following statement: "The program captures how Miley, who has grown up in the public eye, has grown as an artist and reveals her natural progression and sophistication." The concert special was watched by over 2.6 million viewers in the United States. Miley Cyrus: Live from London's airing on ABC was a filtered version of the full-length concert, which became available on the limited, deluxe edition of Can't Be Tamed, released on June 21, 2010. The deluxe edition featured the audio CD, containing the album's music, and a DVD, which contains nineteen live performances and behind-the-scenes footage with Cyrus. "We anticipate an overindexing, if you will, of those who buy the CD/DVD over just the music because it's never been seen before", stated Abbey Konowitch, general manager of Hollywood Records. The performances of "Fly on the Wall" and "Start All Over" were included in Cyrus' second video album Can't Be Tamed: Mini DVD (2010), released only in the United Kingdom and Japan. ## Set list 1. "Breakout" 2. "Start All Over" 3. "7 Things" 4. "Kicking and Screaming" 5. "Bottom of the Ocean" 6. "Fly on the Wall" 7. "Let's Get Crazy" 8. "Hoedown Throwdown" 9. "These Four Walls" 10. "When I Look at You" 11. "Obsessed" 12. "Spotlight" 13. "G.N.O. (Girl's Night Out)" 14. "I Love Rock 'n' Roll" (Joan Jett cover) 15. "Party in the U.S.A." 16. "Wake Up America" 17. "Simple Song" Encore 1. <li value=18> "See You Again" 2. <li value=19> "The Climb" Notes: - During the performance of "7 Things" in Salt Lake City, Cyrus ran off the stage because of illness from strep throat and the necessity of medical attention. Her band and back up singers covered for her, and, fifteen minutes later, Cyrus returned to resume the concert. "Kicking and Screaming" and "Wake Up America" were both omitted from the set list to make up for the loss of time. - Starting with the performance in Milwaukee, "Hovering" replaced "Wake Up America". ## Shows ## Personnel Creative team - Director, choreographer – Jamal Sims - Assistant director – Octavious Terry - Assistant choreographer – Dondraico Johnson - Assistant – Christopher Scott - Creative consultant – Jeffery Hornaday - Production designer (lighting, video, stage) – Seán Burke - Wardrobe designer – Simone Harouche - Screens content director – Richard Turner - Screen content producer – Justine Catterall - Content creation & direction – Ben Ib, Seán Evans - Content creation & animation – Colin Walsh - Scenic consultant – Chris Medvitz - Effects designer – Scott Christensen - Flying by foy – Joe Mcgeough - Sound effects – Clay Janes Band - Music direction, drummer – Stacy Jones - Guitar – Jamie Arentzen, Jaco Caraco - Keyboards – Mike Schmid - Bass – Vashon Johnson - Background vocals – Sara Mann, Carmel Helene Staff and Crew - Staff & crew production manager – Omar Abderrahman - Tour manager – Steve Brumbach - Stage manager – Scott "Striker" Christensen - Production designer – Seán Burke - FOH – Paul Hager - Monitors – Vish Wadi - Assistant tour managers – Lauren Abderrahman, Mick Adkins - Production coordinator – Jon Bumgarner - Production assistants – Dillan Esco, Lauren Temple - Stage manager assistant – Seth Posner - Security – Sal Pietripaoli, Thomas Rosehaley - Hair stylist – Scott Cunha - Make up artist – Denika Bedrossian - Prop master – Chris Malta - Props assistant – Sage Christensen - Backline – John Ciasulli, Benoit Brideau - Dancers – Jennifer Talarico, Christina Glur, Ashlee Nino, Bianca Brewton, Ryan Novak, Mike Dizon, Cory Graves, Christopher "War" Martinez, Nolan Padilla, Jabari Odom - Pro tools – Clay Janes, Trevor Robinson - Carpenters – Joe Rogers, Carl Ciasulli, Carl Chadwick, Kyle Hoffman - Foy tech – Patrick Leonard - Lighting director – Seán Burke - Lighting crew chief – Ronald Beal - Lighting techs – Peter Feher, Thomas Dubas, Robert Simoneaux, Jason Winfree, Allison Triplet - Pyro techs – Steve Aleff, Brien Capenter, Travis Jameson - Riggers – Art Mcconnell, Seyton Pooley, Jeremy Benauer, Antar Abderrahman, Craig "Miami" Powell, Martin Zilio - Showrig – Sean Conner, Neville Emerton, James Ford, Jeremy Bryden, Charles Veal, Terry Parker - Sound crew chief – Tim Holder - Sound techs – Adam Stuart, Jeffery Lutgen, Nyle Wood, Dustin Ponscheck - Video director – Rob Darcy - Media server programmer & operator – Richard Turner - Video techs – Bob Boynton, Adam Sion, Bruce Ramos, Redo Jackson, Tommy Kalogiannis, Joe Wolohan - Wardrobe supervisor – Jill Focke - Wardrobe – Tiffany Fellar, Zhenni Li-Cagle - Wal-Mart (sponsor manager) – Paul Douglas - Wal-Mart representatives – Joseph Cesaretti, Jerry Farantatos, Nicholas Farantatos, Ryan Norris, Andria Goodrow - Merch (show day team) – Ty Zigler - Merch assistant (show day team) – Luke Underwood - Merch (advance team) – Jon Kohl - Merch assistant (advance team) – Matt Parillo - Bus drivers – John Fry, Joe Reed, George Hampton, Keith Kaminski, Larry Cyrus, Tracy Morgan, Ronny Knox, Bryan Stevensen, Todd Harrison, Bill Douglas, Matt Selah, Charlie Mcpherson, Grant Whitman, Eric Smith - Lead truck driver – James Johnston - Truck drivers – Larry Hockensmith, Bryan Roddy, Jorge Delgado, Jerry Burnett, Joe Harrison, Jon Mcclain, Danny Martin, Tim Faye, Herchel Cook, Toby Williams, Alex Nino, Jimmy Edelen, Phillip Pedigo, Julie Sword, Leo Johnson, Adam Morris, Neil Lilly, Terry Beebe - Merch truck driver – Robert Pinkey - Merch advance truck driver – Hans Smith Source:
153,660	River Hull	1,172,194,088	River in the East Riding of Yorkshire, England	[ "Geography of Kingston upon Hull", "Humber drainage basin", "Land drainage in the United Kingdom", "River navigations in the United Kingdom", "Rivers of the East Riding of Yorkshire" ]	The River Hull is a navigable river in the East Riding of Yorkshire in Northern England. It rises from a series of springs to the west of Driffield, and enters the Humber Estuary at Kingston upon Hull. Following a period when the Archbishops of York charged tolls for its use, it became a free navigation. The upper reaches became part of the Driffield Navigation from 1770, after which they were again subject to tolls, and the section within the city of Hull came under the jurisdiction of the Port of Hull, with the same result. Most of its course is through low-lying land that is at or just above sea level, and regular flooding has been a long-standing problem along the waterway. Drainage schemes to alleviate it were constructed on both sides of the river. The Holderness Drainage scheme to the east was completed in 1772, with a second phase in 1805, and the Beverley and Barmston Drain to the west was completed in 1810. Since 1980, the mouth of the river has been protected by a tidal barrier at the estuary, which can be closed to prevent tidal surges entering the river system and causing flooding upriver. Most of the bridges which cross the river are movable, to allow shipping to pass. There are six swing bridges; four bascule bridges, two of which have twin leaves, one for each carriageway of the roads which they carry; and three Scherzer lift bridges, which are a type of rolling bascule bridge. The former Scott Street Bridge (taken out of use 1994 and dismantled 2020) was originally powered from a high pressure water main maintained by the first public power distribution company in the world. ## Etymology The name Hull is probably of Brittonic origin. The name may derive from \hūl, an element related to \hū- meaning "boil, soak, seethe" (\< Old Celtic \*seu-; c.f. River Sill in Europe). ## Course The source of the River Hull is in the Yorkshire Wolds. It rises from a series of springs to the west of Driffield, near the site of the medieval village of Elmswell. The Elmswell Beck flows eastwards from these, and is joined by the Little Driffield Beck, which flows southwards from Little Driffield. It continues as the Driffield Beck, flowing around the south-western edge of Driffield, where it is joined by the Driffield Trout Stream. After the junction, it becomes the River Hull or the West Beck and flows to the east, before turning south to reach Corps Landing. For much of the route below Driffield, the Driffield Navigation runs parallel to the river. The river from Corps Landing to its mouth is navigable. At Emmotland, it is joined by the Frodingham Beck, which is also navigable, and leads to the canal into Driffield, which forms the major part of the Driffield Navigation. Scurf Dyke joins from the west and is followed by Struncheon Hill lock, which marks the end of the Navigation, and the official start of the navigable River Hull. Below here, the river is tidal. The tidal range of tides can be up to 7 feet (2.1 m) in winter and 4 feet (1.2 m) in summer. Just above the lock, the Beverley and Barmston Drain, which collects water from the catchwater drains on either side of the main channel, flows under the navigation in a tunnel, and runs just to the west of the river almost to its mouth. Below the lock, the surrounding land is almost at sea level, and the river is constrained by flood banks on both sides. On its route southwards, the river passes the former junction with Aike Beck, once navigable to Lockington Landing, but the stream was subsequently re-routed to join the Arram Beck. The Leven Canal used to join on the east bank, but the entrance lock has been replaced by a sluice. The Arram Beck flows in from the west, and then the river is crossed by Hull Bridge, the cause of repeated disagreement between the owners of the Driffield Navigation and the Corporation of Beverley, who owned the bridge. Just above Beverley Beck, which joins from the west, is Grovehill Bridge, now a lift bridge but once a ferry bridge. Once the river reaches the outskirts of Hull, its course is marked by a series of bridges, most of which open to allow boats to pass. There are swing bridges, lift bridges and bascule bridges, and the river becomes part of the Port of Hull. The river, which is the dividing line between West and East Hull, bisects the city's industrial area. The bridges can cause traffic delays during high tides, though river traffic is less than it once was. The Beverley and Barmston Drain rejoins the river above Scott Street Bridge. Below North Bridge, an unused dry dock on the west bank marks the former entrance to Queens Dock. Below Drypool Bridge, a muddy basin on the east bank was once the entrance to Drypool Basin and Victoria Dock. The river reaches its confluence with the Humber Estuary in the centre of Kingston upon Hull. At its mouth, a tidal barrier has been constructed to prevent tidal surges from entering the river. In the past, these had regularly flooded the town and the flat countryside to the north. ## History The River Hull has served as a navigation and a drainage channel, and has been subject to the conflicts that this usually creates, as water levels need to be raised for navigation, but lowered for efficient drainage. In 1213, the Archbishops of York laid claim to the river, and declared their right to navigate on a 24-foot (7.3 m) channel. A number of fish-weirs made navigation difficult, and the Archbishop negotiated their removal in 1296, so that a wharf could be established at Grovehill to serve the town of Beverley. By 1321, river rights had been extended to the charging of tolls. One-third of a shilling (4d equivalent to 1.7p decimal currency) was charged for each bushel carried on the river between Emmotland and the Humber, but the merchants of Hull were unhappy with this; eventually the river had free navigation, and goods could be carried on it without toll. The Arram Beck was also exempt from all tolls. It has remained free, except for 1 mile (1.6 km) from the mouth, which is part of the Port of Hull and is under the control of Hull Corporation. The outlet of the river onto the Humber is thought to have changed in the early medieval period. The original outlet has been identified at a place called Limekiln creek. A second channel Sayers Creek was cut or widened, with both outlets existing simultaneously at one point. Limekiln creek was subsequently reduced in flow to the level of a drain. The lower river was bordered by salt marshes in medieval times, when efforts were first made to drain them. Further upstream, channels were cut through the fens in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries by the monks of Meaux Abbey, primarily to enable travel by boat, but these gradually became part of the drainage system. John Smeaton, when asked by the merchants of Driffield to advise on ways to allow keels to reach their town, suggested a small cut of about 1.2 miles (1.9 km) including one lock, from the river near Wansford. The merchants sought a second opinion, and John Grundy, Jr. suggested a much longer canal, running for 5 miles (8.0 km) from Fisholme on the Frodingham Beck. When fully opened in 1770, the new route was some 3 miles (4.8 km) shorter than the river, which follows an extremely winding course in its upper reaches. The river above Aike was now considered to be part of the Driffield Navigation, and tolls were charged for its use. Also in this period the first cut of the Holderness Drain was made, enabled by an act of 1764, originally outfalling onto the river. In addition to the drainage works to the east of the river, the banks were raised for 17 miles (27 km) on the east side, to prevent flooding. Although beyond their jurisdiction, the Navigation commissioners attempted to extend their powers, to improve the river below the junction with Aike Beck. They particularly wanted to replace the stone Hull Bridge, near Beverley, with a swing bridge, which would make it easier for keels to reach Frodingham bridge. The Corporation of Beverley objected, because the bridge was the main route of communication between Beverley and Holderness, and the commissioners instead dredged parts of the river to improve access. Plans to improve Hull Bridge were again resisted by Beverley Corporation in 1799, but an agreement was finally reached in 1801, and an Act of Parliament was obtained in July of that year. William Chapman acted as engineer, as the act authorised the construction of towpaths, a new cut between Bethels Bridge and the lock at Struncheon Hill, to avoid a long loop in the river, and rebuilding of the bridge. The bridge cost £500, half of which was met by Richard Bethell, the owner of the Leven Canal, on condition that the tolls for passing through it were reduced significantly. Passage through Hull had long been difficult, because of the number of ships which used the river for loading and unloading goods. In 1794, the merchants of Beverley had advocated the building of docks at Hull, with a separate entrance, so that traffic to the upper river would not be impeded, while the Driffield Navigation had unsuccessful attempted to get a clause inserted into the Act of Parliament which the Hull Dock Company obtained in 1840, to ensure free passage for vessels, and the removal of tolls for boats not using the docks. The Navigation Company also received complaints from the Beverley and Barmston Drainage Commissioners, who believed that water levels were being kept at a higher level than was good for drainage. In 1980, the Environment Agency constructed a tidal barrier at the mouth of the river. The structure spans the river, and a huge steel gate, weighing 202 tonnes, can be lowered into the waterway, effectively sealing the river from the Humber, and preventing tidal surges from moving up the river and flooding parts of the city and the low-lying areas beyond. The gate was initially lowered about twelve times a year, and protects around 17,000 properties. In 2009, a £10 million upgrade of the structure was started, to ensure it would stay operational for a further 30 years. The upgrade included a new drive mechanism, which raises and lowers the gate, and pivots it when it is at the top of the structure, so that it lies horizontally rather than vertically. It also included a new control system. In July 2017 the barrier was granted Grade II listed status. Plans have been considered to build a barrage at the mouth of the Hull where it joins the Humber Estuary to maintain a constant water level as it passes through the city. The idea was first raised by the Abercrombie report, which considered how to redevelop Hull after significant destruction during the Second World War. The estimated cost of such a project was around £195 million in 2007. ## Traffic Because the river was a free river, there are no figures for traffic on the lower river. However, it connected to a number of waterways on which tolls were collected, and so an indication of the traffic can be gained from the figures for these waterways. The main cargoes on Beverley Beck in 1730 were coal, bricks, turfs and wool, together with cereal crops, consisting of wheat, barley, oats and malt. Receipts from tolls more than doubled between 1732 and 1748, after which the tolls were let to an independent collector. The annual rent charged for this privilege doubled again between 1748 and 1792. There was a steady expansion of trade on the Driffield Navigation during the same period, as the dividends paid to shareholders rose from 1.5 to 4 per cent. In 1789, Bainton, Boyes and Co negotiated a lump sum payment to cover coal from the Aire and Calder Navigation to their new carpet factory and the export of their carpets in the downstream direction. The factory later became a corn mill. Toll rentals continued to increase on the Beverley Beck, rising from £190 to £435 between 1793 and 1835. Some 31,185 tons of cargo were carried in 1838. In 1817, a steam packet service started to run between Driffield and Hull. Three return trips each week were made, but the journey times were too long, and an advertisement in 1825 indicated that the engine had been altered and an express steam packet service would commence. Three boats were recorded as trading between Driffield and Hull every other day in a directory of Yorkshire published in 1823. Traffic for 1832 included 7,394 chaldrons of coal, 18,173 quarters of wheat, 7,745 quarters of oats, 19,396 quarters of barley and 4,555 sacks of flour. An additional 1,564 quarters of wheat and 8,194 sacks of flour were carried to or from Foston Mill, reached from Frodingham Beck. A regular carrier also operated between the Leven Canal and Hull once a week. Between 1848 and 1905, traffic on Beverley Beck more than trebled, from 33,498 tons to 101,540 tons. Coal and other minerals accounted for around one quarter of the traffic in 1905, while goods carried in 1906 included fertiliser, burnt ore, flour and scrap metal. Commercial traffic continued into the 1970s, when tolls of £2,365 were collected on 28,169 tons of cargo. Traffic on the Driffield Navigation was relatively steady between 1871 and 1905, falling slightly from 35,654 to 32,666 tons. Goods carried included coal, linseed, cottonseed, wheat, flour and artificial manures. In 1922, £7 of income was received from pleasure craft using the navigation. Traffic declined during the 1930s, with commercial traffic finally ceasing in 1944. The Leven Canal carried 4,242 tons in 1888 and 4,546 in 1905, but then succumbed to road competition, and closed in 1935. ## Drainage The problems of flooding of the land adjacent to the river were addressed by the construction of catchwater drains to both sides of it. The east side of the river was protected by the Holderness Drainage scheme. John Grundy worked on plans for the scheme which would protect 11,000 acres (4,500 ha) of low-lying land to the north-east of Hull. John Smeaton was also involved, although the final report was largely Grundy's work, and an Act of Parliament to authorise the work was passed on 5 April 1764. The Trustees for the scheme wrote to Grundy and Smeaton in May 1764, asking them to work on the project. Grundy's wife had died only a fortnight previously, and the two engineers corresponded, but besides valuable comment on Grundy's plans for the outfall sluice, Smeaton had no further involvement, and it was Grundy who ran the project, which included 17 miles (27 km) of barrier bank along the east side of the river. John Hoggard acted as Superintendent for the scheme, while Joseph Page was appointed as resident engineer, to oversee the construction of the drains and the outfall sluice. Grundy made regular visits until October 1767, by which time the sluice and the main drainage channels were completed, at which point he and Page moved on, while Hoggard oversaw additional work on the drains and banks, which lasted for several more years. By the time of its completion in 1772, the scheme had cost £24,000. Despite the Holderness scheme, there were still problems near Leven and Weel, and William Jessop spent a month inspecting the area before writing a report in July 1786. His plan advocated separating the water which fell on the uplands to the north and flowed through the low-lying areas, from the local drainage of those low-lying areas. George Plummer carried out most of the subsequent survey work on Jessop's behalf, although Jessop surveyed the River Hull in 1787, to identify how the outfall could be improved. Jessop visited the works from time to time, making seven visits between 1789 and 1792, while the day to day oversight of the scheme was handled by Plummer as resident engineer. Plummer was succeeded by Anthony Bower, who was engineer from 1792 to 1795, and the whole scheme was completed in 1805, having cost £16,000. In 1796, Robert Chapman was asked to report on possible solutions for flooding to the west. His report formed the basis for the Beverley and Barmston Drainage Act, which was passed by Parliament in June 1798. Chapman was appointed as engineer for the scheme, which would cost £115,000, and would provide flood defences and drainage for 12,600 acres (5,100 ha) of land to the west of the river. The project included the construction of 23 miles (37 km) of drainage cuts, and building embankments along 20 miles (32 km) of the river. At Hull, an outfall sluice was constructed, and the drain passed through tunnels under eleven waterways, including the Beverley Beck. 27 bridges were built to carry roads over the drain, and the whole project was finished in 1810. ## River crossings There are several bridges in the Hull area which cross the River Hull. Details of them are shown in the following table, starting from that furthest north and moving south to the river mouth. The present Drypool Bridge was designed by W. Morris, the Hull City Engineer, and it was built in Hull. The previous wrought iron swing bridge, which had opened in 1888, was too narrow, with a carriageway which was 16 feet (4.9 m) wide. It was closed in May 1959, so that it could be demolished and Morris's new bridge opened in March 1961. Scott Street Bridge had gradually deteriorated, and a public consultation was held in 1986, to determine its future. By that time a 10-ton weight limit had been imposed on traffic using the bridge, because of its poor structural state. Three suggestions were made as to its future. These were to close and demolish it, to refurbish it at an estimated cost of £1.6 million, and to build a new bridge on the same site but a different alignment, to eliminate the awkward turn at the west end, which was costed at £2 million. None of these actions have been taken, as the bridge leaves were raised in 1994, and have remained raised ever since. Consideration was given in 2007 to preserving two of the hydraulic rams which operated the bridge, during planning to demolish the structure. The Hull Hydraulic Power Company was set up in 1872, and by 1876 was operating a pumping station on Machell Street. This supplied water to a high pressure main which ran from Wellington Street to Sculcoates Bridge, and was used by local industries to power machinery, including the bridge when it was constructed. Although the power company closed in the 1940s, it made Hull the first city in the world to have a public system of power distribution. The design for the Ennerdale Link road included a tunnel under the river. Initial investigations suggested that there was a layer of boulder clay below the alluvium of the river bed, and that a chalk aquifer was below the clay. Construction work started in July 1991. A cofferdam was built on the east bank, and the cutting which would have provided access to the twin-bore tunnel was nearly excavated when a 6.6-foot (2.0 m) hole appeared in the river bed, and the entire site flooded. A 3-month investigation took place, which suggested that it would be difficult to finish the tunnel and maintain the integrity of the aquifer. Despite some £10 million having been spent on the project, it was abandoned in 1993. A contract for a replacement bridge was awarded in June 1995 and the river was crossed by twin lift bridges, which were opened in April 1997. The project had cost £30 million, compared to an original budget of just £13 million. A tunnel was successfully constructed under the river in 2001. The 6.2-mile (10.0 km) long sewer runs from the city centre to a treatment works at Salt End. It was excavated using two tunnelling machines, which were manufactured in Canada and were named Maureen and Gloria. The tunnel was officially opened on 21 August 2001, when a Mini car was driven through it, recreating scenes from the film The Italian Job. Before 1897, there had been a ferry at Grovehill, and a shipyard on the east bank, owned by Joseph Scarr. To assist his workers to reach the shipyard, Scarr designed and built a ferry bridge, which cost him £300. It consisted of a large rectangular pontoon, above which was fitted a bridge deck with handrails. Two jack screws enabled the deck to be raised or lowered in relation to the pontoon, so that it remained at approximately the same height, whatever the state of the tide. On the eastern bank, Scarr constructed a variable-height landing, but the landing on the west bank was constructed by Beverley Council, and was fixed. Scarr campaigned to have a variable landing here as well, and was prepared to fund it, but his requests were always rejected. The fixed landing made access to the bridge difficult at high tides. When a boat needed to pass, the west end was freed, and the pontoon swung round to lie parallel to the bank, either upstream or downstream, depending on the state of the tide. It would then be winched back into position by a small barrel winch. At night the bridge was closed and moored beside the bank. Responsibility for the bridge was taken over by Beverley Council before the Second World War. Its condition deteriorated, and in 1948, they attempted to replace it with a footbridge around 400 yards (370 m) further upstream. Because the ferry rights had been in existence for more than 600 years, an Act of Parliament was needed, and this was thwarted by a petition containing 84 signatures, presented by the people of Weel to the House of Lords. Plans for a new lift bridge were drawn up, and it was opened on 19 October 1953. In 1913, the Hull Bridge upstream of Beverley, which had caused so much disagreement in the 18th century until it had been replaced in 1801, was demolished by the County Council, who installed a steel rolling bridge in its place. Once the Tickton Bypass bridge had been built a short distance upstream, it no longer needed to carry road traffic, and it was replaced by a footbridge in 1976. At the other end of the river, the Millennium Bridge was opened in 2001. There was once a ferry at this point, before 1865, which gave access to the Victoria Dock, opened in 1850. South Bridge replaced the ferry in 1865, making it easier for workers to reach the dock. The swing footbridge was closed in 1934, but was not demolished until 1944. ## Water quality The Environment Agency measure the water quality of the river systems in England. Each is given an overall ecological status, which may be one of five levels: high, good, moderate, poor and bad. There are several components that are used to determine this, including biological status, which looks at the quantity and varieties of invertebrates, angiosperms and fish. Chemical status, which compares the concentrations of various chemicals against known safe concentrations, is rated good or fail. The water quality of the River Hull system was as follows in 2016. The reasons for the quality being less than good include sewage discharge and physical modification of the channel. ## Points of interest ## See also - Rivers of the United Kingdom
32,752,871	Tue Rechnung! Donnerwort, BWV 168	1,169,641,306	Church cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach	[ "1725 compositions", "Church cantatas by Johann Sebastian Bach" ]	Johann Sebastian Bach composed the church cantata Tue Rechnung! Donnerwort (Settle account! Word of thunder), BWV 168 in Leipzig for the ninth Sunday after Trinity and first performed it on 29 July 1725. Bach set a text by Salomo Franck, a librettist with whom he had worked in Weimar. The text, which Franck had published in 1715, uses the prescribed reading from the Gospel of Luke, the parable of the Unjust Steward, as a starting point for thoughts about the debt of sin and its "payment", using monetary terms. He concluded the text with a stanza from Bartholomäus Ringwaldt's hymn "Herr Jesu Christ, du höchstes Gut". Bach structured the cantata in six movements and scored it intimately, as he did for many of Franck's works, for four vocal parts, combined only in the chorale, two oboes d'amore, strings and basso continuo. It is the first new composition in his third year as Thomaskantor in Leipzig. ## History and words Bach composed the cantata in Leipzig for the Ninth Sunday after Trinity as the first cantata of his third cantata cycle, being the first new composition in his third year as Thomaskantor in Leipzig. The libretto is by Salomon Franck who was a court poet in Weimar. Bach had often set Franck's texts when he was Konzertmeister (concertmaster) there from 1714 to 1717. Franck published the text of Tue Rechnung! Donnerwort in 1715 as part of the collection Evangelisches Andachts-Opffer, and Bach would probably have used at the time had it not been for a period of mourning for Prince Johann Ernst of Saxe-Weimar. The prescribed readings for the Sunday were from the Epistle to the Romans, a warning of false gods and consolation in temptation (), and from the Gospel of Luke, the parable of the Unjust Steward (). Franck's text is closely related to the Gospel, beginning with a paraphrase of verse 2 in the opening aria. The situation of the unjust servant is generalized; he is seen wanting mountains and hills to fall on his back, as mentioned in . Franck uses explicit monetary terms to speak about the debt, such as "Kapital und Interessen" (capital and interest). A turning point is reached in the fourth movement, referring to the death of Jesus which "crossed out the debt". The cantata is concluded by the eighth stanza of Bartholomäus Ringwaldt's hymn "Herr Jesu Christ, du höchstes Gut" (1588). Bach had treated the complete chorale a year before in his chorale cantata Herr Jesu Christ, du höchstes Gut, BWV 113, for the eleventh Sunday after Trinity. Bach first performed the cantata on 29 July 1725. ## Music ### Structure and scoring Bach structured the cantata in six movements and scored it intimately, as he did for many of Franck's works. The singers consist of four vocal soloists (soprano (S), alto (A), tenor (T), and bass) (B) plus a four-part choir only in the chorale. The instrumental parts are for two oboes d'amore (Oa), two violins (Vl), viola (Va) and basso continuo (Bc). The title of the autograph score reads: "9 post Trinit. / Thue Rechnung! Donner Wort / a / 4 Voci / 2 Hautb. d'Amour / 2 Violini / Viola / e / Continuo / di / J.S.Bach". The duration is given as 17 minutes. In the following table of the movements, the scoring and keys and time signatures are taken from Alfred Dürr, using the symbol for common time (4/4). The instruments are shown separately for winds and strings, while the continuo, playing throughout, is not shown. ### Movements #### 1 The work opens with a bass aria, accompanied by the strings, "Tue Rechnung! Donnerwort" (Settle account! Word of thunder). Christoph Wolff notes: > Bach translates Franck's baroque poetry into an extraordinarily gripping musical form. The virtuoso string writing in the opening aria prepares and then underscores the emphatically articulated "word of thunder, that can shatter even the rocks" ("Donnerwort, das die Felsen selbst zerspaltet"), and which causes the blood to "run cold" ("Blut erkaltet"). #### 2 The recitative, "Es ist nur fremdes Gut" (It is only an alien good) is the first movement with the full orchestra. The oboes first play long chords, but finally illustrate the text figuratively, speaking of toppling mountains and "the flash of His countenance". The musicologist Julian Mincham notes that Bach's recitative is "both melodic and dramatic throughout", showing his familiarity with "the best contemporary operatic styles". #### 3 A tenor aria with the oboes in unison develops "Kapital und Interessen" (Capital and interest). Klaus Hofmann calls the movement dance-like. #### 4 A secco recitative for bass demands: "Jedoch, erschrocknes Herz, leb und verzage nicht!" (Nevertheless, terrified heart, live and do not despair!). #### 5 A duet of the upper voices, only accompanied by the continuo, reflects "Herz, zerreiß des Mammons Kette" (Heart, rend the chains of Mammon). Hofmann notes the dotted rhythm of the dance Canarie to the often canonic imitation of the voices. The word "zerreiß" (tear asunder) is depicted by a rest afterwards. The fetters (Kette) are illustrated with "slurred coloraturas", the term "Sterbebett" (deathbed) appears in "darkening of the harmony." #### 6 The closing chorale, "Stärk mich mit deinem Freudengeist" (Strengthen me with Your joyful Spirit), is a four-part setting. ## Recordings The listing is taken from the selection on the Bach Cantatas Website. Ensembles playing period instruments in historically informed performance are marked by green background.
4,334,213	Jeffrey Hammonds	1,163,921,666	American baseball player (born 1971)	[ "1971 births", "20th-century African-American sportspeople", "21st-century African-American sportspeople", "African-American baseball players", "All-American college baseball players", "Arizona League Brewers players", "Arizona League Giants players", "Baltimore Orioles players", "Baseball players at the 1991 Pan American Games", "Baseball players at the 1992 Summer Olympics", "Baseball players from Union County, New Jersey", "Bowie Baysox players", "Cincinnati Reds players", "Colorado Rockies players", "Fresno Grizzlies players", "Harrisburg Senators players", "Living people", "Major League Baseball center fielders", "Major League Baseball right fielders", "Medalists at the 1991 Pan American Games", "Milwaukee Brewers players", "National League All-Stars", "New Orleans Zephyrs players", "Olympic baseball players for the United States", "Pan American Games bronze medalists for the United States", "Pan American Games medalists in baseball", "People from Scotch Plains, New Jersey", "People from Weston, Florida", "Rochester Red Wings players", "San Diego Padres scouts", "San Francisco Giants players", "Scotch Plains-Fanwood High School alumni", "Sportspeople from Plainfield, New Jersey", "Stanford Cardinal baseball players", "Washington Nationals players" ]	Jeffrey Bryan Hammonds (born March 5, 1971) is an American former professional baseball player. Hammonds was an outfielder and played for the Baltimore Orioles (1993–1998), Cincinnati Reds (1998–1999), Colorado Rockies (2000), Milwaukee Brewers (2001–2003), San Francisco Giants (2003–2004) and the Washington Nationals (2005) in Major League Baseball (MLB). Before playing professionally, Hammonds played for Scotch Plains-Fanwood High School in Scotch Plains, New Jersey and Stanford University. At Stanford, Hammonds was named an All-American. The Orioles selected Hammonds with the fourth overall selection of the 1992 MLB Draft. Though he was seen as one of the best prospects in baseball, injuries limited his performance with Baltimore. After he was traded to Cincinnati and then to Colorado, he emerged with the Rockies in 2000, and was selected to appear at the 2000 Major League Baseball All-Star Game. He signed a three-year, \$21.75 million contract with the Milwaukee Brewers that off-season, but continued to struggle with injuries. He had a resurgence with the Giants in 2003, after he was released by the Brewers, but struggled with the Giants in 2004 and Nationals in 2005 before retiring. ## Amateur career Born in Plainfield, New Jersey, Hammonds grew up in Scotch Plains, New Jersey, He attended Scotch Plains-Fanwood High School, where he played for the school's baseball team. After high school, Hammonds was a ninth-round draft pick of the Toronto Blue Jays in the 1989 Major League Baseball Draft, though he did not sign. He reported that he never considered going professional at that point, as his parents insisted he attend college, and that Hammonds' brother, who had signed with the Pittsburgh Pirates out of high school, suffered a career-ending injury while playing in minor league baseball. Hammonds had scholarship offers to attend Duke University, the University of Notre Dame, and Stanford University and play college baseball. He chose to attend Stanford University, where he played for the Stanford Cardinal baseball team that competed in the Pacific-10 Conference (Pac-10) in the National Collegiate Athletic Association's (NCAA) Division I. At Stanford, Hammonds broke the Pac-10 single season stolen base record as a freshman, stealing 102 bases in 174 career games. Hammonds was awarded NCAA Freshman of the Year and voted All-College World Series in 1990 and was also named an All-American in that year. During the 1992 season, Hammonds batted .380 with 33 stolen bases in 47 games, and was again named an All-American. He again led the Cardinal to the 1992 College World Series. ## Professional career ### Draft Before the 1992 Major League Baseball Draft, Hammonds indicated that he would sign if offered a \$1.8 million signing bonus, which caused Hammonds to fall to the fourth overall selection, where the Baltimore Orioles selected Hammonds with their first-round draft pick. Frank Robinson, then the Orioles' assistant general manager (GM), met Hammonds at that year's College World Series while scouting, and advised Orioles GM Doug Melvin to pick Hammonds. The Orioles, regarded as frugal, held a hard line with Hammonds in negotiations, refusing to give a signing bonus as large as \$1 million. Hammonds did not play professionally in 1992 as he competed for the United States national baseball team in the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona. He faced a two-month road trip across sixteen states by bus, more travel combined with training than employed by any professional team. Hammonds struggled with the national team initially, but agreed to sign with the Orioles in July 1992, receiving a \$975,000 signing bonus, the largest of any player chosen in that draft. Upon signing, his hitting improved. ### Top prospect: Baltimore Orioles (1992–1996) Without having played a single professional game, Baseball America rated Hammonds as the 19th best prospect in baseball. He made his professional debut in 1993 with the Bowie Baysox of the Class-AA Eastern League, where he batted .283, at which point he was promoted to the Rochester Red Wings of the Class-AAA International League, where he batted .311. Hammonds received a promotion to the Orioles on June 25, becoming the first player chosen in the 1992 MLB draft to reach the majors, where his debut was greeted with fanfare and high expectations. He batted .305 in 105 at-bats with the Orioles that season, however he suffered a pinched nerve in May, and a neck injury in August. The Orioles ended his season prematurely to allow Hammonds to recover. Hammonds was reunited on the 1993 Orioles with former Stanford teammates Mike Mussina and Paul Carey. Thought of as a potential candidate for the American League Rookie of the Year Award, at this point Baseball America rated Hammonds the third best prospect in all of baseball. Hammonds suffered a knee injury during the 1994 season but opted to continue playing despite being told he needed reconstructive knee surgery, with his subsequent performances limited as a result. When the Orioles needed to reduce their roster from 28 players to 25 in May 1995, Hammonds, who started the season batting 4-for-19, was optioned back to Bowie. After struggling with the Orioles early in the 1996 season, batting .237 in 56 games, he was demoted back to Rochester in June. The Orioles included Hammonds in numerous trade proposals that summer, but eventually held on to him. During his spell with Rochester Hammonds became more selective in his approach at the plate, and was recalled to the Orioles. Hammonds injured his knee in August and though he returned to the Orioles in September, they left him off their postseason roster, as they asserted that they felt Hammonds was rusty. Hammonds believed that the snub meant he should be traded, but stopped short of demanding a trade. ### Searching for success: Baltimore Orioles and Cincinnati Reds (1997–1999) Formerly considered a top prospect in the Orioles organization, Hammonds returned to them in 1997 with his role in the organization unclear. In past spring trainings Hammonds had always practiced with the starters; in 1997, the Orioles alternated him between the starters, who practiced in the stadium, and the minor leaguers and non-roster players, who practiced in fields behind the stadium near an airport runway. New GM Pat Gillick didn't deny that the Orioles could trade him if Hammonds didn't maximize his talent, though he called a potential trade a "last resort". Despite this Hammonds had a successful season, playing in 118 games that season, receiving 397 at-bats. He scored 71 runs, had 105 hits, including 19 doubles, three triples, and 21 home runs, and recorded 55 RBI. By 1998, Hammonds and the Orioles were hoping he would achieve more consistency. With the threat of facing a salary arbitration hearing, the Orioles approached him with the idea of working out an agreement on a multi-year contract extension. Hammonds agreed, and signed a three-year, \$7 million contract before the 1998 season. Hammonds felt that this was a strong commitment from the Orioles hierarchy, including Gillick, after which manager Ray Miller believed that this would allow Hammonds to focus on improving his skills. However, Hammonds suffered a back injury that returned him to the disabled list that year. When Hammonds recovered, the Orioles traded him to the Cincinnati Reds for Willie Greene in August 1998. Hammonds originally was designated to serve as a backup outfielder for the Reds going into the 1999. In the May 19 contest versus the Colorado Rockies, Cincinnati won by a score of 24−12, tied for the fourth-highest run-scoring output in MLB history. Hammonds hit three home runs in this game; the Reds totaled six. He batted .279 with 17 home runs and 41 RBIs in 123 games during the 1999 season. After the season, the Reds traded Hammonds with Stan Belinda to the Colorado Rockies for Dante Bichette and \$1.9 million to make up for the differences in salaries, as the Reds believed the slugging Bichette could aid them in replacing Greg Vaughn. ### All-Star season and multiyear contract: Colorado Rockies, Milwaukee Brewers (2000–2003) In 2000 with the Colorado Rockies, Hammonds batted .335 with 20 home runs, 106 RBI, 14 stolen bases, in only 454 at bats. For his performance, he earned a spot on the 2000 National League All-Star team roster. He trailed only teammate Todd Helton in batting average for the majority of the season, eventually finishing with the fourth-highest batting average in the league, behind Helton, Moisés Alou, and Vladimir Guerrero. After the season, the Rockies declined to offer Hammonds salary arbitration, making him a free agent. Due to concerns about Hammonds' injury history, including 40 games missed due to injury in the 2000 season, the Rockies chose not to meet Hammonds' financial demands. Before the 2001 season, the Milwaukee Brewers signed Hammonds to a three-year, \$21.75 million contract, the largest contract the organization had approved to that date. However, injuries prevented Hammonds from approaching the All-Star form he had shown with the Rockies. He suffered a shoulder injury in 2001 which required surgery and this limited him to 49 games played for the season. He returned with a hot start in the 2002 season, batting .324 as of June 5, but he had a recurrence of the shoulder injury later in the season that returned him to the disabled list yet again. Hammonds then began the 2003 season on the disabled list, this time with a high ankle sprain. ### Struggles, resurgence, and injuries: San Francisco Giants and Washington Nationals (2003–2005) The Brewers released Hammonds on June 4, 2003, after he struggled in ten games, batting .158. He signed with the San Francisco Giants at the end of June. They initially assigned him to the Class-AAA Fresno Grizzlies of the Pacific Coast League, before promoting him on July 30. He batted .277 with three home runs and 10 RBIs in 36 games during the second half of the 2003 season, and was selected for the Giants' postseason roster over Marvin Benard and Eric Young where he batted 2-for-4 in Game 4 of the 2003 National League Division Series. Granted free agency at the end of the season, he re-signed with the Giants for the 2004 season for \$1 million, as the replacement for Jose Cruz Jr., who had left after becoming a free agent. However, Hammonds was unable to sustain his improved performance and the Giants released Hammonds that June, after he batted .211 with three home runs and six RBIs. Hammonds then signed with the Washington Nationals organization on a minor league contract. He started the 2005 season with the New Orleans Zephyrs of the PCL, but was recalled to the Nationals on May 3. He batted .219 with one RBI in thirteen games for the Nationals, before returning to the disabled list with an injured hamstring on May 22. While rehabilitating the injury, Hammonds decided to retire rather than return to the minor leagues. Though Hammonds had great natural talent, his injuries limited his career. Hammonds announced his retirement on June 10, 2005. In his thirteen-year career in MLB, he batted .272, 110 home runs, 824 hits, and 423 RBIs. ## Personal life Hammonds lives in Weston, Florida with his three children. As of 2012, he was employed as a scout for the San Diego Padres. He has interest in digital media, aiding baseball prospects, and working for the Major League Baseball Players Association. On February 6, 2014, Hammonds was hired by the players' union as special assistant for player program development. Hammonds' older brother, Reginald, played minor league baseball for the Pittsburgh Pirates' organization, reaching Class-AAA before suffering a career-ending injury. He enrolled at Northwestern University, graduated, became a stockbroker and aided Hammonds in his 1992 contract negotiations. ## See also - 1992 College Baseball All-America Team
1,035,594	Rinoa Heartilly	1,171,072,197	Co-protagonist of Final Fantasy VIII	[ "Characters designed by Tetsuya Nomura", "Female characters in video games", "Fictional witches", "Final Fantasy VIII", "Final Fantasy characters", "Square Enix protagonists", "Video game characters introduced in 1999", "Video game characters who use magic" ]	Rinoa Heartilly (Japanese: リノア・ハーティリー, Hepburn: Rinoa Hātirī) is the character and co-protagonist of Square's (now Square Enix) 1999 role-playing video game Final Fantasy VIII. She is a teenaged member of a resistance faction known as the Forest Owls. After she recruits protagonist Squall Leonhart and his friends, she decides to stay with his group and falls in love with Squall in the process. During their adventure, she is briefly possessed by the evil sorceress Ultimecia and becomes a sorceress herself once the spirit leaves her body. After defeating Ultimecia, Rinoa and Squall become a couple. Rinoa has also made cameo appearances in other Final Fantasy and Square Enix games. Character artist Tetsuya Nomura designed her to be cute, not beautiful, as he wanted to create a character whose personality would leave an impression on the player. He felt that the more realistic graphical capabilities the original PlayStation could provide, along with advances like full motion video, made female characters too beautiful and was overshadowing their personalities. The design team set out from the beginning to make Rinoa's clothing more realistic than past Final Fantasy games. Critics and players alike have praised Rinoa for her personality and her beauty. They also praised her romance with Squall, calling both their relationship and Final Fantasy VIII one of the most romantic Final Fantasy titles. Some reviewers, however, called their relationship forced and criticized that they expressed their feelings so late in the story. ## Character design Character artist Tetsuya Nomura found Rinoa the hardest character to design in Final Fantasy VIII. Nomura emphasized that he tried to avoid letting the possibilities presented by the recent advancements in full-motion video technology become the entire focus. He believed that these innovations might tempt developers to make their female characters "too beautiful" and focus more on physical appearance than personality. With this concern in mind, Nomura set out to avoid making Rinoa gorgeous and simply make her "cute" instead. To further emphasize this, he wrote a list of vocabulary traits and physical habits for Rinoa's character that he felt conveyed this idea of "cute, not gorgeous", and sent them to scenario writer Kazushige Nojima along with the character's design. Designers also based Rinoa's appearance on feedback Nojima got after developing Final Fantasy VII. The women on the development team wanted a different design as they were concerned it was not realistic for a female character to fight in a miniskirt. Yoshinori Kitase, the director of Final Fantasy VIII, designed the game's logo, which shows a male and female character embracing. Kitase wanted to make fans curious about why the couple was embracing. The games' Event Director Hiroki Chiba said that his favorite moment in the Final Fantasy franchise was Squall and Rinoa's embrace with Faye Wong's "Eyes On Me" playing. Chiba listened to the song many times to make the scene's action line up precisely. For the Kingdom Hearts series, some parts of Squall's design were changed to reference Rinoa's, most notably the wings in his jacket. Nomura stated that the reason Rinoa did not appear in the franchise was because he did not have a clear understanding of Rinoa's personality. Rinoa's first voiced appearance was in Dissidia Final Fantasy NT, with Kana Hanazawa providing her voice in Japanese, and Skyler Davenport performing the English version. ## Appearances ### In Final Fantasy VIII Rinoa Heartilly is the 17-year-old daughter of General Caraway, a high-ranking officer in the Galbadian army, and Julia Heartilly, a famous singer. Over the course of the game, she falls in love with the protagonist, Squall Leonhart. Rinoa is a member of the "Forest Owls", a tiny resistance faction seeking to liberate the small nation of Timber from Galbadian occupation. She is called the "princess" of the group. Rinoa first meets Squall at the SeeD inauguration ball at Balamb Garden. During the dance, she manages to charm the usually antisocial Squall into dancing with her. She then hires Squall and his mercenary friends Zell Dincht and Selphie Tilmitt to fight for the Forest Owls. After failing to assassinate Sorceress Edea for her crimes against Timber, the Forest Owls escape the sorceress and Rinoa decides to stay with the group. While at the Fishermans Horizon, she shares a moment with Squall during a concert performed by other members of her group. Later on, the evil Sorceress Ultimecia possesses Rinoa after losing control of Edea, which causes Rinoa to fall into a coma-like state. Ultimecia then uses Rinoa to release Sorceress Adel from her orbital prison. Ultimecia then possesses Adel and leaves Rinoa to die. Squall rescues her and the two share another personal moment on the Ragnarok spaceship. Rinoa discovers that she now has Edea's magical powers from her time possessed by Ultimecia, making her a Sorceress as well. Fearful of sorceresses, the Esthar government imprisons her but Squall convinces himself to rescue her. During the game's ending, she reunites with Squall and kisses him on the Balamb Garden balcony for the first time. ### Other appearances Rinoa appears in Square's and Sony's PlayStation 2 technology demo. Originally a pre-rendered video, the demo recreated the ballroom dance scene in real-time. She appears in several other games, such as the 2012 rhythm video game Theatrhythm Final Fantasy and in the role-playing video game Puzzle & Dragons as part of a Final Fantasy collaboration. Her outfits are available for players to put on their characters in the video game Gunslinger Stratos 2. Rinoa, accompanied by her pet dog Angelo, appears as a playable character in Dissidia Final Fantasy NT. Rinoa and Angelo are also available for recruitment in the free-to-play mobile game Dissidia Opera Omnia. ## Reception Rinoa Heartilly has been mostly well received by video game critics and the general public. Japanese fans voted Rinoa as the tenth favorite female Final Fantasy character in an official Square Enix survey in 2013. In 2020 NHK conducted an All-Final Fantasy Grand Poll of Japanese players, with Rinoa ranked as the thirty fifth greatest Final Fantasy character by Japanese respondents. David Smith at IGN UK regarded her as one of the franchises' most memorable characters. Natalie Flores from Paste Magazine praised her character arc as Rinoa starts as a pacifist heroine and becomes motivated to aid SeeD to defeat Edea and Ultimecia. Mike Gorby, writing for Goomba Stomp, observed that Rinoa subverts gender stereotypes and roles expected of a typical female character and compared her favorably to Squall as he found her more realistic. When Game Revolution's Johnny Liu expressed the wish that the game had voice acting, he specifically mentioned Rinoa. She has been noted due to her beauty by multiple video game publications. IGN's Justin Kaehler and Naomi Cheung remembered the "hot" Rinoa as one of the game's main strengths. GamesRadar described her as "rough around the polygonal edges", but also "feminine enough to make fanboys latch on for years to come". Some critics focused on the relationship between Rinoa and Squall. IGN noted that their first dance together was both cute and awkward. Aneni Soren of RPGamer wrote a feature article about the "great" relationship between Squall and Rinoa. Jenni Lada of TechnologyTell ranked Final Fantasy VIII as the third most romantic Final Fantasy game. IGN's Ryan Clements called Final Fantasy VIII "one of the best examples of the innocent relationship" based on how subtle it was. IGN UK also ranked the pair as one of the best romances in Final Fantasy and gaming in general. On the other hand, Charlie Barratt of GamesRadar listed her as an example of "lazy character cliches". Ashley Reed of GamesRadar criticized the over-reliance of Rinoa's character on the damsel in distress cliche, alongside other traits that made the character unlikable. Brett Elston, also from GamesRadar, believed her character was too stereotypical. Elston opined that the couple's relationship was a "most forced, uninteresting romance" comparing them to the main cast from the film Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones. IGN's Jeff Lundigran criticized that they did not express their feelings until late in the game and that players expected more romance from the game's promotional images. Reflecting on the divisive reception received, Flores from Paste Magazine called them the most misunderstood characters in the Final Fantasy series. A popular fan theory about the game was that the overarching antagonist of Final Fantasy VIII, Ultimecia, is Rinoa from the future. Reed also included the theory of Rinoa being Ultimecia on the list of top nine lingering plotlines in video games. According to Glenn Morrow of RPGamer, most of the arguments in favor of it have potential but also opined that the theory is "in no way" plausible. Kitase debunked this theory when interviewed during the PAX West 2017 event, conceding that while there are similarities, such as both being sorceresses, they are not the same person. ### Legacy According to Official PlayStation Magazine, "the Final Fantasy VIII characters have certainly been embraced by the Japanese gaming public. At the Tokyo Game Show [1999], there were hundreds of people dressed up as Final Fantasy VIII characters", including Rinoa. Scenario writer Kazushige Nojima said that "it is scary to think about the impact that a game can give to the society". Art director Yusuke Naora also said that "I sometimes really admire them for the time, energy, and money they spent on the costumes". Rinoa, an English post-metal group active from 2007 to 2010, was named after the Final Fantasy character. The 2010 film Scott Pilgrim vs. the World includes a dream sequence referencing a similar scene involving Squall and Rinoa at the end of the game. In 2011, American beauty YouTuber Michelle Phan made a tutorial on how to recreate Rinoa Heartilly's make-up. ## See also - Characters of Final Fantasy VIII
51,836,865	2016 Hong Kong ePrix	1,130,486,451	null	[ "2016 in Chinese motorsport", "2016 in Hong Kong sport", "2016–17 Formula E season", "Hong Kong ePrix", "October 2016 sports events in China" ]	The 2016 Hong Kong ePrix (formally the 2016 FIA Formula E HKT Hong Kong ePrix for sponsorship purposes) was a Formula E electric motor race held at the Hong Kong Central Harbourfront Circuit in Hong Kong before a crowd of 30,000 people on 9 October 2016. It was the first race of the 2016–17 Formula E Championship and the first edition of the event. The 45-lap race was won by e.Dams-Renault driver Sébastien Buemi who started from seventh place. Audi Sport ABT's Lucas di Grassi finished second and Mahindra driver Nick Heidfeld was third. Nelson Piquet Jr. won the pole position by recording the fastest lap in qualifying. He pulled away from the rest of the field and led until he collided with the barrier after swerving to avoid José María López's crashed car on the 17th lap allowing Sam Bird to take the lead. Some drivers elected to make pit stops to switch to their second cars with Bird choosing to remain on the circuit until his own stop eight laps later. He had technical problems with his second car and Buemi moved into the lead. Di Grassi was no more than two seconds behind Buemi but was unable to get close enough to challenge him because he had to conserve electrical energy and Buemi remained the leader for the rest of the race to win. There were three lead changes among four different drivers during the course of the race. It was Buemi's first victory of the season and the seventh of his career. The result gave the Buemi of the Drivers' Championship with 25 points, seven ahead of di Grassi and ten in front of Heidfeld. Buemi's teammate Nico Prost was fourth on 12 points and António Félix da Costa was fifth with ten points. e.Dams-Renault held a 19-point advantage in the Teams' Championship over joint second-placed Audi Sport ABT and Andretti. Mahindra Racing were nine points ahead of the fifth-placed NextEV with eleven races left in the season. ## Background The idea for a race in Hong Kong was first raised in 2013 when a design team visited the city. It was intended for inclusion in the 2014–15 season schedule but negotiations and approval from local authorities and motorsport's international governing body, the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA), went longer than anticipated. In October 2015 the Hong Kong ePrix was announced by the CEO and founder of Formula E Alejandro Agag in a press conference at the Central Harbour Front Event Space, pending further review from the FIA. The event was later confirmed as part of Formula E's 2016–17 schedule in September 2016 by the FIA World Motor Sport Council. It was the first of 12 single-seater electric car races of the season, and was held at the Hong Kong Central Harbourfront Circuit on 9 October 2016. A total of ten squads entering two drivers each competed in the event. Heading into the new season, some teams opted to keep the same line-up as they had in the previous season; however, some teams changed drivers. One of the main changes involved the début appearance of Jaguar in the sport with the 2008–09 A1 Grand Prix champion Adam Carroll and the 2012 GP3 Series title winner Mitch Evans competing for the team. Team Aguri was purchased by Chinese sports development and management firm SECA in mid-2016 and was renamed Techeetah with Jean-Éric Vergne and Ma Qinghua announced as the team's drivers. Defending FIA GT World Cup champion Maro Engel was hired by Venturi to replace World Endurance Championship driver Mike Conway, while Virgin employed three-time consecutive World Touring Car champion José María López to partner Formula E race winner Sam Bird. The final change involved two-time Macau Grand Prix winner and reigning European Formula Three champion Felix Rosenqvist joining the series with Mahindra, partnering Nick Heidfeld. Defending drivers' champion Sébastien Buemi stayed at e.Dams-Renault after his title-winning campaign, and was again joined by Nico Prost. Buemi said the increase in competition for the championship's third season meant he was not thinking about the title but on winning as many races as possible. Audi Sport ABT's Lucas di Grassi, who finished second to Buemi in the previous season's drivers' championship, stated his team was highly motivated and aimed to win the championship after having placed third and second in the previous two seasons. He spoke of his feeling that the series was going to possibly experience "the most diverse and perhaps most exciting Formula E season.” Di Grassi said that his objective was to win the race and spoke of his astonishment if he became its inaugural winner. Heidfeld revealed that he was looking forward to the new season and aimed to help his team gain positions in the championship. The 10-corner 1.860 km (1.156 mi) long track was designed by Rodrigo Nunes. It was constructed in eight days and was completed on the Friday before the event because the local authorities denied permission for the streets to be closed to traffic before that day. US\$2.6 million (HK\$20 million) was spent on relocating street lighting, cutting down trees, lowering underground facilities covers and converting existing roadside infrastructure. The circuit received positive feedback from drivers. Ma called the track "very exciting" and stated his belief that the race would see a large amount of overtakes. Rosenqvist said that he felt the track appeared "incredible" which went beyond his expectations. It reminded him more of American race circuits than the Guia Circuit and noted the track's bumpiness. Concerns were raised over the turn three chicane which had no kerbs or any visible markings. Heidfeld felt there was an risk of a driver crashing his car in the area with António Félix da Costa backing up his view and calling for the installation of tyres and observation of the turn's run-off area. ## Practice Two practice sessions—both on Sunday morning—were held before the Sunday late afternoon race. The first session ran for 45 minutes and the second for 30 minutes. A 30-minute shakedown was held on Saturday afternoon before the practice sessions and had Ma post the fastest time of 1 minute, 8.633 seconds, four-tenths of a second faster than Nelson Piquet Jr. in second. The session was temporarily halted when Prost's car stopped on track. Both practice sessions took place in warm weather. Di Grassi used 200 kW (270 hp) of power to post the first practice session's fastest lap at 1 minute, 2.381 seconds, 0.145 seconds faster than Buemi in second. Daniel Abt, Engel, Vergne, Bird, Stéphane Sarrazin, Prost, Félix da Costa and Rosenqvist rounded out the session's top ten fastest drivers. The session was first disrupted when Oliver Turvey's vehicle stopped on track with an electrical issue after four minutes, necessitating the brief deployment of red flags, to allow course workers to remove his car from the circuit. A second stoppage occurred when the Andretti of Robin Frijns (who previously spun twice) lost control of his car at turn nine and blocked the track, and Rosenqvist impacted the first turn barrier and was stranded at the corner's run-off area. In the second practice session, Vergne was quickest with a lap of 1 minute, 2.350 seconds, ahead of Prost, Bird, Rosenqvist, Félix da Costa, Heidfeld, Buemi, Ma, Sarrazin and Loïc Duval (Dragon). Duval lost control of his car and crashed into the turn ten outside barrier's exit, removing both of his right-hand side tyres, and stopping the session for ten minutes to allow his car to be removed from the centre of the track. Engel spun and damaged his right-rear suspension, but was able to drive slowly back to the pit lane. Di Grassi ran wide and went deep onto the turn two run-off area. He spun his car to exit the corner but struck a wall, removing his rear wing. López lost his vehicle's nose cone in a collision with a wall at the same corner, and his rear wing was removed from his car when he hit the turn eight barrier. His rear wing was off the racing line, avoiding the need for yellow flags. The session concluded early when Piquet collided with the chicane exit barrier. ## Qualifying After practice but before qualifying, circuit officials elected to remove a kerb at the chicane with the teams notified of the change shortly before qualifying began. Saturday afternoon's qualifying session ran for 60 minutes and was divided into four groups of five cars. Each group was determined by a lottery system and was permitted six minutes of on-track activity. All drivers were limited to two timed laps with one at maximum power. The fastest five overall competitors in the four groups participated in a "Super Pole" session with one driver on the track at any time going out in reverse order from fifth to first. Each of the five drivers was limited to one timed lap and the starting order was determined by the competitor's fastest times (Super Pole from first to fifth, and group qualifying from sixth to twentieth). The driver and team who recorded the fastest time were awarded three points towards their respective championships. Qualifying was held in warm weather. The modifications to the kerb and a dirty track slowed lap times by at least one second than in practice. Super Pole was cancelled following several long delays caused by multiple crashes and the starting order was determined by the fastest overall times in the four groups. Piquet clinched the first pole position of his career and the first for NextEV with a time of 1 minute, 3.099 seconds. He was joined on the grid's front row by teammate Turvey who was 0.132 seconds slower. In his first Formula E qualifying session, López qualified third in front of his teammate Bird. Buemi went out first in the fourth group and was initially two-tenths of a second slower than Piquet despite no driver errors on his full power lap and took fifth place. Rosenqvist was the first driver to venture onto the track in the group three and drove aggressively which saw him make light contact with the barrier to qualify sixth. Abt took seventh place, ahead of Duval but he served a three-place starting position penalty after he was observed speeding under red-flag conditions in shakedown. Hence, Vergne inherited eighth and his fastest time was set on cold tyres and brakes. Prost's full power lap saw him narrowly avoid hitting the chicane and his car slid at the final turn, leaving him ninth. Heidfeld took tenth, ad Engel was the fastest driver who was not issued with a penalty to not qualify within the top ten. He was more than one-tenth of a second faster than 13th-placed qualifier Félix da Costa, who in turn, was nearly four-tenths ahead of débutant Carroll. The trio were followed by Sarrazin in 15th, and Evans 16th; cold brakes and tyres slowed Evans. Ma's left-rear quarter was damaged when he made contact with a barrier beside the circuit and qualified 17th. Jérôme d'Ambrosio struggled and began behind Ma. Di Grassi, 19th, pushed hard and made an error at the chicane, hitting the wall, damaging his front-left quarter, and triggering red-flag conditions with three minutes left in the second group. Frijns completed the field and temporarily stopped qualifying when his car went airborne after hitting the kerbs at the chicane and collided with the barrier. ### Qualifying classification Notes: - — Loïc Duval received a three-place grid penalty for speeding under red flag conditions in the shakedown session. ## Race A special feature of Formula E is the "Fan Boost" feature, an additional 100 kW (130 hp) of power to use in the driver's second car. The three drivers who were allowed to use the boost were determined by a fan vote. For the Hong Kong race, Buemi, di Grassi and López were handed the extra power and the results were announced on the 14th lap. The weather at the start was dry, warm and mostly sunny. The air temperature ranged from 28.0 to 28.8 °C (82.4 to 83.8 °F) with a track temperature between 36.1 to 37.8 °C (97.0 to 100.0 °F). Rain showers from an nearby typhoon had been forecast for the race but moved away from Hong Kong before it started. The event was attended by 30,000 people. When the event started at 16:00 Hong Kong Time (UTC+8), Piquet and his teammate Turvey made clean getaways and maintained first and second on the straight heading into the first turn. López ran wide leaving the first corner, made minor contact with the turn's barrier, allowing teammate Bird and Buemi to overtake him. López lightly hit Bird and fell down the running order because of heavy steering damage. Under braking for the second turn, Abt's rear wing was removed when Félix da Costa collided with him, causing Ma to apply his brakes and strike the back of Félix da Costa's car, leading to the removal of the former's front wing. Di Grassi was unable to slow and collided with Ma's rear, removing the front-right section of his nose cone. Prost fell from ninth of 14th by the end of the first lap because of an incorrect power setting, while Heidfeld made four positions over the same distance. At the end of the first lap Piquet led from teammate Turvey, who was followed in turn, by Bird, Buemi, López, Heidfeld, Rosenqvist, Duval, Vergne and Abt. Piquet pulled away from the rest of the field as Buemi started to draw closer to Bird and Turvey. López fell to eighth on the second lap after Mahindra's Heidfeld and Rosenqvist along with Duval overtook him. Both di Grassi and Abt were shown a black flag with an orange circle, requiring both drivers to make pit stops for car repair. Ma switched to a second car but became the race's first retirement soon after because of a battery issue. Bird placed Turvey under pressure which allowed Piquet to open up a two-second lead by lap four. On lap five, Di Grassi moved to the outside line into the chicane on the fifth lap and overtook Sarrazin and López leaving the turn and moved in front of Carroll into the second corner. Bird overtook Turvey for second position on lap six, and Buemi passed Turvey by turning left into turn one on the following lap. Di Grassi made his required pit stop for a new front wing on lap eighth and narrowly avoided striking a trackside marshal leaving his pit stall. Vergne dropped down the order when his car developed a water pump battery failure and had to make an unscheduled pit stop to move into his second vehicle on lap nine. López had dropped to 16th place by the start of the next lap. Bird briefly reduced the time deficit to Piquet until the latter responded to his fast pace. Rosenqvist lost control of the rear of his car and slid backwards into the turn five barrier on the 14th lap, damaging his rear wing. The crash forced him to make a pit stop to switch into his second car. López carried a large amount of speed exiting the chicane and made contact with a wall on lap 17. Piquet was close behind and took avoiding action but reacted late and had an understeer that sent him into a barrier. He did not damage his car and extricated himself from the barrier but lost the lead to Bird and Buemi moved to second. The incident necessitated the safety car's deployment to allow marshals to repair the wall and remove López's car from the track. Some drivers, including Buemi, made their mandatory pit stops to switch into their second cars under safety car conditions at the end of the 20th lap. Bird elected to not to make a pit stop and maintained the lead at the lap-22 restart, ahead of Félix da Costa. Piquet chose to make his pit stop immediately after racing resumed. Bird pulled away from Félix da Costa whom the delayed Vergne slowed. He chose to remain on the circuit with a strategy to conserve electrical energy which was followed by both Jaguar drivers. Bird made his pit stop at the end of the 25th lap and it appeared that he would rejoin the race in the top ten but technical problems with his second car caused him to search for different reset procedures, losing 1 minute, 27 seconds and emerged one lap down in 15th position. An electrical issue was discovered on Evans' second car during his pit stop and his team elected to retire him on the same lap to prevent further damage. Frijns led the field for one lap before making his pit stop on the 26th lap. Buemi took the lead from Frijns with di Grassi second and Heidfeld third. Di Grassi closed to within less than two seconds of Buemi with ten laps left with the latter reacting by extending his advantage to 2 seconds. Rosenqvist set the race's fastest lap of 1 minute, 2.947 on lap 36, earning him one point. By the 38th lap, drivers who made their stops under safety car conditions entered their electrical energy conservation phase. Andretti chose to allow their drivers to remain on the circuit for as long as possible, allowing Félix da Costa and Frijns to catch and overtake d'Ambrosio and Turvey for fifth and sixth in the closing laps. Félix da Costa then attempted to catch the fourth-placed Prost but was unable to get close to him. As the final lap began, di Grassi, Heidfeld and Prost had five per cent of usage electrical energy remaining. Buemi was unchallenged for the rest of the lap to take his first victory of the season and the seventh of his career. Di Grassi finished second, ahead of Heidfeld in third. Prost, Félix da Costa, Frijns, d'Ambrosio, Turvey, Engel and Sarrazin rounded out the top ten. Piquet, Carroll filled the next two positions. Bird was fast enough to unlap himself by passing the race leaders, despite spinning his tyres at the circuit's low-speed exit turns, and finished 13th. Duval and Rosenqvist were the final finishers. There were three lead changes in the race; four drivers reached the front of the field. Buemi led once for a total of 20 laps, more than any other competitor. Of the two other retirees, Vergne stopped with an overheating battery, and Abt lost all electrical energy in his car after 34 laps. ### Post-race The top three drivers appeared on the podium to collect their trophies and spoke to the media in a later press conference. Buemi said that the race had not been easy because his battery had greatly overheated and another lap would have prevented him from finishing. Nevertheless, he was happy to begin the new season with a victory after having ended the previous season badly. He later confessed that luck played a role in him winning as his car was not set-up to his preference but reserved praise to his strategist. Second-place finisher di Grassi spoke of his delight with the result and that his race had been "crazy" which demonstrated that this team they did not stop and it was "a great start" to his season. He praised his mechanics for helping him stay on the same lap as the leaders and believed that he was targeting the fastest lap award. Heidfeld, who finished in third, stated that he was happy to achieve a podium position in the first race of the season and hoped that his team could finish their forward progress in the championship. Piquet said it was a mixed day for his team considering that he had the pole position and made a quick getaway at the start but was disappointed to finish 11th. He claimed that the incident with López may have happened to any other driver but was looking forward to the season's next race where he hoped to qualify well and his team were going to keep pushing. Bird was disappointed with the result, saying it was beneficial if the technical problems with his second car at the pit stop were diagnosed in the season's first race rather than later on. His teammate López thanked the sport's fans for voting him to receive the FanBoost and was upbeat despite retiring from his first event: "The car is fast and I think qualifying proved that. I’m sure the end result will be much, much better in Marrakech." Vergne told the press that he lost the chance to achieve a strong result in the race when his car developed problems with his car's water pump and described the event as "a big mess" but felt certain that he could secure the championship. As this was the first race of the season, Buemi led the Drivers' Championship with 25 points, seven ahead of di Grassi in second, who in turn, was a further three in front of the third-placed Heidfeld. Prost was fourth on 12 points, and Félix da Costa was fifth with ten points. e.Dams-Renault's first and fourth-place finishes meant they became the leaders of the Teams' Championship with 37 points; Audi Sport ABT and Andretti were tied for second with 18 points each. Mahindra stood in fourth on 16 points, nine ahead of NextEV in fifth place with eleven races left in the season. Despite negative press reviews about the Hong Kong ePrix, Agag reaffirmed his commitment to holding a race in the city and stated that he would not be discouraged by any financial losses incurred from the event. ### Race classification Drivers who scored championship points are denoted in bold. Notes: - — Three points for pole position. - — One point for fastest lap. ## Standings after the race Drivers' Championship standings Teams' Championship standings - Notes: Only the top five positions are included for both sets of standings.
44,304,034	Death of Benito Mussolini	1,171,240,360	1945 death of Italian fascist dictator	[ "1945 deaths", "1945 in Italy", "1945 in military history", "April 1945 events in Europe", "Benito Mussolini", "Death conspiracy theories", "Deaths by firearm in Italy", "Deaths by person in Italy" ]	The death of Benito Mussolini, the deposed Italian fascist dictator, occurred on 28 April 1945, in the final days of World War II in Europe, when he was summarily executed by an Italian partisan in the small village of Giulino di Mezzegra in northern Italy. The generally accepted version of events is that Mussolini was shot by Walter Audisio, a communist partisan. However, since the end of the war, the circumstances of Mussolini's death, and the identity of his executioner, have been subjects of continuing dispute and controversy in Italy. In 1940, Mussolini took his country into World War II on the side of Nazi Germany but soon was met with military failure. By the autumn of 1943, he was reduced to being the leader of a German puppet state in northern Italy and was faced with the Allied advance from the south and an increasingly violent internal conflict with the partisans. In April 1945, with the Allies breaking through the last German defences in northern Italy and a general uprising of the partisans taking hold in the cities, Mussolini's situation became untenable. On 25 April he fled Milan, where he had been based, and headed towards the Swiss border. He and his mistress, Claretta Petacci, were captured on 27 April by local partisans near the village of Dongo on Lake Como. Mussolini and Petacci were executed the following afternoon, two days before Adolf Hitler's suicide. The bodies of Mussolini and Petacci were taken to Milan and left in a suburban square, the Piazzale Loreto, for a large angry crowd to insult and physically abuse. They were then hung upside down from a metal girder above a service station on the square. Initially, Mussolini was buried in an unmarked grave but, in 1946, his body was dug up and stolen by fascist supporters. Four months later it was recovered by the authorities who then kept it hidden for the next eleven years. Eventually, in 1957, his remains were allowed to be interred in the Mussolini family crypt in his home town of Predappio. His tomb has become a place of pilgrimage for neo-fascists and the anniversary of his death is marked by neo-fascist rallies. In the post-war years, the "official" version of Mussolini's death has been questioned in Italy (but, generally, not internationally) in a manner that has drawn comparison with the John F. Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories. Some journalists, politicians and historians, doubting the veracity of Audisio's account, have advanced a wide variety of theories and speculation as to how Mussolini died and who was responsible. At least twelve different individuals have, at various times, been claimed to be the killer. These have included Luigi Longo and Sandro Pertini who subsequently became general secretary of the Italian Communist Party and President of Italy respectively. Some writers believe that Mussolini's death was part of a British special forces operation, with the supposed aim of retrieving compromising "secret agreements" and correspondence with Winston Churchill that Mussolini had allegedly been carrying when he was captured. However, the "official" explanation, with Audisio as Mussolini's executioner, remains the most credible narrative. ## Preceding events ### Background Mussolini had been Italy's fascist leader since 1922, first as prime minister and, following his seizure of dictatorial powers in 1925, with the title Il Duce. In June 1940, he took the country into World War II on the side of Nazi Germany led by Adolf Hitler. Following the Allied invasion of Sicily in July 1943, Mussolini was deposed and put under arrest; Italy then signed the Armistice of Cassibile with the Allies in the following September. Shortly after the Armistice, Mussolini was rescued from prison in the Gran Sasso raid by German special forces, and Hitler installed him as leader of the Italian Social Republic, a German puppet state set up in northern Italy and based at the town of Salò near Lake Garda. By 1944, the "Salò Republic", as it came to be called, was threatened not only by the Allies advancing from the south but also internally by Italian anti-fascist partisans, in a brutal conflict that was to become known as the Italian Civil War. Slowly fighting their way up the Italian Peninsula, the Allies took Rome and then Florence in the summer of 1944 and later that year they began advancing into northern Italy. With the Spring 1945 offensive in Italy bringing a final collapse of the German army's Gothic Line in April, total defeat for the Salò Republic and its German protectors was imminent. ### 18–27 April 1945 On 18 April 1945, Mussolini left Gargnano, a village near Salò where he had been residing, and moved, with his entire government, to Milan and based himself in the city's prefecture. The purpose of the move appears to have been to prepare for final defeat. His new location would put him in closer proximity to the Archbishop of Milan, Cardinal Schuster, whom he hoped to use as an intermediary to negotiate with the Allies and the partisans. Additionally, it was better placed for an escape to the Swiss border. Over the week following his arrival in Milan, and with the military situation deteriorating, Mussolini vacillated between a number of options including making a last stand in the Valtellina, a valley in the Italian Alps (the so-called Ridotto Alpino Repubblicano plan), fleeing to Switzerland, or attempting to negotiate a peaceful handover to the partisan leadership, the CLNAI, or to the Allies. As the German forces retreated, the CLNAI declared a general uprising in the main northern cities. It also issued a decree establishing popular courts, which included in its provisions what, in practice, would constitute a death sentence for Mussolini: > Members of the Fascist government and the gerarchi of fascism who are guilty of suppressing constitutional guarantees, destroying popular liberties, creating the Fascist regime, compromising and betraying the fate of the country, and leading it to the present catastrophe are to be punished with the penalty of death, and in less serious instances life imprisonment. In the afternoon of 25 April, Cardinal Schuster hosted peace negotiations at his residence between Mussolini and representatives of the CLNAI, which were unsuccessful. That evening, with the German army in northern Italy about to surrender and the CLNAI taking control of Milan, Mussolini decided to flee the city. At 8 p.m. he headed north toward Lake Como. It is unclear whether his objective was to attempt to cross the Swiss border or to go to the Valtellina; if it were the latter, he left the city without the thousands of supporters gathered in Milan intended to be his escort to the last stand in the Alps. By some accounts, on 26 April, Mussolini, now joined by his mistress Claretta Petacci, made several failed attempts to cross the border into Switzerland. In any event, on 27 April, he joined a Luftwaffe column travelling in convoy and retreating northwards to Germany. ### Capture and arrest On 27 April 1945, a group of local communist partisans attacked the convoy in which Mussolini and Petacci were travelling, near the village of Dongo on the north western shore of Lake Como and forced it to halt. The convoy included a number of other Italian fascist leaders. The partisans, led by Pier Luigi Bellini delle Stelle and Urbano Lazzaro, recognised one of the fascists, but not Mussolini at this stage. They made the Germans hand over all the Italians in exchange for allowing the Germans to proceed. Eventually Mussolini was discovered slumped in one of the convoy vehicles. Lazzaro later said that: > His face was like wax and his stare glassy, but somehow blind. I read utter exhaustion, but not fear ... Mussolini seemed completely lacking in will, spiritually dead. The partisans arrested Mussolini and took him to Dongo, where he spent part of the night in the local barracks. In Dongo, Mussolini was reunited with Petacci, who had requested to join him, at about 2:30 a.m. on 28 April. In all, over fifty fascist leaders and their families were found in the convoy and arrested by the partisans. Aside from Mussolini and Petacci, sixteen of the most prominent of them would be summarily shot in Dongo the following day and a further ten would be killed over two successive nights. Fighting was still going on in the area around Dongo. Fearing that Mussolini and Petacci might be rescued by fascist supporters, the partisans drove them, in the middle of the night, to a nearby farm of a peasant family named De Maria; they believed this would be a safe place to hold them. Mussolini and Petacci spent the rest of the night and most of the following day there. On the evening of Mussolini's capture, Sandro Pertini, the Socialist partisan leader in northern Italy, announced on Radio Milano: > The head of this association of delinquents, Mussolini, while yellow with rancour and fear and trying to cross the Swiss frontier, has been arrested. He must be handed over to a tribunal of the people so it can judge him quickly. We want this, even though we think an execution platoon is too much of an honour for this man. He would deserve to be killed like a mangy dog. ### Order to execute Differing accounts exist of who made the decision that Mussolini should be summarily executed. Palmiro Togliatti, the Secretary-General of the Communist Party, claimed that he had ordered Mussolini's execution prior to his capture. Togliatti said he had done so by a radio message on 26 April 1945 with the words: > Only one thing is needed to decide that they [Mussolini and the other fascist leaders] must pay with their lives: the question of their identity. He also claimed that he had given the order as deputy prime minister of the government in Rome and as leader of the Communist Party. Ivanoe Bonomi, the prime minister, later denied that this was said with his government's authority or approval. A senior communist in Milan, Luigi Longo, said that the order came from the General Command of the partisan military units "in application of a CLNAI decision". Longo subsequently gave a different story: he said that when he and Fermo Solari [it], a member of the Action Party (which was part of the CLNAI), heard the news of Mussolini's capture they immediately agreed that he should be summarily executed and Longo gave the order for it to be carried out. According to Leo Valiani, the Action Party representative on the CLNAI, the decision to execute Mussolini was taken on the night of 27/28 April by a group acting on behalf of the CLNAI comprising himself, Sandro Pertini, and the communists Emilio Sereni and Luigi Longo. The CLNAI subsequently announced, on the day after his death, that Mussolini had been executed on its orders. In any event, Longo instructed a communist partisan of the General Command, Walter Audisio, to go immediately to Dongo to carry out the order. According to Longo, he did so with the words "go and shoot him". Longo asked another partisan, Aldo Lampredi [it], to go as well because, according to Lampredi, Longo thought Audisio was "impudent, too inflexible and rash". ## Shooting Although several conflicting versions and theories of how Mussolini and Petacci died were put forward after the war, the account of Walter Audisio, or at least its essential components, remains the most credible and is sometimes referred to in Italy as the "official" version. It was largely confirmed by an account provided by Aldo Lampredi and the "classical" narrative of the story was set out in books written in the 1960s by Bellini delle Stelle and Urbano Lazzaro, and the journalist Franco Bandini (it). Although each of these accounts vary in detail, they are consistent on the main facts. Audisio and Lampredi left Milan for Dongo early on the morning of 28 April 1945 to carry out the orders Audisio had been given by Longo. On arrival in Dongo, they met Bellini delle Stelle, who was the local partisan commander, to arrange for Mussolini to be handed over to them. Audisio used the nom de guerre of "Colonnello Valerio" during his mission. In the afternoon, he, with other partisans, including Aldo Lampredi and Michele Moretti, drove to the De Maria family's farmhouse to collect Mussolini and Petacci. After they were picked up, they drove 20 kilometres (12 mi) south to the village of Giulino di Mezzegra. The vehicle pulled up at the entrance of the Villa Belmonte on a narrow road known as via XXIV maggio and Mussolini and Petacci were told to get out and stand by the villa's wall. Audisio then shot them at 4:10 p.m. with a submachine gun borrowed from Moretti, his own gun having jammed. There were differences in Lampredi's account and that of Audisio. Audisio presented Mussolini as acting in a cowardly manner immediately prior to his death whereas Lampredi did not. Audisio said he read out a sentence of death, whereas Lampredi omitted this. Lampredi said that Mussolini's last words were "aim at my heart". In Audisio's account, Mussolini said nothing immediately prior to or during the execution. Differences also exist with the account given by others involved, including Lazzaro and Bellini delle Stelle. According to the latter, when he met Audisio in Dongo, Audisio asked for a list of the fascist prisoners that had been captured the previous day and marked Mussolini's and Petacci's names for execution. Bellini delle Stelle said he challenged Audisio as to why Petacci should be executed. Audisio replied that she had been Mussolini's adviser, had inspired his policies and was "just as responsible as he is". According to Bellini delle Stelle no other discussion or formalities concerning the decision to execute them took place. Audisio gave a different account. He claimed that on 28 April he convened a "war tribunal" in Dongo comprising Lampredi, Bellini delle Stelle, Michele Moretti and Lazzaro with himself as president. The tribunal condemned Mussolini and Petacci to death. There were no objections to any of the proposed executions. Urbano Lazzaro later denied that such a tribunal had been convened and said: > I was convinced Mussolini deserved death ... but there should have been a trial according to law. It was very barbarous. In a book he wrote in the 1970s, Audisio argued that the decision to execute Mussolini taken at the meeting in Dongo of the partisan leaders on 28 April constituted a valid judgment of a tribunal under Article 15 of the CNLAI's ordinance on the Constitution of Courts of War. However, the lack of a judge or a Commissario di Guerra (required by the ordinance to be present) casts doubt on this assertion. ## Subsequent events During his dictatorship, representations of Mussolini's body—for example pictures of him engaged in physical labour either bare-chested or half-naked—formed a central part of fascist propaganda. His body remained a potent symbol after his death, causing it to be either revered by supporters or treated with contempt and disrespect by opponents, and assuming a broader political significance. ### Piazzale Loreto In the evening of 28 April, the bodies of Mussolini, Petacci, and the other executed fascists were loaded onto a van and transported south to Milan. On arriving in the city in the early hours of 29 April, they were dumped on the ground in the Piazzale Loreto, a suburban square near the main railway station. The choice of location was deliberate. Fifteen partisans had been shot there in August 1944 in retaliation for partisan attacks and Allied bombing raids, and their bodies had then been left on public display. At the time, Mussolini is said to have remarked "for the blood of Piazzale Loreto, we shall pay dearly". Their bodies were left in a heap, and by 9:00 a.m. a considerable crowd had gathered. The corpses were pelted with vegetables, spat at, urinated on, shot at and kicked; Mussolini's face was disfigured by beatings. Allied forces began arriving in the city during the course of the morning and an American eyewitness described the crowd as "sinister, depraved, out of control". After a while, the bodies were hung by their feet from the metal girder framework of a half-built Standard Oil service station. This mode of hanging had been used in northern Italy since medieval times to stress the "infamy" of the hanged. However, the reason given by those involved in hanging Mussolini and the others in this way was to protect the bodies from the mob. Movie footage of what happened appears to confirm that to be the case. ### Morgue and autopsy At about 2:00 p.m. on 29 April, the recently arrived American military authorities ordered that the bodies be taken down and delivered to the city morgue for autopsies to be carried out. A US army cameraman went to the morgue and took photographs of the bodies for publication, including one with Mussolini and Petacci positioned in a macabre pose as though they were arm-in-arm. On 30 April, an autopsy was carried out on Mussolini at the Institute of Legal Medicine in Milan. One version of the subsequent report indicated that he had been shot with nine bullets, while another version specified seven bullets. Four bullets near the heart were given as the cause of death. The calibres of the bullets were not identified. Samples of Mussolini's brain were taken and sent to the United States for analysis. The intention was to prove the hypothesis that syphilis had caused insanity in him, but nothing resulted from the analysis. No evidence of syphilis was found on Mussolini's body and no autopsy was carried out on Petacci. ### Impact on Hitler On the afternoon of 29 April, Adolf Hitler learned of Mussolini's execution, although it is unknown how much of the detail was communicated to him. Earlier that day, Hitler had recorded in his Last Will and Testament that he intended to choose death rather than be captured by the enemy or fall into the hands of "the masses" to become "a spectacle arranged by Jews". The following day, Hitler killed himself in Berlin, shortly before the city fell to the Red Army. In accordance with Hitler's prior instructions, his body was immediately burned with petrol, leaving virtually no remains. Some historians believe that what happened to Mussolini was a factor in Hitler's decision to take his own life and have his body burned. Alan Bullock said that news of Mussolini's fate had presumably increased Hitler's determination to avoid capture and William L. Shirer thought that knowledge of the events surrounding Mussolini's death may have strengthened Hitler's resolve not to risk his downfall being turned into a public humiliation. However, Hugh Trevor-Roper believed that this was improbable as it was unlikely that the details would have been reported to Hitler and, in any event, he had already decided on his course of action. Ian Kershaw notes that while it is uncertain whether Hitler was told the details of Mussolini's death: > if he did learn of the full gory tale, it could have done no more than confirm his anxiety to take his own life before it was too late, and to prevent his body from being seized by his enemies. ### Interment and theft of corpse After his death and the display of his corpse in Milan, Mussolini was buried in an unmarked grave in the Musocco cemetery, to the north of the city. On Easter Sunday 1946, Mussolini's body was located and dug up by a young fascist, Domenico Leccisi, and two friends. Over a period of sixteen weeks it was moved from place to place – the hiding places included a villa, a monastery and a convent – while the authorities searched for it. Eventually, in August, the body (with a leg missing) was tracked down to the Certosa di Pavia, a monastery not far from Milan. Two Franciscan friars were charged with assisting Leccisi to hide the body. The authorities then arranged for the body to be hidden at a Capuchin monastery in the small town of Cerro Maggiore where it remained for the next eleven years. The whereabouts of the body was kept a secret, even from Mussolini's family. This remained the position until May 1957, when the newly appointed Prime Minister, Adone Zoli, agreed to Mussolini's re-interment at his place of birth in Predappio, in Romagna. Zoli, who also came from Predappio and knew Mussolini's widow, Rachele, was reliant on the far right to support him in Parliament. This included Leccisi himself, who was now a neo-fascist party deputy. ### Tomb and anniversary of death The re-interment in the Mussolini family crypt in Predappio was carried out on 1 September 1957, with supporters present giving the fascist salute. Mussolini was laid to rest in a large stone sarcophagus. The tomb is decorated with fascist symbols and contains a large marble head of Mussolini. In front of the tomb is a register for visitors paying their respects to sign. The tomb has become a neo-fascist place of pilgrimage. The numbers signing the tomb's register range from dozens to hundreds per day, with thousands signing on certain anniversaries; almost all the comments left are supportive of Mussolini. The anniversary of Mussolini's death on 28 April has become one of three dates neo-fascist supporters mark with major rallies. In Predappio, a march takes place between the centre of town and the cemetery. The event usually attracts supporters in the thousands and includes speeches, songs and people giving the fascist salute. ## Post-war controversy Outside of Italy, Audisio's version of how Mussolini was executed has largely been accepted and is uncontroversial. However, within Italy, the subject has been a matter of extensive debate and dispute since the late 1940s to the present and numerous theories of how Mussolini died have proliferated. At least 12 different individuals have been identified at various times as being responsible for carrying out the shooting. Comparisons have been made with the John F. Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories, and it has been described as the Italian equivalent of that speculation. ### Reception of Audisio's version Until 1947, Audisio's involvement was kept a secret, and in the earliest descriptions of the events (in a series of articles in the Communist Party newspaper L'Unità in late 1945) the person who carried out the shootings was only referred to as "Colonnello Valerio". Audisio was first named in a series of articles in the newspaper Il Tempo in March 1947 and the Communist Party subsequently confirmed Audisio's involvement. Audisio himself did not speak publicly about it until he published his account in a series of five articles in L'Unità later that month (and repeated in a book that Audisio later wrote which was published in 1975, two years after his death). Other versions of the story were also published, including, in the 1960s, two books setting out the "classical" account of the story: Dongo, la fine di Mussolini by Lazzaro and Bellini delle Stelle and Le ultime 95 ore di Mussolini by Franco Bandini. Before long, it was noted that there were discrepancies between Audisio's original story published in L'Unità, subsequent versions that he provided and the versions of events provided by others. Although his account most probably is built around the facts, it was certainly embellished. The discrepancies and obvious exaggerations, coupled with the belief that the Communist Party had selected him to claim responsibility for their own political purposes, led some in Italy to believe that his story was wholly or largely untrue. In 1996, a previously unpublished private account written in 1972 by Aldo Lampredi for the Communist Party's archives, appeared in L'Unità. In it, Lampredi confirmed the key facts of Audisio's story but without the embellishments. Lampredi was undoubtedly an eyewitness and, because he prepared his narrative for the private records of the Communist Party – and not for publication – it was perceived that he had no motivation other than to tell the truth. Furthermore, he had had a reputation for being reliable and trustworthy; he was also known to have disliked Audisio personally. For all these reasons it was seen as significant that he largely confirmed Audisio's account. After Lampredi's account was published, most, but not all, commentators were convinced of its veracity. The historian Giorgio Bocca commented: > it sweeps away all the bad novels constructed over 50 years on the end of the Duce of fascism .... There was no possibility that the many ridiculous versions put about in these years were true ... The truth is now unmistakably clear. ### Claims by Lazzaro In his 1993 book Dongo: half a century of lies, the partisan leader Urbano Lazzaro repeated a claim he had made earlier that Luigi Longo and not Audisio, was "Colonnello Valerio". He also claimed that Mussolini was inadvertently wounded earlier in the day when Petacci tried to grab the gun of one of the partisans, who killed Petacci and Michele Moretti then shot dead Mussolini. ### The "British hypothesis" There have been several claims that Britain's wartime covert operations unit, the Special Operations Executive (SOE), was responsible for Mussolini's death, and that it may have even been ordered by the British prime minister, Winston Churchill. Allegedly, it was part of a "cover up" to retrieve "secret agreements" and compromising correspondence between the two men, which Mussolini was carrying when he was captured by partisans. It is said that the correspondence included offers from Churchill of peace and territorial concessions in exchange for Mussolini persuading Hitler to join the western Allies in an alliance against the Soviet Union. Proponents of this theory have included historians such as Renzo De Felice and Pierre Milza and journalists including Peter Tompkins and Luciano Garibaldi [it]; however, the theory has been dismissed by many. In 1994 Bruno Lonati, a former partisan leader, published a book in which he claimed that he had shot Mussolini and he was accompanied on his mission by a British army officer called "John", who shot Petacci. Journalist Peter Tompkins claimed to have established that "John" was Robert Maccarrone, a British SOE agent who had Sicilian ancestry. According to Lonati, he and "John" went to the De Maria farmhouse in the morning of 28 April and killed Mussolini and Petacci at about 11:00 a.m. In 2004, the Italian state television channel, RAI, broadcast a documentary, co-produced by Tompkins, in which the theory was put forward. Lonati was interviewed for the documentary and claimed that when he arrived at the farmhouse: > Petacci was sitting on the bed and Mussolini was standing. "John" took me outside and told me his orders were to eliminate them both, because Petacci knew many things. I said I could not shoot Petacci, so John said he would shoot her himself, while making it quite clear that Mussolini however, had to be killed by an Italian. They took them out of the house and, at the corner of a nearby lane they were stood against a fence and shot. The documentary included an interview with Dorina Mazzola who said that her mother had seen the shooting. She also said that she herself had heard the shots and that she "looked at the clock, it was almost 11". The documentary went on to claim that the later shootings at the Villa Belmonte were subsequently staged as part of the "cover up". The theory has been criticised for lacking any serious evidence, particularly on the existence of the correspondence with Churchill. Commenting on the RAI television documentary in 2004, Christopher Woods, researcher for the official history of the SOE, dismissed these claims saying that "it's just love of conspiracy-making". ### Other "earlier death" theories Some, including most persistently the fascist journalist Giorgio Pisanò, have claimed that Mussolini and Petacci were shot earlier in the day near the De Maria farmhouse and that the execution at Giulino de Mezzegra was staged with corpses. The first to put this forward was Franco Bandini in 1978. ### Other theories Other theories have been published, including allegations that not only Luigi Longo, subsequently leader of the Communist Party in post-war Italy, but also Sandro Pertini, a future President of Italy, carried out the shootings. Others have claimed that Mussolini (or Mussolini and Petacci together) committed suicide with cyanide capsules. ## See also - "The Killers of Mussolini" (1959) - Last Days of Mussolini (1974)
27,375,159	1909 Monterrey hurricane	1,173,185,970	Category 3 Atlantic hurricane	[ "1909 Atlantic hurricane season", "1909 in Mexico", "1909 natural disasters in the United States", "Atlantic hurricanes in Mexico", "Category 3 Atlantic hurricanes", "Hurricanes in Cuba", "Hurricanes in Haiti", "Hurricanes in Texas", "Hurricanes in the Dominican Republic", "Hurricanes in the Leeward Islands" ]	The 1909 Monterrey hurricane was one of the deadliest Atlantic tropical cyclones on record, killing an estimated 4,000 people throughout Mexico. Originating from a tropical storm east of the Leeward Islands on August 20, the storm tracked west-northwest, entering the Caribbean as a minimal hurricane the next day. After striking Hispaniola on August 23, the hurricane made another landfall in eastern Cuba before reentering the Caribbean. Once back over open water, the storm intensified into a Category 3 hurricane and moved across the northern tip of the Yucatán Peninsula. By August 26, the storm had emerged into the Gulf of Mexico as a weakened, but regrouping system. It attained its peak winds of 120 mph (195 km/h) that evening. Maintaining this intensity, the system made landfall in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas late on August 27 and rapidly dissipated the following afternoon. Throughout its existence, the hurricane remained relatively close to land, so consequently its effects were felt in many areas. Much of the northern Caribbean received moderate to heavy rainfall along with gusty winds during its passage; although only Haiti reported damage from it. Its effects were far more severe in Mexico where an estimated 4,000 people were killed by record-breaking floods triggered by the hurricane. The city of Monterrey received the worst damage: more than half of the structures in the city were flooded, hundreds were destroyed, and 20,000 people were left homeless. Damage from the storm in the country was estimated to have exceeded \$50 million (1909 USD; \$ 2023 USD). ## Meteorological history The origins of the hurricane are uncertain due to a lack of ship reports in the western Atlantic Ocean. According to the Atlantic hurricane database, it was first identifiable as a tropical storm on August 20 to the east of the Leeward Islands. Tracking to the west-northwest, the storm quickly attained winds of 80 mph (130 km/h), equivalent to Category 1 status on the modern-day Saffir–Simpson hurricane scale. By the evening of August 21, the storm entered the Caribbean as it brushed the northern coast of Guadeloupe; intensification of the hurricane over the northeastern Caribbean was slow. Early on August 23, it made its first landfall with winds of 90 mph (145 km/h) in San Cristóbal Province, Dominican Republic, just southwest of the country's capital city of Santo Domingo. The hurricane weakened slightly over the mountainous terrain of Hispaniola, although it is believed to have maintained winds of at least 75 mph (120 km/h) based on damage reports in Haiti. Later on August 23, the storm "jumped" northward before making another landfall in the Cuban province of Guantánamo. Continuing towards the west-northwest, the hurricane regained strength as it moved over the northern Caribbean. During the afternoon of August 24, the system attained winds of 100 mph (160 km/h), corresponding to a Category 2 hurricane. Early the following morning, it further intensified to a Category 3 major hurricane, defined as having winds in excess of 111 mph (179 km/h), before making landfall in the Yucatán Peninsula near Cancún. The hurricane emerged into the Gulf of Mexico within 12 hours and quickly re-intensified to attain its peak winds of 120 mph (195 km/h) on August 26. It soon slowed and turned due west, maintaining its intensity. Late on August 27, the storm made its final landfall in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas. Rapid weakening took place as it drifted onshore, and it dissipated the following afternoon. ## Impact ### Caribbean Prior to the hurricane's devastating impacts in Mexico, it brought heavy rains and high winds to several of the northern Caribbean Islands. The first to be affected by the storm were the Leeward Islands; however, no known damage resulted from its passage. Moderate rain and gusty winds were reported in Puerto Rico as well as the Dominican Republic and Jamaica. In eastern Jamaica, between Aquavale and Hope, the banana crop was largely destroyed. Haiti suffered severe damage reported in many towns, with homes destroyed and many homeless. Much of Cuba was also impacted by the storm, with winds up to 60 mph (95 km/h) being recorded as far north as Havana. ### Mexico Although a borderline Category 2–3 hurricane when it made landfall in the Yucatán Peninsula, little is known about the storm's impact in the region. The United Fruit Company steamship, Cartago, encountered adverse conditions in the hurricane while traversing the Yucatán Channel about 25 mi (40 km) offshore. Rocked by severe winds up to 100 mph (160 km/h) and swells for 12 hours, the ship suffered damage to its pilothouse, starboard deck, and railings. Aside from seasickness, none of the vessel's 24 crewmen were injured. However, following the hurricane's second landfall, the resulting damage was catastrophic. During the overnight hours between August 27 and 28, cities along the coastline of Tamaulipas likely sustained severe damage from the hurricane's storm surge and high winds. Newspaper reports stated winds reached 60 mph (97 km/h) in Veracruz and 75 to 90 mph (121 to 145 km/h) from Tampico to Matamoros in Tamaulipas. The worst of the damage took place further inland, within the state of Nuevo León. There, torrential rainfall triggered a flood even exceeding 100-year flood values. According to meteorologists in Mexico, the storm dropped 17.5 in (440 mm) of rain over a 40‐hour span. Further rains fell for the following 32 hours, worsening the situation. Adobe homes that survived the initial onslaught collapsed in these rains, killing many people. The rising Santa Catarina River flowed into the San Juan River, causing an abrupt rise and subsequent overflow of water that caught residents off-guard. Multiple small communities were swept away in the ensuing floods. According to Mexican officials, overnight on August 27, the reservoir dam near Nuevo León's capital city, Monterrey, burst, flooding more than half of the buildings in the city, as well as all of the nearby town of San Luisto. The normally 150 yd (140 m) wide river swelled to 0.75 mi (1.21 km) wide. Steel works and smelters situated along the Santa Catarina River were destroyed after the river rose well over its banks. Hundreds of homes were destroyed throughout the city, leaving an estimated 20,000 people homeless. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, an enormous 235,000 ft<sup>3</sup> (6,650 m<sup>3</sup>) of water was being moved per second during the height of the flood. The raging rivers finally subsided by August 30. At the height of the floods, residents were forced to seek refuge on the roofs of two-story buildings; however, the Santa Catarina River was flowing at a very fast pace of 20 mph (32 km/h). The force of the current led to most homes being taken off their foundations and sent downstream, resulting in the deaths of anyone inside. In one incident, 90 people died after seeking refuge in a school after their homes collapsed. However, not long after entering the building, flood waters inundated the structure and caused it to collapse. By the morning, survivors reported that the state of the city was "indescribable". The San Francisco church, built in 1572, was destroyed during the storm. Damage from the hurricane was estimated to have been at least \$50 million (1909 USD; \$ 2023 USD). Of this, roughly \$20 million was attributed to railroad losses. Throughout Mexico, reports indicated that about 4,000 people were killed as a result of the storm, making it one of the deadliest Atlantic hurricanes on record. Some estimates place the death toll as high as 5,000 and others as low as 3,000. Of these fatalities, 800 are believed to have been in the south side of Monterrey where four blocks of the city were completely destroyed. ### United States While the hurricane traversed Cuba on August 24, the United States National Weather Bureau issued hurricane warnings for southern Florida between Tampa and Jupiter and advised ships to avoid the eastern Gulf and South Atlantic. Ahead of the hurricane's landfall in Mexico, the Weather Bureau raised storm and hurricane warnings for the Texas coat on August 27. Upon landfall, the storm's northern half brought increased swells and gusty winds to, recorded up to 68 mph (109 km/h), to parts of southern Texas. Tides were described as the highest in several years. Tarpon Beach was devastated by surging waters, with every structure except the lighthouse and quarantine station being damaged or destroyed. Debris from the town washed ashore 3 mi (4.8 km) away at Point Island. Rescued personnel from Brazos Santiago were able to save all of the stranded residents as waters rose. The coastlines of Mustang Island and San José Island straddling Aransas Pass were submerged. Low-lying areas north of Corpus Christi were inundated by 1 to 3 ft (0.30 to 0.91 m) of water and several piers were damaged. A tornado near Beeville destroyed a large barn and outhouse. Rainfall from the hurricane reached 7.8 in (200 mm) in Falfurrias between August 27 and 28. Twenty-four-hour rainfall reached 5.88 in (149 mm) in La Parra, a state record for the month of August at the time. Overall damage in the state was minimal from the storm and there were no deaths. ## Aftermath Crippled communication networks and infrastructure hampered relief efforts in the immediate aftermath. More than 60 mi (97 km) of railway was destroyed and numerous roads were washed out. The city of Monterrey was entirely cut-off and within days, food supplies were low and residents were at risk of famine. Local water supplies were rendered useless. Many residents and visitors in the city did all they could to help rescue those trapped in the flood waters and take care of the homeless. According to The New York Times, one person rescued 30 people stranded in flood waters. Numerous rescue operations were undertaken during the flood, saving many lives. However, survivors faced another issue after losing their homes: lack of food. Food was unavailable to most residents in the wake of the storm until August 31 when the first relief supplies arrived. Even then, most only received a small amount of bread and beans. Municipal authorities and the American Consulate provided bread, coffee, and soup to more than 10,000 people. Benefit performances and bull fights were planned to raise charity money. American Consulate General Hanna appealed for American aid on August 30 and the American Red Cross appealed for \$20,000. Once the flood along the Santa Catarina River receded, searches were conducted to attempt to locate the bodies of victims. However, reports indicated that the river bed was similar to quicksand and most bodies on it were likely underground. To deal with the large number of bodies in the wake of the disaster, Mexican officials decided to cremate and mass bury victims. By mid-September, between 1,600 and 1,800 people were hired to repair and rebuild the devastated railways in Nuevo León. In 2009, the third edition of the book El Río Fiera Bramaba: 1909 by Oswaldo Sánchez, re-accounting reports form people who experienced the flood, was planned. According to the director of publications at the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, the book was considered one of historical quality. In memory of those who perished during the flood, the book was released to the public on August 27, 2009, the 100 year anniversary of the disaster. ## See also - List of deadliest Atlantic hurricanes - Hurricane Alex (2010) - Caused similarly disastrous flooding in Monterrey - Hurricane Charlie (1951) - Hurricane Gilbert
7,745,355	Monaco at the 1984 Winter Olympics	1,054,769,961	null	[ "1984 in Monégasque sport", "Monaco at the Winter Olympics by year", "Nations at the 1984 Winter Olympics" ]	Monaco sent a delegation to compete in the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia from 8–19 February 1984. This was the first time the principality had participated in a Winter Olympic Games, The Monégasque delegation consisted of a single alpine skier, David Lajoux. He failed to finish the men's slalom, and came in 47th place in the men's downhill. ## Background Monaco first participated in Olympic competition at the 1920 Antwerp Olympics, and have participated in most Summer Olympic Games since. The Comité Olympique Monégasque (the National Olympic Committee (NOC) of Monaco) was not recognised by the International Olympic Committee until 1 January 1953. Despite their history of Olympic participation, these Sarajevo Olympics were the principality's first time entering a Winter Olympic Games. The 1984 Winter Olympics were held in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia from 8–19 February 1984; a total of 1,272 athletes represented 49 NOCs. Monaco sent a single athlete to Sarajevo, alpine skier David Lajoux, who was chosen as the flag-bearer for the opening ceremony. ## Alpine skiing David Lajoux was 17 years old at the time of the Sarajevo Olympics, and he was making his only Olympic appearance. On 16 February he participated in the single-run men's downhill race, and finished with a time of 1 minute and 56.95 seconds, which put him in 47th place out of 60 competitors who finished the event. The gold medal was won by Bill Johnson of the United States in a time of 1 minute and 45.59 seconds; the silver medal was won by Peter Müller of Switzerland, and the bronze was earned by Anton Steiner of Austria. Three days later, he took part in the men's slalom, but failed to finish the first leg of the two-leg race. The gold and silver medals were won by American twins Phil Mahre and Steve Mahre respectively, with the bronze medal going to Didier Bouvet of France. ## See also - Monaco at the 1984 Summer Olympics
6,995,558	Max Guevara	1,172,962,751	Main protagonist of Dark Angel	[ "American female characters in television", "Characters created by James Cameron", "Cultural depictions of Jessica Alba", "Dark Angel (American TV series)", "Female soldier and warrior characters in television", "Female superheroes", "Fictional American postal workers", "Fictional characters from Seattle", "Fictional characters who can move at superhuman speeds", "Fictional characters with accelerated healing", "Fictional characters with superhuman senses", "Fictional characters with superhuman strength", "Fictional female martial artists", "Fictional feminists and women's rights activists", "Fictional genetically engineered characters", "Fictional professional thieves", "Fictional secret agents and spies in television", "Fictional super soldiers", "Fictional twins", "Fictional vigilantes", "Martial artist characters in television", "Science fiction television characters", "Television characters introduced in 2000", "Television superheroes" ]	Max Guevara (X5-452) is a fictional character and the protagonist of the cyberpunk science fiction television program Dark Angel. During both seasons of the series, Max was portrayed by Jessica Alba; Geneva Locke played the character during flashbacks to her childhood. Over one thousand actresses were considered for the part of Max before Alba was given the role. Max also appears in three canonical novels based on the series as well as an apocryphal video game adaptation. Created by James Cameron and Charles H. Eglee, Max followed a long line of strong female characters in Cameron's work, including Sarah Connor and Ellen Ripley. Max is a genetically enhanced transgenic supersoldier, created in a secret government lab known as Manticore. Along with 11 other children, Max escapes from the facility when she is 9 years old. Max attempts to live a normal life while eluding recapture by Manticore. She also searches for other escaped transgenics with the help of Logan Cale, a cyber-journalist also known as "Eyes Only". The character received mostly positive reception from critics, and Alba won several awards for her portrayal of Max. In 2004, Max was ranked at No. 17 in TV Guide's list of the "25 Greatest Sci-Fi Legends." ## Creation and appearances Following his success with the film Titanic, director James Cameron teamed up with Charles H. Eglee. The two formed a production company, Cameron/Eglee Productions, and began working on ideas for a television series, eventually deciding on the idea of Dark Angel. Cameron said they began with the idea that Max would be a genetic construct who appeared normal but was different on a genetic level, saying "We explored what that could mean. Do her eyes look different? Were there things that manifest themselves? Were there negatives to it? We wanted her to have flaws, things that were built in – like Kryptonite." Max followed a long line of strong female characters in films directed Cameron, including Sarah Connor and Ellen Ripley. Cameron believes such characters are well received all round as women respond favourably to strong female characters and male audiences "want to see girls kick ass". More than one thousand young actresses were considered for the part of Max before Jessica Alba was chosen; Cameron started reviewing audition tapes when it had been narrowed down to 20 or 30 applicants. Cameron said he was not overly impressed with Alba's acting skill or appearance in her audition tape, though he kept coming back and watching it as there was something about her attitude that he liked, eventually deciding he needed to see her in person. Alba was hired for the role before the scripts were written. Eglee said "We had the benefit of being able to write a script kind of backwards, we were writing for this actress, with her cadences and her rhythms and her sensibilities and her attitude and her slang." In order to train for the role, Alba spent a year doing martial arts and gymnastics and riding motorcycles. Max is the lead character in both seasons of the TV series Dark Angel, where she is portrayed primarily by Alba but also by Geneva Locke as a child in flashbacks. She appears in three original novels based on the series, two of which pick up directly where the series ended and one that serves as a prequel novel, filling in the time between Max's escape from Manticore and the beginning of the first season. Max is also the playable character in the video game adaptation, Dark Angel, where she is voiced by Alba. ## Attributes Max was genetically engineered and carried to term by a woman who was not permitted to meet her. She was created for a secret government supersoldier program called Manticore, then located in Gillette, Wyoming. As with almost all Manticore's soldiers, Max has a barcode on the nape of her neck, with her identifying number sequence (332960073452). She is an X5 model and is thus referred to as X5-452. Designed to be "the perfect soldier," Max is extremely strong, athletic and agile. She can see in the dark, can zoom in with her eyes to view distant objects, does not need to sleep and has a photographic memory. She also has enhanced hearing, can leap up or down from great heights with ease, can hold her breath underwater for extended periods and can dodge bullets with her super speed. Max lies, cheats and steals when she needs to and shows no remorse when doing so, though she is morally opposed to guns. Max rides a Kawasaki motorcycle and enjoys riding at high speed. When she wants to be alone she sits atop of the derelict Space Needle. Max's forms 'family' bonds with her best friend and flatmate Original Cindy, her ally Logan Cale and her fellow X5 escapees. Upon escaping from Manticore, Max chooses the last name "Guevara" for herself. Max has a genetic flaw that causes her to have seizures, and must take tryptophan to help control them. The seizures played a subplot early in the first season though the issue was phased out without explanation as the series progressed. As a side-effect of having cat DNA, Max goes into heat twice during the first season, though as with the seizures the issue did not re-appear in the second season. In the second season it is revealed that Max has no junk DNA; every one of her DNA sequences has a specific purpose. ## Storyline In 2009 twelve of the X5s, including 9-year-old Max, escape from Manticore into a snowy forest. Max is found and given shelter by Hannah, a sympathetic Manticore nurse. Several months later terrorists detonate an electromagnetic pulse weapon in the atmosphere over the US, destroying all electronic devices in the country and throwing it into chaos and poverty. In the prequel novel, Dark Angel: Before the Dawn, after escaping Manticore, Max makes her way to Casper, Wyoming, where she meets Lucy Barrett, a little girl who helps Max stow away in her mother's SUV. Later, after arriving in Los Angeles, California, Lucy's mother, Joann, agrees to let Max live with them. Max and Lucy endure physical and emotional abuse from Lucy's alcoholic father, Jack. Max runs away from her foster home in 2013 and heads to Hollywood, where she joins the Chinese Clan, a group of thieves taking refuge in the remains of Grauman's Chinese Theatre. In 2019, Max leaves Los Angeles to search for one of her Manticore siblings in Seattle, Washington. While stopping in Eureka, California, Max meets "Original Cindy" McEachin when she comes to McEachin's aid in a bar fight, and the two of them travel to Seattle together. In Seattle, the duo meet Kendra Maibaum, a young woman who offers Max a place to stay after Max defends her from her boss who was sexually harassing her. McEachin and Maibaum feature as regular characters in the TV series. The TV series begins with Max, now 19, living in a post-apocalyptic Seattle. She lives in fear of Colonel Donald Lydecker, who had been assigned by Manticore to capture Max and the other escapees. Max holds a job as a bicycle messenger for the company "Jam Pony X – Press", and also operates at night as a burglar, explaining, "I steal things in order to sell them for money. It's called commerce." Max is caught by Logan Cale, a vigilante cyber journalist who uses the alias "Eyes Only", while she is attempting to burglarize him. Cale notices and recognizes Max's barcode, and offers to help her locate her Manticore brothers and sisters if she agrees to team up with him. Max initially refuses, but changes her mind after Cale is rendered a paraplegic after he attempts a mission without her assistance. Max spends season one "jugg[ling] 'Eyes Only' missions" while searching for fellow Manticore escapees. A complicated romantic interest develops between Max and Cale. Near the end of the season, Lydecker is betrayed by his superior, Elizabeth Renfro, and subsequently defects from Manticore. He aids Max in an assault on the Manticore headquarters, though Max is badly wounded and captured. In season two Cale exposes Manticore to the world, and Renfro torches the facility in an attempt to cover up the evidence, though she is killed in the process. Max escapes the facility and frees hundreds of other super soldiers and failed Manticore experiments. Lydecker disappears under mysterious circumstances. National Security Agency agent Ames White, who is also a member of a secretive cult that wishes to eliminate transgenics, is tasked with recapturing the Manticore escapees. Both the authorities and cult members pursue Max, though she escapes to Terminal City, an abandoned part of Seattle where hundreds of outcast transgenics have been hiding. When the police begin to surround Terminal City, Max convinces the other transgenics to stand their ground rather than run. The second and final season ends with the military surrounding and possibly preparing to invade Terminal City. The novel Dark Angel: Skin Game picks up where season two ends. Reports of a transgenic serial killer in Seattle are exacerbating the stand-off at Terminal City. Max uncovers that the killer's psychosis was caused by him unwillingly being given a psychoactive drug by White. A truce develops between transgenics and the authorities after Max publicly reveals the information, and White goes into hiding. The final novel, Dark Angel: After the Dark, picks up where the previous novel ends. Cale is kidnapped by the cult, who are trying to provoke Max into attacking them. Max eventually leads an assault on the cult's headquarters, which frees Cale and results in White's death and the compound being set on fire. As the headquarters burn Max finds Lydecker in a prison cell, and he promises to help her find her mother if she saves him, to which she agrees. The book ends with Cale and Max finally consummating their relationship. ## Reception Max has been cited as a feminist character and is considered a symbol of female empowerment. Writing for the University of Melbourne, Bronwen Auty considered Max to be the "archetypal modern feminist hero – a young woman empowered to use her body actively to achieve goals", citing Max's refusal to use firearms and instead using martial arts and knowledge as weapons as contributing to this status. Writing in Science Fiction Film & Television, Clarice Butkus noted Max has been considered a "distinctly millennial post-third-wave feminist warrior", and considered Max's relationship and dialogue with Original Cindy, an African American lesbian, to convey female empowerment. For example Cindy encourages Max not to feel guilt over her sexual behaviour and instead to embrace a traditionally masculine approach to sex. Writing in Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture, Lorna Jowett also considered Max an example of female empowerment, saying she appeared to be the "usual postmodern, postfeminist representation of the female action hero" who displayed mixtures and reversals of traditional gender traits. The character received mainly positive reviews from critics. In October 2000 Howard Rosenberg commented "If pouty faces and sexy walks could destroy, the highly arresting Max would be wiping out the entire planet. It's actually quite moving. And she looks great on her bike." Hal Boedeker from the Orlando Sentinel gave a positive review of Max, and compared her skills to those of Catwoman, Xena, Emma Peel and Wonder Woman. Time commented favorably on Alba's physical skills portraying Max, though stated she had "an emotional range unusual among action babes." Conversely, Joyce Millman said "Cameron and Eglee give us very little incentive to care about Max as a person, the way we care about Buffy or Faith. And that's because Max is little more than lips and ass and a premise reminiscent of other, better shows". In December 2000 People listed Alba's portrayal of Max as among the breakthrough performances of 2000. Alba was nominated for several awards for her portrayal of Max. She won "Best Actress on Television" at the 27th Saturn Awards, "Breakout Star of the Year" at the TV Guide Awards, "Outstanding Actress in a New Television Series" at the ALMA Awards and "Choice Actress" at the 2001 Teen Choice Awards. In 2004, Max was ranked at number 17 in TV Guide's list of the "25 Greatest Sci-Fi Legends", and in 2012, Dave Golder from GamesRadar ranked Max at number 49 on his list of the 100 sexiest women in sci-fi.
67,476,185	Sunset Park Material Recovery Facility	1,139,511,957	Recycling center in New York City	[ "2013 establishments in New York City", "Recycling in New York City", "Sunset Park, Brooklyn", "Waste management infrastructure of New York City" ]	Sunset Park Material Recovery Facility is a recycling facility at the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, United States. Operated by Sims Municipal Recycling, it was designed by Annabelle Selldorf, and its construction involved the use of a variety of recycled materials. The campus contains several structures, including an education center and New York City's first commercial-scale wind turbine. As of January 2022, it is the largest commingled recycling facility in the United States and the primary recycling center in New York City. ## Construction and facilities The Material Recovery Facility is operated by Sims Municipal Recycling, part of Sims Metal Management, a large recycling company which holds a 40-year contract with the City of New York. The 11-acre (45,000 m<sup>2</sup>) property sits on the Sunset Park side of the Gowanus Bay, at the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal. It was designed by architect Annabelle Selldorf and built on the site of a former New York Police Department impound lot. The pier was raised four feet above what the city would otherwise require to be resilient against rising water levels and harsh weather. Consistent with its purpose, it was constructed using many recycled materials. The buildings are raised another four feet above the pier on recycled glass and stone left over from the development of the Second Avenue Subway project, while the structures themselves are largely built with recycled steel. The ropes used along the pier are selected to cultivate mussels, and three artificial reefs were installed at the end to help cultivate a habitat to attract marine life and birds. It has its own storm water management system to avoid runoff into the East River. The campus includes a tipping building where materials arrive, the main processing building along the southern edge, storage buildings, and an administrative building. These structures take up about 140,000 square feet (13,006 m<sup>2</sup>). The administrative building includes an education center for student and tour groups which includes exhibits explaining how the plant operates. An elevated pedestrian walkway connects the administrative building to the main processing building for public viewing. The tipping building's exterior is composed of exposed steel girders and lateral bracing; according to architectural writer Pavel Bendov, this helped the facility "avoid its fate as another box warehouse". A 160-foot 100 kW small wind turbine sits on the north corner of the property, the first commercial-scale turbine in New York City and the city's tallest as of January 2015. It produces about 4% of the facility's power. 30,000 sq ft (2,800 m<sup>2</sup>) of rooftop solar panels provides another 20% of daily energy. The total cost of construction totaled \$110 million, of which \$60 million was subsidized by the city as part of the Bloomberg Administration's PlaNYC 2030 project. The plant opened in December 2013. At the time, Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times praised its design, calling it "understated, well proportioned and well planned – elegant, actually, and not just for a garbage site" and suggested good design principles could work to help sell the public on the idea of recycling, which is necessary in order for the facility to succeed. As of January 2022, it is the largest commingled recycling facility in the United States. ## Activity The plant is New York City's primary recycling facility, and processes three-quarters of its plastic, metal, and glass. As of February 2018, it processes about 20,000 tons of material monthly, up from 15,000 tons three years earlier, with a daily processing capacity of 1,000 tons. The facility's primary purpose is to sort the materials it receives before selling them to other processors. The machinery is manufactured by the Dutch company Bollegraaf. The material arrives in trucks, mostly hauled from barges, which reduces the total mileage sanitation trucks had to travel previously by about 240,000 miles (390,000 km). It is dumped into a pile on the main facility's floor where large items are removed manually and the rest put on conveyor belt. There are about 2 miles (3.2 km) of conveyors in the plant. Items removed manually include appliances, which can be recycled, and objects which cannot be recycled like bowling balls, which the facility receives about 1,200 of per year. The conveyor line first goes through a slow shredder with large gaps which opens the bags the materials arrive in. Particular materials are pulled out of the stream using specialized machines, for example using a rotating magnetic drum to extract tin cans. Another machine breaks glass small enough to fall through a disc screen to a dedicated stream below it. A drum magnet separates ferrous metals from the glass. Optical sorters identify and separate certain types of plastic and paper, with air jets passing selected items from one line to another. An eddy current separator removes most of the remaining metals before passing through a trommel at the end of the line. Human inspectors are most involved at the end of the process to correct for any mistakes the machines made. The separated materials are then collected, compressed into blocks, and moved out of the main facility, mostly by train. The time it takes an object to be put on the initial conveyor belt to when it is bundled at the other end is between two and ten minutes. The city pays Sims to process its recycling at a rate of approximately \$75 per ton of metal, glass, and plastic that comes from its sanitation trucks. When the value of the materials increases, the city receives a rebate. In 2019, Sims made nearly \$25 million this way. The facility's activity and revenue are affected by politics, such as shifting policies in China reducing the amount of foreign recycled material it would accept, and debates over the implementation or expansion of New York's 1983 bottle bill, which allows people to redeem certain kinds of containers for a deposit fee.
12,400,025	Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens	1,150,705,566	null	[ "1961 establishments in Florida", "Art Deco architecture in Florida", "Art museums and galleries in Florida", "Art museums established in 1961", "Gardens in Florida", "Historic American Landscapes Survey in Florida", "Institutions accredited by the American Alliance of Museums", "Museums in Jacksonville, Florida", "Tourist attractions in Jacksonville, Florida" ]	The Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens is a museum located in Jacksonville, Florida. It was founded in 1961 after the death of Ninah Cummer, who bequeathed her gardens and personal art collection to the new museum. The Cummer Museum has since expanded to include the property owned by Ninah's brother-in-law, but it still includes her original garden designs and a portion of her home with its historic furnishing. The museum and gardens attract 130,000 visitors annually. The permanent collection of the museum currently includes over 5,000 works of art dating from 2100 BCE to the twenty-first century. The museum's collection is especially strong in European and American paintings and also includes substantial holdings of Meissen porcelain. The museum also has an award-winning education center, Art Connections, which possesses a number of interactive educational installations and serves underprivileged and special education students with its programs. There are three flower gardens on the museum grounds, the oldest dating back to 1903. These gardens have preserved their original layout for over a century and were designed by landscape designers such as the Olmsted Brothers, Thomas Meehan & Sons, and Ellen Biddle Shipman. The Cummer Gardens are on the National Register of Historic Places. ## History ### Cummer family The history of the Cummer Museum dates back to 1902. That year, Arthur and Ninah Cummer built their home on Riverside Avenue. Arthur's parents Wellington and Ada Cummer lived next door, and Arthur's brother Waldo and sister-in-law Clara lived nearby. Wellington Cummer was a wealthy lumber baron from Cadillac, Michigan who moved to Jacksonville in 1896. The Cummer Lumber company was, at one point, the largest landowner in Florida. Wellington also built the Jacksonville and Southwestern Railroad. In 1906, on their honeymoon, Ninah and Arthur Cummer purchased their first piece of art, a painting titled Along the Strand directly from the artist, Paul King. The painting depicts two men riding horse-drawn carts on a beach. In 1931, Ada Cummer died, and her two sons tore down her old home and split the property. Ninah Cummer then hired landscape architect Ellen Biddle Shipman to create the Italian Garden on her and Arthur's land. Clara Cummer had her portion combined with her existing garden to create the Olmsted Garden. After Arthur's death in January 1943, Ninah Cummer began collecting art in earnest. During the fifteen years before her death, Ninah expanded her art collection to sixty pieces, all of which are still in the museum's collection today. In 1957, the year before her death, Ninah announced that her gifts would “make only a small beginning toward a large vision” and hoped “that others will share this vision and by their interest and contributions will help establish here a center of beauty and culture worthy of the community.” She created the DeEtte Holden Cummer Museum Foundation, named for the deceased infant daughter of the Cummers, to manage her vision after her death. ### Museum Ninah Cummer and Clara Cummer, both now widows, died in 1958. Ninah Cummer left her estate, including her gardens, to the DeEtte Holden Cummer Museum Foundation for a museum to house her art collection. In 1960, the siblings' homes were both demolished in order to build the museum. Clara and Waldo's property was sold and now houses the Northeast Florida chapter of the American Red Cross and the Cummer's education center, Art Connections. Parts of the gardens were also destroyed during this demolition. The new building was designed by Saxelbye and Powell and constructed in 1961. It featured an Art Deco façade and an inner courtyard that was paved with the terra cotta tiles of the Cummers' old roof. One room from the original Cummer home, known as the Tudor Room, was preserved and incorporated into the new museum. The Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens, then named The Cummer Gallery, opened on November 11, 1961. The museum's first opening was attended by one thousand guests, including Jacksonville mayor W. Haydon Burns and Florida governor Farris Bryant. Burns was noted as saying, "The people of Jacksonville have never received a gift comparable in generosity or beauty to the museum... a testament to the heritage of the past and representing the strength and character of those who were leaders of Jacksonville in the past." The museum's collection was on display, as well as three special exhibitions: a collection of 51 etchings by James McBey (now part of the museum's permanent collection), a selection of French paintings on loan from a New York gallery, and an exhibition of American art on loan from the National Academy of Design. In 1971, ten years after the museum's opening, the Cummer celebrated the addition of a new wing for 17th-century art. In 1989, the museum acquired an ancient Egyptian stela, dating back to 2100 BCE, making it the oldest piece of art in the museum's collection. The Cummer Museum acquired the Barnett building in the early 1990s, remodeling the first floor into the museum's education center, Art Connections, and using the second floor for administrative offices. The two buildings were connected by the Barnett Concourse, and two more major galleries were added. This expansion was completed in 1992. In early 2002, the museum acquired the adjacent Woman's Club of Jacksonville, a Tudor-style residential building which would serve as a space for programs and events for the museum. The museum also acquired the Jacobsen Gallery of American Art in 2005, and the Mason Gallery in 2006. On , the Cummer Gardens were added to the National Register of Historic Places. In March 2016, the board of trustees of the Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens announced that the old Woman's Club of Jacksonville, which was to become a center for programming for the museum, would have to be demolished because of an infestation of Formosan subterranean termites, costing the museum its \$7 million investment into the building. It had been previously listed on the National Register of Historic Places. ## Collection The Cummer Museum's art collection has expanded from the group of more than 60 works of Ninah Cummer's collection to over 5,000 works of art. The permanent collection spans from 2100 BCE through the 21st century and includes pieces created by Peter Paul Rubens, Winslow Homer, Thomas Moran, Norman Rockwell, and Romare Bearden. It is also home to the Wark Collection of Early Meissen Porcelain. Pieces in the museum's collection were either donated to the museum, like the Wark collection, or they were purchased using the museum's acquisition fund, which is sustained through individual gifts and fundraising events. ### Special collections The Cummer Museum possesses seven special collections: - The Constance I. and Ralph H. Wark Collection of Early Meissen Porcelain – Ralph Wark began collecting Meissen porcelain in 1922. Over the years, he acquired a collection of over 700 pieces. Wark and his sister Constance moved to St. Augustine and donated the collection to the Cummer in 1965. - The Eugène Louis Charvot Collection – Over 200 works produced by Eugène Louis Charvot, a French doctor and army officer as well as a painter. - Joseph Jeffers Dodge Collection – 230 works by American realist artist Joseph Jeffers Dodge. - The Dennis C. Hayes Collection of Japanese Prints – A collection of 190 Japanese prints that encompass the 19th and 20th centuries. - The James McBey Collection – One of the largest collection of James McBey's works outside of his native Scotland, this collection spans his entire career. - The Eugene Savage Collection – A collection of works by National Academy of Design member Eugene Savage that depicts Seminole traditions in the 1930s. - Permanent Collection Archives and Rare Books – A collection of archival materials and rare books that supplement the other special collections, which includes a portion of the Cummers' personal library. ### Tudor Room One room from the original Cummer home, known as the Tudor Room, was preserved in order that "the public at large may enjoy some insight into the personality of the owner." It retains all of its historic furniture, including a number of paintings from the Cummers' original collection. It also features portraits of both Ninah and Arthur Cummer, as well as a needlepoint by Ninah depicting her Italian Garden. ### Sculptures A number of sculptures that are a part of the Permanent Collection are displayed in the landscape around the museum. Janet Scudder's Running Boy is on display in the courtyard, and Riis Burwell's Entropy Series \#26 sits above the Italian Garden. A sculpture of Mercury by an unknown artist stands in the center of the Olmsted Garden. Diana of the Chase, by American artist Anna Hyatt Huntington, is located in the upper tier of the gardens. A sculpture garden surrounds the outside of the Barnett building. Various other pieces are on display inside the museum. ## Gardens The Cummer Gardens are 1.45 acres of historic gardens made up of native Florida plants, large live oak trees, and a number of reflecting pools, fountains, ornaments and sculptures. They are split into three themed gardens and a large lawn on the St. Johns River. Many of the original trees on the property were felled in order to make room for flower beds, but those that remained grew up to 150 feet in size. Ninah Cummer adopted the lion as her personal motif, and lion details can be found all over the gardens. The first gardens on the Cummer property were designed by Ossian Cole Simonds in 1903, just after the adjoining house was completed. Thomas Meehan & Sons of Philadelphia redesigned this garden and created what would become known as the English Garden in 1910. Ellen Biddle Shipman designed the Italian Garden in 1931. Sections of Clara and Waldo's garden were designed by William Lyman Phillips, a partner in the Olmstead Brothers firm. The Olmsted Brothers also advised Ninah on a design for a wall garden in 1922, but she chose to plant a garden designed by William Mercer of Philadelphia. The Cummer Gardens were selected for the National Register of Historic Places because they represent the history of American landscape design in the first four decades of the twentieth century. All of the Cummer's gardens are available to be toured virtually on the Cummer Museum's website with a stated purpose of serving to engage, educate, and inspire without it being necessary for a staff member to participate in the tour with each individual visitor. This also allows individuals to tour the garden virtually without having to visit the museum itself. Through the virtual garden tour, visitors can learn more about the gardens, plants, and sculptures in each garden. In September 2017, the Cummer Gardens were severely impacted by Hurricane Irma, including extensive flood damage when the St. Johns River overflowed approximately four feet of water into the gardens. A \$1.3 million reconstruction initiative for the English Garden, Italian Garden, and Olmsted Garden began in December 2018 and was completed in June 2019. The restoration plan was created using a variety of historic documents, including historic records, plant logs, photographs, and invoices from the initial creation of the gardens. The English Gardens reopened in April 2019, with all three gardens being completed and open to the public in July 2019. ### English Garden The English Garden is a rectangular garden featuring brick paths, a pergola that features cypress trees at the head of the garden, and a number of statues and garden ornaments. The garden has hundreds of native trees, shrubs, and perennials, most notably azaleas. It also features a wall garden, which was built in 1922. The centerpiece of the garden is a large wisteria arbor. Thomas Meehan & Sons of Philadelphia designed the English Garden in 1910. It was first known as the Wisteria Garden. In 1925, Ninah attended a lecture on azaleas given by H. Harold Hume, a horticulturist known for his work with azaleas, camellias, and citrus. This lecture sparked her interest in azaleas, so she visited azalea gardens in Charleston, South Carolina for inspiration. Advised by Hume, she replanted much of her English garden with them, renaming it the Azalea Garden. ### Italian Garden Ellen Biddle Shipman designed the Italian Garden in May 1931. It features two rows of clipped evergreens between two long, rectangular reflecting pools. It has a focal point at the end of the garden in the form of a marble fountain surrounded by an arched gloriette. There are also a number of statues, ornaments, tubs of small trees, and flowers. In 2002, the focal fountain, made of Verona aggregate that had deteriorated over time, was replaced with an exact reproduction of Botticino marble, sculpted by Nicola Stagetti in Pietrasanta, Italy. ### The Olmsted Garden `The Olmsted Garden was designed by the Olmsted Brothers, sons of Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of Central Park in New York City. It was located behind Waldo and Clara's home. It features numerous varieties of flowers and trees, a curved staircase, portico, and three garden rooms.` After the property was sold in 1960, the garden fell into disrepair, but with the purchase of the Barnett building, plans were made to restore it using historical photographs. The restoration to the original layout was completed in 2013. In its prime, the garden's centerpiece was a neoclassical bronze statue of Mercury by an unknown artist. The statue was given away in the 1960s, but it was donated back to the museum around 2013, to be displayed in the restored garden. ### Cummer Oak The Cummer oak is a large live oak tree, estimated to be between 175 and 200 years old, that stands prominently over the gardens. It is 80 feet tall, 138 feet across, and has a trunk circumference of 21 feet. ## Education The 1992 expansion of the museum made space for a new education center named Art Connections. Art Connections has allowed thousands of local schoolchildren an art education experience through hands-on experiences, art classes, and special tours for students. In 1994, Art Connections received the National Award for Museum Service from the Institute of Museum and Library Services for outstanding community service. Art Connections underwent a complete renovation in 2004. Most of the work went into installing new, high-tech activities, including a virtual canvas powered by a laser-light paintbrush and a room that turns dancers' shadows into art on the wall. Art Connections houses a number of educational programs, such as Women of Vision, Junior Docents, the VSA Arts Festival, Cummer in the Classroom, and the Weaver Academy of Art. The Very Special Arts Festival is an annual festival for special education students hosted at the Cummer Museum that saw over 2,000 students and 1,000 volunteers in 2014. Guided by museum volunteers, students engage in hands-on art projects, some of which have gone on to be displayed in the museum. The Weaver Academy of Art at The Cummer Museum was created in 2007 for underserved elementary school-aged children. The program serves more than 3,000 students and 200 teachers in the local area. The program, the largest educational program at the Cummer Museum, provides museum tours, classroom outreach, training for teachers, and free passes for teachers and students. Families with young children can check out a Family Backpack from the help desk in the Art Connections Interactive Center on the north end of the museum. Each Family Backpack contains materials and activities geared toward younger visitors and families to help them discover and understand the meaning, moods, and elements of art while at the museum. Family Backpacks are currently available in four themes: Animals, Color Splash, Gardens, and My Family. Visitors can create their own art while exploring the galleries and gardens by visiting the CREATE Cart in the Uible Loggia. On the CREATE Cart, visitors will find boxes containing a clipboard with paper, colored pencils, and a pencil sharpener. These boxes can be checked out with no fee by visitors and should be returned to the cart before leaving the museum. ## Publications The Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens has published two books. These are The Chef's Canvas Cookbook (2016) and A Legacy in Bloom: Celebrating a Century of Gardens at the Cummer (2008), both of which have been previously available for purchase at the museum's shop. ## Gallery
4,905,641	Battle of Hel	1,171,383,451	Battle in Poland during WWII	[ "Battles of the Invasion of Poland", "Naval battles of World War II involving Poland", "October 1939 events", "Pomeranian Voivodeship (1919–1939)", "September 1939 events", "Sieges involving Germany", "Sieges involving Poland" ]	The Battle of Hel (Polish: Obrona Helu, literally "the Defense of Hel") was a World War II engagement fought from 1 September to 2 October 1939 on the Hel Peninsula, of the Baltic Sea coast, between invading German forces and defending Polish units during the German invasion of Poland (also known in Polish historiography as the September Campaign). The defense of the Hel Peninsula took place around the Hel Fortified Area, a system of Polish fortifications that had been constructed in the 1930s near the interwar border with the German Third Reich. Beginning on 20 September 1939, after the Polish Army Pomorze had been defeated in the Battle of Tuchola Forest and after other Polish coastal strongholds had capitulated in the Battle of Westerplatte, Battle of Gdynia and the Battle of Kępa Oksywska, Hel was the only substantial pocket of Polish military resistance left in northern Poland. It was also the site of the invasion's only naval surface engagement. The Germans blockaded the defenders of the Hel Peninsula and did not launch major land operations until the end of September 1939. Some 2,800 Polish soldiers under Rear Admiral Włodzimierz Steyer, part of the Land Coastal Defence formation, defended the Hel Fortified Area for about 32 days, until they surrendered due to low supplies and morale. ## Prelude Construction of a Polish Navy port at Hel, on the tip of the Hel Peninsula, began in 1931, and in 1936 the north section of the Hel Peninsula was officially declared the Hel Fortified Area (Helski Rejon Umocniony). Construction of the fortifications had not been finished before war broke out, but over several months, as tensions between Poland and Germany had mounted, the fortifications had been reinforced with provisional earthworks. The Hel Fortified Area had coastal (anti-ship) and anti-aircraft artillery batteries. The Coastal Artillery Division [pl]'s coastal batteries comprised one battery of four 152 mm (6-inch) guns, two older batteries of two 105 mm (4.1-inch) guns, and three batteries of eight 75 mm (3-inch) guns. The 2nd Naval Anti-aircraft Artillery Division [pl]'s anti-aircraft batteries were equipped with six 75 mm and eight 40 mm (1.6-inch) guns, seventeen machine guns, and two 120 cm (47-inch) searchlights. Infantry cover for the Hel Fortified Area was provided by a Border Defense Corps (KOP) unit – the Hel KOP Battalion [pl] under Major Jan Wiśniewski [pl] – which had several artillery pieces (four 75 mm, and six 37 mm), sixty-two machine guns, and two large and nine small mortars. The Coastal Artillery Division was 162 soldiers strong, the 2nd Naval Anti-aircraft Artillery Division numbered 1,000 personnel, and the KOP battalion, 1,197. Overall command of the Hel Fortified Area was held by Rear Admiral Włodzimierz Steyer. However, Hel also became headquarters for the Polish Navy's commander, Rear Admiral Józef Unrug, who relocated his command center there on the eve of the invasion, on 31 August 1939, concluding that the Hel Fortified Area was better suited to prolonged defense than the more provisional defenses around his peacetime headquarters in Gdynia. Unrug also reinforced the Hel garrison with soldiers from his Gdynia garrison. In September 1939, some 2,800 soldiers were stationed in the Hel Fortified Area. While the Hel coastal batteries were the strongest in Poland, they were inadequate to confront the German Navy and posed no great threat to any of the German capital ships. Likewise, the Polish air-defense batteries in the region were too few and too light to deter enemy aircraft, and the Naval Air Squadron's planes tasked with defending the area, stationed at the nearby town of Puck, were both older than their German counterparts and outnumbered by about ten to one. ## Battle Hel was attacked by the German Luftwaffe from the first day of the invasion. The first air raid occurred at 13:30, 1 September 1939, targeting the Polish coastal batteries. The second air raid, the same day at 18:00, targeted ships in the port, damaging the Polish light minelayer ORP Mewa. Further air raids occurred the following day. On 3 September, the Polish destroyer ORP Wicher and large minelayer ORP Gryf, supported by Polish coastal-battery fire, engaged two German destroyers, Z1 Leberecht Maass and Z9 Wolfgang Zenker. The Polish coastal battery also participated in this battle. This was the only surface naval engagement of the September Campaign and was relatively inconsequential. The German destroyer Z1 Leberecht Maass sustained light damage and four fatalities. The Polish Gryf also sustained light damage, with seven fatalities. The German ships retreated, and later that day the Luftwaffe sank the ORP Gryf, the ORP Wicher, as well as the ORP Mewa, the Polish gunboat ORP General Haller sustained heavy damage, was abandoned, and sank on 6 September. The Polish gunboat ORP Komendant Piłsudski, though largely undamaged, was also abandoned. This effectively eliminated the already heavily outnumbered surface Polish Navy as a fighting force on the Baltic Sea, with only several light units remaining operational in the theater. The surviving crews of the sunken Polish vessels joined the garrison's defenders, and two 120 mm guns from ORP Gryf were salvaged for shore-battery use. In the first week of September, the Wehrmacht forced Polish Armia Pomorze units to retreat from the Danzig Corridor and, having captured Puck, on 9 September began assaulting the Polish forces on the Hel Peninsula. The advancing German forces included the 42nd Border Guard Regiment and the 5th Cavalry Regiment. Polish forces started a slow retreat toward the port of Hel on the Peninsula. On 10 September the Germans captured the village of Swarzewo, and on 11 September the town of Władysławowo near the base of the Peninsula. The Polish defenders fortified the next village, Chałupy, about a fifth of the way up the Peninsula. The Germans, having bottled up the Polish units on the Peninsula, did not launch major land operations until month's end. On the night of 12/13 September 1939, the remaining Polish light minelayers laid a minefield near Hel. The following day, the Luftwaffe sank the Polish light minelayers ORP Jaskółka and ORP Czapla at the port of Jastarnia, while the remaining minelayers, ORP Czajka, Rybitwa, and ORP Żuraw, were damaged. In view of German superiority on the Baltic Sea, the remaining Polish naval units docked at the Hel port and their crews joined the ground forces. The ships' armaments were stripped and converted into additional land-gun emplacements. Heavier German naval units, namely the old Deutschland-class battleships Schleswig-Holstein and Schlesien, shelled the Hel Peninsula, to little effect. Schleswig-Holstein began shelling Polish positions at Hel and Redłowo (on the other side of the Vistula Lagoon, site of the battle of Gdynia) after the Polish garrison at Westerplatte surrendered on 7 September. These operations lasted until 13 September. Schlesien returned to bombarding Polish positions at Jastarnia and Hel from September 21. Between 25 and 27 September, the Schleswig-Holstein joined her sister ship at Hel again. On 25 September it was lightly damaged by Polish coastal batteries. Throughout that time, a number of air raids targeted the Hel Fortified Area as well. The Polish anti-aircraft batteries proved highly effective, shooting down between 46 and 53 German aircraft. Henry Steele Commager writes that the Germans, after initially being stalled by Polish defenses, brought up land-artillery batteries and an armored train battery to support their barrage. According to Commager, German forces slowly advanced, still facing substantial resistance and counterattacks, and on 25 September, after the Germans took the village of Chałupy, Polish military engineers detonated torpedo warheads at the Peninsula's narrowest part, temporarily transforming the Peninsula's far end into an island. A somewhat different account appears in the Polish-language Poland's Battles, 1939–1945: an Encyclopedic Guide, edited by Krzysztof Komorowski. The chapter on the Battle of Hel states that no substantial land engagements took place until 28 September, when German units slowly advanced toward Chałupy. In this account, the major German push took place on 30 September 1939. The German units assigned to take Hel, the 374th Infantry Regiment and the 207th Light Artillery Regiment, captured Chałupy on 30 September, and shortly afterward the Poles detonated the torpedo warheads – but the resulting damage was "less than expected", though it wrecked the Peninsula's railroad line. On 1 October 1939 the Polish Navy's commander, Rear Admiral Józef Unrug, taking into account that the Polish outpost was running out of supplies and that no relief force would be coming, and in view of low troop morale, with two mutiny attempts having been quelled on 29 and 30 September, gave orders to capitulate. Some Polish soldiers attempted to flee across the Baltic Sea to Sweden on the remaining light craft and civilian vessels, but most were unsuccessful. The Germans occupied the Hel Peninsula by 2 October. Some accounts of the Battle of Hel report the sinking on 1 October of the German minesweeper M85 by a mine near the Hel Peninsula, with 24 fatalities. The minefield had been laid by the Polish submarine ORP Żbik as part of Plan Sack. ORP Żbik and two other submarines, ORP Sęp and ORP Ryś – stationed at Hel – had gone to sea on 1 September. ## Aftermath Polish battle casualties were light – some 50 dead and 150 wounded. About 3,600 Polish soldiers and sailors were taken prisoner. German losses were similar, estimated at a few dozen dead and wounded. Some remaining Polish light vessels, including light minelayers, gunboats, and noncombatant units such as tugboats, which were not sunk by air raids, may (sources vary) have been scuttled before the capitulation. Either way, most were either captured by the Germans or raised from the shallow waters and pressed into German service in subsequent weeks. After Hel's surrender, the only organized military resistance in Poland was conducted by Independent Operational Group Polesie, which capitulated after the Battle of Kock on 5 October 1939, marking the end of organized resistance to the German invasion. Some of the fortifications of Hel survived, and are currently tourist attractions. One of Hel's four 152 mm Bofors batteries is now on display at the Polish Army Museum in Warsaw. The Battle of Hel appears among the battles inscribed on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Warsaw. ## See also - List of World War II military equipment of Poland - List of German military equipment of World War II
42,454,010	The Boat Race 2002	1,018,087,740	null	[ "2002 in English sport", "2002 in rowing", "2002 sports events in London", "March 2002 sports events in the United Kingdom", "The Boat Race" ]	The 148th Boat Race took place on 30 March 2002. Oxford won the race by three-quarters of a length, one of the narrowest margins of victory in the history of the contest. In the reserve race Isis beat Goldie; Oxford also won the Women's race. ## Background The Boat Race is an annual competition between the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. First held in 1829, the competition is a 4.2-mile (6.8 km) race along the River Thames in southwest London. The rivalry is a major point of honour between the two universities and followed throughout the United Kingdom and worldwide. Cambridge went into the race as reigning champions, having won the 2001 race by 2.5 lengths, and led overall with 77 victories to Oxford's 69 (excluding the "dead heat" of 1877). The race was sponsored by Aberdeen Asset Management for the third consecutive year. The first Women's Boat Race took place in 1927, but did not become an annual fixture until the 1960s. Until 2014, the contest was conducted as part of the Henley Boat Races, but as of the 2015 race, it is held on the River Thames, on the same day as the men's main and reserve races. The reserve race, contested between Oxford's Isis boat and Cambridge's Goldie boat has been held since 1965. It usually takes place on the Tideway, prior to the main Boat Race. ## Crews Despite weighing just over 1 pound (0.45 kg) less per man than their opponents, Cambridge were the pre-race favourites. Both boats contained four Blues; the Oxford cox Peter Hackworth attended St Paul's School while Cambridge's cox Ellie Griggs attended St Paul's Girls' School, so both were familiar with the course. Oxford's crew contained two American international rowers in Dan Perkins and Luke McGee, and Gerritjan Eggenkamp, a Dutch international. Cambridge's stroke, Rick Dunn, cousin of Oxford's bow Andrew Dunn, was a world champion in coxless fours, and he rowed alongside fellow British internationals Tom Stallard and Josh West. Cambridge's other international rowers included American Sam Brooks, German Sebastian Mayer and Australian Stu Welch. $P$ – Boat Club President ## Race description Cambridge won the coin toss and elected to start from the northern bank (the "Middlesex side") of the Thames. Despite Cambridge's cox Griggs having her hand raised (to indicate that she and the Cambridge crew were not yet ready to commence), race umpire Simon Harris started the race. With a stroke rate of 51, Oxford took an early lead, but Cambridge pulled level as the crews passed Craven Cottage. Taking a slight lead round the Surrey bend, Cambridge's number four, Mayer suffered an asthma attack and showed signs of struggle, allowing Oxford to draw up to within a second as they approached Barnes Bridge. In a sprint finish, Oxford pulled away to be three-quarters of a length clear at the finishing post. Oxford finished with a time of 16 minutes, 54 seconds, Cambridge finishing two seconds behind them, three-quarters of a length behind. It was Oxford's second victory in the previous three years, and brought the overall result to 77–70 in Cambridge's favour. At the finish, following tradition, the Oxford crew threw their cox, Hackworth, into the water in celebration. Mayer was hospitalised minutes after the race, initially considered a result of exhaustion, but later diagnosed as following an asthma attack. In the reserve race, Oxford's Isis beat Cambridge's Goldie. Earlier at Henley, Oxford won the 57th women's race by 2+1⁄2 lengths. ## Reaction Hackworth said "it was neck and neck, but I had absolute belief we could do it". Four-time Olympic gold medallist Matthew Pinsent said of the race "it truly was amazing". Cambridge coach Robin Williams was generous in defeat: "Credit to Oxford. They did an awesome job and took their chance. It was a fantastic race", while Oxford's coach Sean Bowden said "I believed that if we could get through Barnes Bridge well we could still do it. They were rowing so well and I knew how much they wanted it." Simon Barnes of The Times noted that "Cambridge reeled in an early Oxford lead and went ahead themselves ... that should have been the end of it... But this Oxford crew just kept pestering away ... and, with the finish in sight, Cambridge ... yielded."
16,970,173	Collared brown lemur	1,151,576,910	Species of lemur	[ "Fauna of the Madagascar lowland forests", "Fauna of the Madagascar subhumid forests", "Mammals described in 1817", "Taxa named by Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire", "True lemurs" ]	The collared brown lemur (Eulemur collaris), also known as the red-collared brown lemur or red-collared lemur, is a medium-sized strepsirrhine primate and one of twelve species of brown lemur in the family Lemuridae. It is only found in south-eastern Madagascar. Like most species of lemur, it is arboreal, moving quadrupedally and occasionally leaping from tree to tree. Like other brown lemurs, this species is cathemeral (active during the day and the night), lives in social groups, primarily eats fruit, exhibits sexual dichromatism, and does not demonstrate female dominance. The species is listed as Endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and is threatened primarily by habitat loss. ## Taxonomy Together with the twelve other true lemurs (genus Eulemur), the collared brown lemur (E. collaris) is a type of lemur belonging to the family Lemuridae. Collectively, lemurs (infraorder Lemuriformes) are classified as strepsirrhine primates. Originally listed as a subspecies of the common brown lemur (E. fulvus), the collared brown lemur was promoted to full species status in 2001 by biological anthropologist Colin Groves. ## Anatomy and physiology An adult collared brown lemur can reach a head-body length of 39 and 40 cm (15 and 16 in) and have a tail length of 50 and 55 cm (20 and 22 in) for an overall length of 89 and 95 cm (35 and 37 in). It has an average body weight of 2.25 and 2.5 kg (5.0 and 5.5 lb), making it a medium-sized lemur. The only form of sexual dimorphism exhibited by the collared brown lemur is dichromatism. The following table illustrates the coloration differences between the sexes: In the wild, the collared brown lemur's range does not overlap with other brown lemurs, so it is rarely confused with other species. However, in captivity it can be easily confused with the gray-headed lemur (Eulemur cinereiceps) due to similar coloration. The male collared brown lemur can be distinguished by their cream-colored or rufous beards, whereas the male gray-headed lemur has a white beard. Females of these two species are nearly indistinguishable, even though genetic analyses support full species status for both taxa. In Berenty Reserve, the species has hybridized with the red lemur. ## Ecology Found in tropical moist lowland and montane forests in southeastern Madagascar, the collared brown lemur occurs west to the forests of Kalambatritra and in the south from Tôlanaro north to the Mananara River. The Mananara River is the boundary between the ranges of the collared brown lemur and the gray-headed lemur to the north. The collared brown lemur can be found in the littoral forests of Mandena Conservation Zone, Sainte Luce Reserve, and Andohahela National Park. In its environment, the collared brown lemur acts as a seed disperser, and is especially critical for the dispersal of large-seeded fruiting trees within its range. However, there is no evidence that these relationships are coevolutionary and instead these lemurs may be the last remaining seed dispersers for these tree species following the extinction of larger frugivorous birds and subfossil lemurs. ## Behavior Very little is known about the natural history of this species. It shows great dietary flexibility, feeding on fruits from over 100 plant species. It is also cathemeral (active both day and night throughout the year), a trait seen in some other members of its genus. Research has suggested that metabolic dietary-related needs are the leading factor behind this behavior, although the specific hours of this activity pattern can shift based on lunar luminosity and seasonal changes in the photoperiod (day length). Previous studies had ruled out effects of predators on the expression of this trait, and instead pointed to fruit availability and fiber intake as more important factors. The collared brown lemur tends to live in social groups that are multi-male/multi-female, with groups ranging in size from two to seventeen individuals. Population densities are estimated at 14 individuals/km<sup>2</sup>, and it appears to be common within its range. Females give birth to one offspring between October and December, and male involvement with the young has been observed. Female dominance, a common behavioral trait in many lemur species but uncommon in most true lemurs, has not been observed in this species. Brown lemurs at Berenty (hybrid E. fulvus x collaris) show linear hierarchy, adult female dominance, and the presence of conciliatory behavior after aggressions. Additionally, stress levels (measured via self-directed behaviors) decrease at the increase of the hierarchical position of individuals within the social group and reconciliation is able to bring stress down to the baseline levels. ## Conservation status The collared brown lemur was listed as Endangered in the IUCN Red List assessment. Its greatest threat is habitat loss from slash-and-burn agriculture and charcoal production. It is also hunted for food and captured for the local pet trade. However, populations of the collared brown lemur have been successfully sustained in captivity and continue to provide a safeguard against their extinction. A small group of collared brown lemurs was introduced in the 1980s into the Berenty Private Reserve and has since hybridized with introduced red-fronted lemurs.
845,086	KHNL	1,173,569,107	NBC affiliate in Honolulu	[ "1962 establishments in Hawaii", "Antenna TV affiliates", "Gray Television", "Grit (TV network) affiliates", "NBC network affiliates", "Television channels and stations established in 1962", "Television stations in Hawaii" ]	KHNL (channel 13) is a television station in Honolulu, Hawaii, United States, serving the Hawaiian Islands as an affiliate of NBC. It is owned by Gray Television alongside CBS affiliate KGMB (channel 5) and Kailua-Kona–licensed Telemundo affiliate KFVE (channel 6). The stations share studios on Waiakamilo Road in downtown Honolulu, while KHNL's transmitter is located in Akupu, Hawaii. KHNL is also rebroadcast on the island of Hawaiʻi, Maui, and Kauaʻi. The present station on channel 13 began broadcasting July 4, 1962, as KTRG-TV, an independent station owned by the Watumull family. In 1967, Richard Eaton's United Broadcasting Company purchased the station. The call letters were changed to KIKU-TV and the format to primarily Japanese-language shows. In addition to serving Hawaii's Japanese-language community, the station gained notice in the wider market for its telecast of sumo wrestling as well as tokusatsu series, particularly Android Kikaider (better known in Hawaii as Kikaida). A general partnership of investors from California and Hawaii, as well as Japan's TV Asahi, acquired KIKU-TV in 1979. In 1981, channel 13 significantly reduced its Japanese-language broadcasting, though it continued to air programs in the language into the 1990s, and became a general-entertainment independent. Under the management of future Honolulu mayor Rick Blangiardi, in 1984 the station renamed itself KHNL; it then added coverage of University of Hawaiʻi athletics as well as an affiliation with Fox in 1986. A limited amount of Japanese-language programming continued to air into the early 1990s, shortly after the Providence Journal Company acquired the station. In 1994, the acquisition of KHON-TV, Honolulu's number-one station and an NBC affiliate, by Fox-linked SF Broadcasting portended an affiliation switch, which ultimately took place on January 1, 1996, with KHNL changing from Fox to NBC. As a result, in April 1995, KHNL began airing nightly newscasts. Despite luring several high-profile names in local TV news, the station struggled to gain ratings. Providence Journal merged with Belo Corporation in 1997; Belo then divested KHNL to Raycom Media in 1999. Raycom led the consolidation of KHNL and KGMB's news into Hawaii News Now in 2009; the combination became a serious challenger to KHON-TV, primarily on the strength of KGMB's existing news viewership. Gray acquired Raycom in 2019. ## Channel 13 in the 1950s Channel 13 was the last of Honolulu's original five TV allocations to receive any interest, even though channels 2 and 4 each had two applicants. Territorial Telecasters, a group linked to radio woman Christmas Early, filed for the channel in December 1952, only to abandon its bid within months and formally withdraw it in June. In October 1956, Henry J. Kaiser, through his Kaiser Broadcasting, applied for channel 13 after also requesting authority to build a new Honolulu radio station. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) granted a construction permit in December, but this was stayed between January and April 1957 following a protest by KULA-TV (channel 4) on economic grounds. On May 5, 1957, KHVH-TV began broadcasting on channel 13. Airing from Kaiser's Hawaiian Village Hotel, it was the first station to broadcast color television in Hawaii. KHVH-TV was an independent station that lacked network affiliation or even a studio camera; it was primarily a movie station, scheduling three to four feature films a day. In May 1958, Kaiser acquired KULA-TV; the two stations merged as KHVH-TV on channel 4, retaining KULA-TV's affiliation with ABC, at midnight on July 15, 1958. ## Early years ### KTRG-TV: The Watumull years David Watumull, through the Hawaiian Paradise Park Corporation, applied for channel 13 in March 1962. Simultaneously, Watumull purchased KOOD (990 AM) and changed its call letters to KTRG. The construction permit was granted on April 27, 1962; KTRG-TV began telecasting on July 4, 1962; it was more than five hours later than advertised due to technical difficulties with the transmitter and received an assist from the three other Honolulu TV stations to get on the air the first night. Studios were on Kalakaua Avenue. In addition to syndicated programs, KTRG-TV broadcast some local productions. One of these was high school quiz show The Challengers, which debuted in 1963 and was originally moderated by sportscaster Harry Kalas. Another was a local version of the children's program Romper Room. However, the station lost money and was operating on a part-time basis. ### KIKU-TV: The Japanese-language years Watumull filed in January 1966 to sell KTRG-TV to Richard Eaton, owner of the United Broadcasting Company, for an initially agreed sales price of \$700,000 (later revised to \$550,000); Watumull kept the radio station. Eaton's programming plans for channel 13 attracted scrutiny at the FCC, as he sought to convert channel 13 into a station broadcasting Japanese-language programming; In October, the commission designated the deal for a hearing on two issues: the proposed conversion to Japanese-language programming and Eaton's past record, as several other United stations had received short-term license renewals. The commission worried that Eaton would have difficulty controlling a station in far-flung Honolulu given the supervision issues that had arisen at other United stations. By January 1967, the station proposed a format consisting of 50 percent Japanese-language and 50 percent English-language programming. With the deal languishing, Hoover Tateishi, a longtime Hawaii broadcaster who had been part of Eaton's bid, resigned in order to program two hours a week of Japanese-language programs on channel 13. While the FCC's ruling on the matter was pending, Friendly Broadcasting sued Hawaiian Paradise Park Corporation in May 1967, alleging that Watumull had broken his contract to sell KTRG-TV to Eaton and was talking with another party who wished to buy the station for a greater purchase price. Watumull claimed he was able to do so because the contract lapsed after a year without FCC approval. However, judge Cyrus Nils Tavares issued a ruling that June 30 that the sales contract was still binding. Hearing examiner Thomas Donahue ruled in favor of Eaton's purchase of KTRG-TV in July 1967, noting that Eaton's poor track record had come from his business model of converting the "dogs and cats" of stations into viable broadcast properties. The sale was then effectuated; after the sale concluded, Hawaiian Paradise Park sued its Washington attorney for malpractice. Meanwhile, on October 1, KTRG-TV returned to the air as KIKU-TV, with Tateishi as general manager. The new call letters represented the Japanese name for the chrysanthemum flower. While remaining rooted in Japanese-language programming imported from Japan, KIKU-TV slowly broadened its appeal. In 1968, it began nightly telecasts of sumo wrestling; color telecasting began in 1969. The station introduced subtitles on its Japanese-language programs in 1970, which proved popular and expanded to having half of all programs subtitled by 1975. Another channel 13 specialty was children's programming; it aired such tokusatsu programs as Kamen Rider, Rainbowman, and Android Kikaider. The success of the latter was particularly noteworthy; the show beat Sesame Street in the ratings, and it was noted in an article in Time magazine. In 1971, the station moved from Kalakaua Avenue to studios on Puuhale Road. ## From Japanese to English ### Mid-Pacific Television Associates ownership In 1979, Mid-Pacific Television Associates was approved to buy KIKU-TV for \$2.7 million; the general partnership featured two consortia of investors, one local and one headed by the Cushman family of San Diego, as well as Japanese network TV Asahi with a 20 percent stake. Despite the presence of TV Asahi in the ownership group, major changes in 1981 led the station's programming away from Japanese-language shows. On June 29, the station doubled the length of its broadcast day and switched to shows mostly in English as Hawaii's only general-entertainment independent station. Japanese programming remained at noon and 10 p.m., times when management believed its primarily older viewers would still tune in. The programming change was met with some dismay by senior citizens and the Japanese program at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (UH), but it also was in line with declining Japanese fluency and immigration in Hawaii. Joanne Ninomiya, who had been KIKU's general manager since 1969, left in January 1981 due to the proposed changes and then began a venture broadcasting Japanese-language shows on cable. In addition to syndicated programming and the remaining Japanese-language shows, channel 13 also began offering newscasts seven days a week on November 1, 1981. It increased its transmitter power, improving its signal. However, some viewers in the Japanese community refused to watch the station after removing much of the programming that catered to their needs. The largest changes, however, came after Rick Blangiardi, a former University of Hawaiʻi assistant football coach who had worked at KGMB-TV, was named general manager in February 1984. Blangiardi fired 24 employees; he brought with him 13 employees from KGMB and increased the staff size from 48 to 54. The news department was immediately disbanded as a business decision, while programming was upgraded. Blangiardi also changed the station's call sign from KIKU-TV to KHNL, after Honolulu's airport code. Japanese-language shows continued to air from 10 p.m. to midnight, but other than that, the station was operating as a full-time general-entertainment independent that branded itself as a "news alternative" and the "free movie channel". KHNL also began a heavy schedule of local sports telecasts, including next-day broadcasts of University of Hawaiʻi football; sports brought viewers and increased advertising revenue. However, the station still lost money because it reinvested its profits in improvements, especially production equipment for remote sports broadcasts. ### King Broadcasting ownership and Fox affiliation In February 1986, the King Broadcasting Company of Seattle purchased KHNL from Mid-Pacific Television Associates at a time when the local investors who owned 30 percent of the station were facing financial pressures. It was King Broadcasting's first independent station, as it owned three NBC affiliates plus a CBS affiliate on the Mainland. After the King sale, Joanne Ninomiya returned to the station, particularly assisting with the introduction of subtitles to KHNL's long-running sumo telecasts. Her JN Productions also supplied six hours of Japanese-language shows on Sundays and a daily newscast from Japan. KHNL became Hawaii's first affiliate of Fox in October 1986. The station also began expanding its reach with translators on Hawaii's other islands; by 1987, it was broadcasting on Maui and Kauaʻi, and in 1989, it began broadcasting its programs on KHBC-TV (channel 2) in Hilo, Hawaii, which King Broadcasting purchased after a previous attempt to operate the station on an independent basis failed the previous year. The Maui translator was replaced with full-power KOGG (channel 15), which began broadcasting from Haleakalā on August 22, 1989. In 1992, the Providence Journal Company acquired King Broadcasting; Blangiardi, who had been promoted to running Seattle's KING-TV in 1989, was fired from his post there immediately. By this time, on the strength of Fox programming and UH athletics, the station was experiencing success. A Nielsen ratings study found it to be the fourth highest-rated independent station in prime time in the United States. Under Providence Journal ownership, the station rebranded to "Fox 13" in January 1993; later that year, it began programming KFVE "K5" (channel 5) under a time brokerage agreement. K5 became the new broadcaster for UH athletics in January 1994, providing additional opportunities for live broadcasts. Japanese-language programming disappeared from KHNL's schedule in 1993 after JN Productions began programming KHAI-TV (channel 20), which already primarily broadcast shows in Japanese, and moved its cable programs there. That station then changed its call sign to KIKU. ## Switch to NBC In August 1994, Burnham Broadcasting announced it would sell NBC affiliate KHON-TV (channel 2) and two other stations to SF Broadcasting, a joint venture between Savoy Pictures and Fox (the network owning a voting stock in Savoy), with the stations to switch their affiliations to Fox. However, the deal languished for months at the FCC because NBC was challenging the structure of SF's purchase of a fourth Burnham station, WLUK-TV in Green Bay, Wisconsin. KHNL announced in early November 1994 that it was setting up a local news department. On November 21, KHNL and NBC reached an affiliation agreement, with the effective date to be determined as part of the Burnham–SF transaction sale process. The news department launched on April 17, 1995, with the station rebranding to "Hawaii News8" and using its cable channel number instead of channel 13. The affiliation switch took place at midnight on January 1, 1996. In 1997, Belo acquired the Providence Journal Company. However, it found that there was no synergy between KHNL and its clusters of stations in Texas, the Pacific Northwest, and the mid-Atlantic states and put the station up for sale, along with KASA-TV in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in May 1999. The Albuquerque and Honolulu operations were purchased by Raycom Media for \$88 million. Raycom president John Hayes was familiar with KHNL, as he had been the vice president of television at the Providence Journal Company prior to its merger with Belo. With the November 1999 legalization of duopolies, Raycom acquired KFVE outright; the deal was approved on December 29, 1999, creating what Raycom called the first legal duopoly in the United States. Digital broadcasting from KHNL and its satellites began with the launch of digital facilities for KHBC-TV in Hilo in May 2002. KHNL-DT in Honolulu was activated on January 1, 2003. In late 2008, KHNL relocated from its studios on Sand Island Access Road (Route 64/Route 640) and the Puuhale Road offices to a new facility on Waiakamilo Road. The move allowed KHNL to consolidate station operations in one facility; what had been KFVE's building prior to the 1993 operating agreement had housed the news department since its launch, while sales and back-office departments worked out of the Puuhale offices. PBS Hawaiʻi then moved into the building. KHNL, KHBC-TV, and KOGG discontinued analog broadcasting on January 15, 2009, the date on which full-power television stations in Hawaii transitioned from analog to digital broadcasts. The transition in Hawaii had been brought forward from the original February 17 national switch date—itself later delayed to June—because of concern that the dismantling of existing transmitter towers atop Haleakalā would affect the mating season of the endangered Hawaiian petrel, which begins in February. All three stations opted to remain on their pre-transition digital channels of 35, 22, and 16, respectively. ## Consolidation with KGMB On August 18, 2009, Raycom and MCG Capital Corporation (owner of CBS affiliate KGMB) entered into a shared services agreement (SSA) under which KGMB's operations, including its news department, would be combined with KHNL and KFVE in the latter's facility. KGMB and KFVE would effectively swap licenses and channel numbers, moving CBS programming to channel 5—which Raycom owned directly—while KFVE would move from channels 5 to 9 and fall under MCG Capital's ownership. The move would lead to the elimination of a third of the stations' combined staff. The agreement came about primarily for economic reasons. Where the state's TV stations had taken in \$68 million in revenue in 2008, the Great Recession was predicted to reduce that figure to \$48 million in 2009. Raycom president and CEO Paul McTear noted that in light of an "economic reality ... that this market cannot support five traditionally separated television stations, all with duplicated costs", the agreement would preserve the operations of the three involved stations. He said the SSA would "preserve three stations that provide important and valuable local, national and international programming to viewers in Hawaii". The combined operation would reduce its headcount from 198 to 130; KGMB's management, including general manager Blangiardi, would run KGMB and KHNL. The structure of the deal, particularly the channel 5–9 swap seen as an end-run around a rule that prohibited common ownership of two of the four highest-rated stations in the market, led to criticism from media watchdog groups and a formal opposition being filed with the FCC. On October 26, 2009, KGMB and KHNL began presenting joint newscasts under the banner Hawaii News Now. In November 2016, the Hawaii News Now stations and Raycom stations in 22 additional markets discontinued use of Nielsen ratings in favor of other methods of audience research. One reason was that, unlike larger Mainland markets, Honolulu was still measured by Nielsen by means of a diary system instead of meters that electronically track ratings habits. Of 11,400 diaries sent out in one Honolulu market survey, only 914 were returned. ### Sale to Gray Television On June 25, 2018, Atlanta-based Gray Television announced it had reached an agreement with Raycom to merge their respective broadcasting assets (consisting of Raycom's 63 existing owned-and/or-operated television stations, including KGMB and KHNL), and Gray's 93 television stations) under the former's corporate umbrella. In the cash-and-stock merger transaction, valued at \$3.6 billion, Gray shareholders would acquire preferred stock currently held by Raycom. Because Raycom operated three stations in the Honolulu market, the companies were required to sell either KHNL, KGMB or KFVE to another station owner in order to comply with FCC ownership rules. On November 1, 2018, Nexstar Media Group (owner of KHNL-TV) announced that it would acquire KFVE and the licenses of former KGMB-TV satellites KGMD-TV and KGMV from American Spirit Media for \$6.5 million. However, Raycom retained the K5 brand, call letters, and programming (except for KFVE's MyNetworkTV affiliation). The sale of KFVE to Nexstar was approved by the FCC on December 17; the Gray-Raycom merger was approved three days later. The sale was completed on January 2, 2019. In part because of the merger and with a successor lined up, Blangiardi stepped down from running KGMB and KHNL in 2020 and mounted a successful campaign for mayor of Honolulu. ## News operation ### Starting a newsroom Even prior to signing an affiliation agreement with NBC, KHNL announced in November 1994 its intention to begin producing newscasts sometime in 1995. Providence Journal decided to make KHNL the first tapeless TV newsroom in the United States with all-digital editing equipment. While advertising was run immediately to search for news talent, the station made headlines within weeks by poaching a string of top anchors and reporters from Hawaii's other television stations. The first was Dan Cooke, who had been anchoring the news at KITV since 1987. Another KITV employee soon followed: sports director Robert Kekaula, who as part of moving to KHNL would also become a presence on KFVE's UH athletics broadcasts. These were part of a string of defections from KHON, KITV, and KGMB; in total, those three stations lost 16 on- and off-air staff to the new KHNL news operation. KHNL leased KFVE's Sand Island Road studios from its owner to provide space for the news department. On April 17, 1995, Hawaii News8 launched with a prime time newscast at 9 p.m. The program was simulcast on KFVE and featured a fast-paced style. News broadcasts expanded that year with the addition of a 10 p.m. newscast on June 19, followed by the debut of a 5 p.m. newscast on July 24 and a 6 p.m. newscast on November 30. Upon joining NBC, the station added a two-hour weekday morning newscast from 5 to 7 a.m. on January 2, 1996. The station's newscasts, however, failed to find ratings success in spite of NBC's strength in entertainment programming in the late 1990s. By 1999, both Cooke and Kekaula had returned to KITV. In 2007, even though KFVE was still the official station of UH athletics, KHNL ceased airing regular sports segments in its newscasts and proceeded to lose both of its sportscasters. KHNL also produced some newscasts specifically for KFVE. When KHNL became an NBC affiliate, K5 exclusively aired the 9 p.m. news, but it was canceled effective August 3, 1997, because of frequent sports preemptions and a lack of ratings and resources. A newscast in that time period was reinstated in 2004, and a 6:30 p.m. newscast on K5 was added in January 2008. On December 22, 2008, with the move to Waiakamilo Road, KHNL became the first television station in Hawaii to begin broadcasting its local newscasts in high definition; the KFVE newscasts were included in the upgrade. ### Hawaii News Now After the consolidation of KGMB and KHNL news was announced, the combined newscast debuted as Hawaii News Now on October 26, 2009. The two stations changed the times of some of their early evening newscasts; both stations broadcast at 5 and 10 p.m. with KHNL presenting news at 5:30 and KGMB at 6 p.m. Most of the on-air personalities came from KGMB, with just four KHNL on-air employees remaining with Hawaii News Now. Wayne Harada, writing for The Honolulu Advertiser, noted that the choice of KGMB personalities likely owed to the ability to remove highly paid veterans from the combined staff and rely on KGMB's superior ratings image. While the merger of newsrooms created a stronger competitor to KHON-TV in the ratings and sometimes eclipsed it in combined totals, most of the viewership was attributable to KGMB, not KHNL, and the two stations initially carried separate advertising during news simulcasts. KHON was able to claim it had the number one rating at times when KGMB only surpassed it with the addition of KHNL viewers. ### Notable former on-air staff - Maria Quiban – weather anchor, 1995–1998 (now with KTTV in Los Angeles) ## Technical information ### Satellite stations As with other major television stations in Hawaii, KHNL operates satellite stations across the Hawaiian Islands to rebroadcast the station's programming outside of metropolitan Honolulu. KSIX-TV in Hilo and KOGG in Wailuku broadcast KHNL, K5, and KGMB: KHNL is also rebroadcast on translator K32IX-D in Lihue. ### Subchannels of KHNL KHNL's signal is multiplexed, offering the K5 subchannel as well as a simulcast of KFVE, the Telemundo affiliate in Kailua-Kona:
39,873,985	Joshua Soule Zimmerman	1,128,359,710	American politician	[ "1874 births", "1962 deaths", "19th-century American lawyers", "20th-century American businesspeople", "20th-century American lawyers", "20th-century American politicians", "American orchardists", "American people of German descent", "Burials at Indian Mound Cemetery", "Businesspeople from West Virginia", "Businesspeople in agriculture", "County prosecuting attorneys in West Virginia", "Democratic Party members of the West Virginia House of Delegates", "George Washington University Law School alumni", "Methodists from West Virginia", "People from La Plata, Maryland", "People from Romney, West Virginia", "People from Woodstock, Virginia", "Politicians from Washington, D.C.", "Randolph–Macon College alumni", "Roanoke College alumni", "Southern Methodists", "United States Census Bureau people", "West Virginia lawyers" ]	Joshua Soule Zimmerman (January 16, 1874 – September 2, 1962) was an American lawyer, politician, and orchardist in the U.S. state of West Virginia. In the early years of the 20th century, Zimmerman served as the Prosecuting Attorney for Hampshire County and as a Democratic member of the West Virginia House of Delegates. Zimmerman was born in La Plata to Reverend George Henry Zimmerman, a Methodist pastor and church administrator. He began his post-secondary education at Roanoke College and received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Randolph–Macon College in 1892. He worked as a clerk in the United States Census Office in Washington, D.C., and earned a Bachelor of Laws degree in 1896 from Columbian University Law School. Following his graduation, Zimmerman opened a law office in Romney, West Virginia, in July 1896 and engaged in the practice of law there. He provided legal services to a number of companies and organizations including Capon Valley Bank, Hampshire County's Legal Advisory Board, the Hampshire County Food Administration, and Hampshire County orchard owners. Zimmerman was the secretary for the Winchester and Western Railroad. While serving in the West Virginia House of Delegates, Zimmerman was appointed by West Virginia Governor John Jacob Cornwell to serve on a West Virginia Legislature select committee charged with drafting a road transportation bill known as the West Virginia State Road Law. He was again appointed by Governor Cornwell to serve on a similar select committee following the ratification of the "Good Roads Amendment" of the Constitution of West Virginia in 1920. In addition to serving in the West Virginia House of Delegates, Zimmerman was the chairman of the Hampshire County Democratic Party Committee and a member of the Second District Congressional Committee; he also participated in judicial, senatorial, and state conventions. Zimmerman played an active role in the commercial apple orchard industry of Hampshire County, and he operated at least three commercial orchards there. ## Early life and family Joshua Soule Zimmerman was born on January 16, 1874, near La Plata in Charles County, Maryland, at the ancestral home of his mother, Henrietta A. Rowe Zimmerman. His father was Reverend George Henry Zimmerman, a Methodist pastor and church administrator whose family originated from an estate in Baltimore County near Baltimore, Maryland. Zimmerman's father presided over the Moorefield district of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (1894–1898). Zimmerman had two brothers: Edgar Rowe Zimmerman of Ruxton, Maryland, and George Henry Zimmerman of Whitesburg, Kentucky. The pastoral profession of Zimmerman's father caused his family to relocate to a number of towns throughout Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia. Zimmerman spent the majority of his youth and received his early education in Woodstock and Salem, Virginia. His father was then transferred to Romney, West Virginia, to preside over the Moorefield district of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. ## Education Zimmerman attended Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia, for two sessions from 1885 to 1886. In 1888, he began attending Randolph–Macon College in Ashland, Virginia, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1892. Following his graduation, Zimmerman worked briefly as a tutor on a plantation and operated a school at Shelby, Mississippi. In 1893, Zimmerman accepted the position of a clerk in the United States Census Office in Washington, D.C., during the second administration of President Grover Cleveland. He remained at the office through the completion of work associated with the 1890 United States census. During his three years serving in the United States Census Office, Zimmerman completed night courses in jurisprudence at Columbian University Law School, and he graduated from the institution with a Bachelor of Laws degree in 1896. While attending Columbian University, Zimmerman also served as editor of the 1896 Class Book and resided at 915 I Street, Northwest near Mount Vernon Square. Zimmerman was a member of the Phi Delta Theta social fraternity and of the Phi Delta Phi legal honor society. He was later made a Golden Legionnaire of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity. While attending the Columbian University, Zimmerman was a member of the law school's debating society. ## Law career Following his graduation from Columbian University Law School, Zimmerman opened his law office in Romney, West Virginia, in July 1896 and began engaging in the practice of law there. His first legal case argued before the Hampshire County Circuit Court was West Virginia v. Smith, in which his client was charged with "breaking and entering with intent to commit larceny". Zimmerman lost this case. In Hu Maxwell and Howard Llewellyn Swisher's History of Hampshire County, West Virginia: From Its Earliest Settlement to the Present (1897), Zimmerman was described as "a young man" who had "made his success at the bar of Hampshire". Zimmerman's law practice expanded, and he began arguing cases in adjoining West Virginia county courts and in both the West Virginia state and United States federal courts. Only seven years after starting his law practice, Zimmerman was appointed to fill the unexpired term of Prosecuting Attorney for Hampshire County, William B. Cornwell, who had resigned from the position. Zimmerman was subsequently reelected twice to the position, and he served as Hampshire County's prosecuting attorney from 1900 until 1910 (a total of nine years and three months). Zimmerman also served as one of three chancery commissioners for Hampshire County, during which he served with Christian Streit White, Robert White, and James Sloan Kuykendall. He was a member of the West Virginia Bar Association. Zimmerman was the lawyer for the Capon Valley Bank, headquartered in Wardensville, West Virginia, and provided his legal services to secure the bank's incorporation. During World War I, Zimmerman served as a member of Hampshire County's Legal Advisory Board and was the lawyer for the County Food Administration. Following the outbreak of World War I, Zimmerman registered for the draft during the registration for men aged 18 through 45 under the Selective Service Act of 1917. After the Winchester and Western Railroad Company received its charter on August 31, 1916, to build and operate a rail line connecting Wardensville and the Lost River valley of West Virginia to the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and the Cumberland Valley Railroad at Winchester, Virginia, Zimmerman served as the company's secretary. ## Political career Zimmerman became a prominent leader within the Democratic Party in Hampshire County, which was the dominant political party in the county. At various times, Zimmerman served as the chairman of the Hampshire County Democratic Party Committee, a member of the Second District Congressional Committee, and attended judicial, senatorial, and state conventions. ### West Virginia House of Delegates Zimmerman was nominated as the Democratic Party candidate for a seat representing Hampshire County in the West Virginia House of Delegates in 1920. He won the seat against Republican Party candidate C. W. Rogers in the November 1920 general election and subsequently served as a member of the West Virginia House of Delegates from 1921 to 1924. Following his election, Zimmerman was made the Democratic Party's minority floor leader in the West Virginia House of Delegates. Zimmerman was appointed by West Virginia Governor John Jacob Cornwell to serve on a West Virginia Legislature select committee charged with drafting a road transportation bill under West Virginia Senate Joint Resolution No. 21 of May 21, 1919, known as the West Virginia State Road Law. The new West Virginia State Road Law became necessary following the authorization of a 50 million USD bond issue during the 1920 general election. Zimmerman was again appointed by Governor Cornwell to serve on a similar select committee following the ratification of the "Good Roads Amendment" of the Constitution of West Virginia in 1920. During the 1921 legislative session, Zimmerman was assigned to the Judiciary, Roads, and Game and Fish committees. Also during the 1921 legislative session, he sponsored the following bills: - H.B. 274 (Ch. 158), which gave county courts the authority to impose a "special building levy" not to exceed 30 cents for the purpose of completing the construction or repair of county courthouses. - H.B. 392 (Ch. 49), which provided for the establishment of a county high school for Hampshire County and authorized the Hampshire County Board of Education to impose a levy not to exceed 30 cents for three years to construct and maintain the high school. During the 1923 session, Zimmerman was majority floor leader. He also served on the standing committees of the Judiciary, Humane Institutions and Public Buildings, Railroads, Game and Fish, Redistricting, and Rules. Throughout his tenure in the West Virginia House of Delegates, Zimmerman supported legislation that strictly enforced prohibition. ## Agricultural pursuits Zimmerman played an active role in the commercial apple orchard industry of Hampshire County, in which he was responsible for the promotion of several of the county's orchard companies, served as an officer and legal advisor to orchard companies, and owned 150 acres (0.61 km<sup>2</sup>) of his own commercial apple orchards. In November 1906, Zimmerman, Henry Bell Gilkeson, R. W. Dailey, Jr., and P. J. Ruckman were incorporators of the Mill Mountain Orchard Company, which operated orchards along the top of Mill Creek Mountain west of Romney. According to the 1919 Census of the Commercial Apple Orchards in West Virginia published by the West Virginia Department of Agriculture, Zimmerman was engaged in the management of three commercial apple orchards near Romney, West Virginia: Fairfax Orchard Company, which produced Stark Delicious apples; Gilkeson, Hart & Zimmerman Orchard, which produced York Imperial, Pennsylvania Winesap, Ben Davis, Stayman Winesap, Jonathan, Grimes Golden, and Rome Beauty apples; and the Mill Mountain Orchard Company, which produced York Imperial, Stayman Winesap, Pennsylvania Winesap, Rambo, Northern Spy, Canada Red, Ben Davis, Grimes Golden, Jonathan, Rome Beauty, Yellow Transparent, and Stark apples. ## Marriage and children Zimmerman married Kitty Campbell Vance on October 10, 1900, at the Vance family's Ashbrook farm, near Romney, West Virginia. Kitty Campbell Vance was the daughter of John T. and Mary Elizabeth Inskeep Vance of Romney. Zimmerman and his wife Kitty had four children: - Mary Elizabeth Zimmerman Kump (March 21, 1903 – 1994), married Garnett Kerr Kump in 1940 in Hampshire County, West Virginia - George Henry Zimmerman (February 20, 1905 – 1987) - Kitty Campbell Zimmerman McCracken, married James Paris McCracken of Cisco, Texas at the Romney Presbyterian Church in Romney, West Virginia on August 20, 1946 - Vance Zimmerman (August 5, 1910 – September 27, 1976), married Mildred Sites in 1937 in Hampshire County, West Virginia Zimmerman was an active layperson in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and served as a steward of the Romney Methodist Episcopal Church, South, congregations. He also served for a number of years as the superintendent of the congregation's Sunday school program, taught the men's bible class, and served on the church's board of trustees. Zimmerman represented the church in the Moorefield district and at annual conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Despite his involvement in the Southern Methodist church, his wife Kitty and several of his children were Presbyterian. In addition, Zimmerman was the dean of the South Branch Bar Association. ## Later life and death Zimmerman's wife Kitty predeceased him in 1937. He died at the Williamsport Sanitarium in Williamsport, Maryland, on September 2, 1962, following several months of illness. His funeral was held on September 5, 1962, at the Romney Methodist Church. Zimmerman was interred with his wife Kitty at Indian Mound Cemetery in Romney, West Virginia. He had practiced law in Romney, West Virginia, for 66 years.
3,488,609	Central Province, Zambia	1,172,567,055	Province of Zambia	[ "Central Province, Zambia", "Provinces of Zambia" ]	Central Province is one of Zambia's ten provinces. The provincial capital is Kabwe, which is the home of the Mulungushi Rock of Authority. Central Province has an area of 94,394 km (58,654 mi). It borders eight other provinces and has eleven districts. The total area of forest in the province is 9,095,566 ha (22,475,630 acres), and it has a national park and three game management areas. The first mine in the region was opened up in 1905 making the then Broken Hill town the first mining town. In 1966, he town's name was reverted to its indigenous name - Kabwe (Kabwe-Ka Mukuba) meaning 'ore' or 'smelting'. As of 2010, Central Province had a population of 1,307,111, comprising 10.05% of the total Zambian population. The literacy rate stood at 70.90% against a national average of 70.2%. Bemba was the most spoken language with 31.80% speaking it, and Lala was the majority clan in the province, comprising 20.3% of population. Central Province contains 20.64% of the total area of cultivated land in Zambia and contributes 23.85% of the total agricultural production in the country, with wheat being the major crop. The Ikubi Lya Loongo festival during July and Ichibwela Mushi festival during September are the major festivals celebrated in the province. Kafue National Park, the country's largest, is shared with Southern and North-Western Provinces, and other natural areas include Blue Lagoon National Park, Kasanka National Park, the Bangweulu Wetlands, South Luangwa National Park, the Lunsemfwa and Lukusashi river valleys and Lukanga Swamp. ## History Central Province is considered the birthplace of the national movement of Zambia. The United National Independence Party (UNIP) was founded in Kabwe by Kenneth Kaunda, who later became the first President of Zambia and remained in office from 1964 to 1991. The provincial capital is Kabwe, home of the Mulungushi Rock of Authority. This is a historic site, an isolated flat-topped hill, where in 1960, UNIP met for the first time, away from the eye of the colonial administration. It is still used for political gatherings, but the open air assemblies have been replaced by a conference centre built nearby at Mulungushi University. The Mulungushi River gives its name to many historical policies, buildings and organizations. The 1968 Mulungushi Declaration proclaimed the country as a socialist nation. Mulungushi Hall in the capital is the venue for most international conventions. As of 2013, Chisamba, before a part of Chibombo District, was declared a district on its own by the President, Michael Sata. As of 2015, Ngabwe, before a part of Kapiri Mposhi District, was declared a district on its own, with a proposal for it to become Zambia's new capital city by former infrastructure minister Lucky Mulusa. In 2012, President Michael Sata proposed for Itezhi-Tezhi District to be moved from Southern Province to Central Province, which eventually happened and in February 2018, President Edgar Lungu moved Shibuyunji District from Lusaka Province to Central Province. Chitambo District was also created by splitting Serenje District in 2012 and Luano District was also created by splitting Mkushi District in 2012. Adding Chisamba District, Ngabwe District, Itezhi-Tezhi District, Shibuyunji District, Luano District & Chitambo District to the original districts brings the total to 12 districts as of 2018. On 17 November 2021, President Hakainde Hichilema officially declared Itezhi-Tezhi District as part of Southern Province (no-longer part of Central Province), thereby returning the district to its original province. So, Central Province has 11 districts as of 2022. ## Geography Central Province has an area of 94,394 km (58,654 mi) and shares a border with eight other provinces. The total area of forest in the province is 9,095,566 ha (22,475,630 acres). The province has a national park and three game management areas. There are six districts in the province. The province has fertile soil conducive for the growth of cotton and maize. Lukanga Swamp has been identified by the International Monetary Fund as a potential place for a fishing industry. Precious metals are found in the Mkushi area, gold in Mumbwa, and coal in Kapiri Mposhi. Lukanga Swamp is a permanent swamp covering 1,850 km<sup>2</sup> at the mouths and along the Lukanga and Kafue rivers. It contains many lagoons like Lake Chiposhye and Lake Suye. TAZARA, the Tanzania-Zambia railway line, has a major terminal in the city. It provides connectivity to the port in Tanzania from Zambia. ## Demographics According to the 2010 Zambian census, Central Province had a population of 1,307,111, comprising 10.05% of the total Zambian population of 13,092,666. There were 648,465 males and 658,646 females, making the sex ratio 1,016 females for every 1,000 males, compared to the national average of 1,028. The literacy rate stood at 70.90% against a national average of 70.2%. Approximately 74.87% of people lived in rural areas, while 25.13% lived in urban areas. The total area of the province is 94,394 km<sup>2</sup> and the population density was 13.80 per km<sup>2</sup>. The decadal population growth of the province was 2.60%. The median age in the province at the time of marriage was 20.6. The average household size was 5.5, with the average size of families headed by women being 4.8 and 5.8 for families headed by men. In the province, 54.30% were eligible to vote. The unemployment rate was 12.70%. The total fertility rate was 6.3, the complete birth rate was 6.1, the crude birth rate was 36.0, the child–woman ratio at birth was 785, the general fertility rate was 156, the gross reproduction rate was 2.5, and the net reproduction rate was 1.8. The labour force constituted 52.20% of the total population. Out of the labour force, 62.7% were men and 42.2% were women. The annual growth rate of the labour force was 2.2%. Bemba was the most spoken language with 31.80% speaking it. The total population in the province with albinism stood at 3,007. The life expectancy at birth stood at 52 compared to the national average of 51. Lala was the largest clan in the province, comprising 20.3% of population. ## Administration The provincial administration is set up purely for administrative purposes. The province is headed by a minister appointed by the President and there are ministries of central government for each province. The administrative head of the province is the Permanent Secretary, appointed by the President. There is a Deputy Permanent Secretary, heads of government departments and civil servants at the provincial level. Central Province is divided into eleven districts: - Chibombo District - Chisamba District - Chitambo District - Kabwe District - Kapiri Mposhi District - Luano District - Mkushi District - Mumbwa District - Ngabwe District - Serenje District - Shibuyunji District All of the district headquarters are the same as the district names. There are eleven councils in the province, each of which is headed by an elected representative, called a councilor. Each councilor holds office for three years. The administrative staff of the council is selected based on the Local Government Service Commission from within or outside the district. The office of the provincial government is located in each of the district headquarters and has provincial local government officers and auditors. Each council is responsible for raising and collecting local taxes and the budgets of the council are audited and submitted every year after the annual budget. The elected members of the council do not draw salaries, but are paid allowances from the council. Central Province is predominantly rural and hence there are no city or municipal councils. The government stipulates 63 different functions for the councils, with the majority of them being infrastructure management and local administration. Councils are mandated to maintain each of their community centres, zoos, local parks, drainage systems, playgrounds, cemeteries, caravan sites, libraries, museums and art galleries. They also work with specific government departments for helping in agriculture, conservation of natural resources, providing postal service, and establishing and maintaining hospitals, schools and colleges. The councils prepare schemes that encourage community participation. ## Economy and society As of 2014, a total of 6,853 (59.2%) out of 11,576 candidates obtained a Full School Certificate (the Grade 12 examination). The unemployment rate was 10% and the youth unemployment rate was 14.2% in 2016. As per the Living Condition Monitoring survey of 2015, malaria was the most common illness and accounted for 14.3% of reported deaths. HIV prevalence in the province as of 2013–14 was 12.5% overall, 14.8% for women, and 9.8% for men. The total area of crops planted during 2014 in the province was 391,593.23 hectares, which constituted 20.64% of the total area cultivated in Zambia. The net production stood at 971,484 metric tonnes, which formed 23.85% of the total agricultural production in the country. Wheat was the major crop in the province with 99,758 metric tonnes, constituting 49.51% of the national output. The annual rate of inflation in the province as of August 2017 was 7.2% against a national rate of 6.3%, and the provincial contribution to the national inflation during the same period was 0.8. ## Culture The Ikubi Lya Loongo festival is celebrated in Mumbwa district by the Sala tribe during July, the Ichibwela Mushi festival is celebrated in Mkushi district by the Bisa/Swaka/Lala tribe during September, the Musaka Jikubi festival is celebrated in Mumbwa district by the Kaonde tribe during September, the Kulamba Kubwalo festival is celebrated in Chibombo district by the Lenje tribe during October, and the Ikubi Lya Malumbe-Munyama festival is celebrated in Mumbwa district by the Kaonde Ila tribe during October. The Kulamba Kubwalo festival is attended by 250,000 people annually to pay tribute to their leader and celebrate the harvest. ## Environment Kafue National Park, the country's largest national park, is shared with the Southern and North-Western Provinces. Blue Lagoon National Park located in the northern part of the Kafue Flats, Kasanka National Park in the border of Bangweulu Wetlands, South Luangwa National Park, the Lunsemfwa and Lukusashi River valleys and Lukanga Swamp are the major wildlife and game areas in the province. Kundalila, a waterfall in Serenje district, is a declared national heritage site. ## See also ## General and cited references
51,410,400	The Gambia at the 2016 Summer Paralympics	1,146,950,297	null	[ "2016 in Gambian sport", "Nations at the 2016 Summer Paralympics", "The Gambia at the Paralympics" ]	The Gambia sent a delegation to compete at the 2016 Summer Paralympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from 7–18 September 2016. This was the nation's second appearance at a Paralympics, following their first participation in the 2012 London Paralympics. The Gambia sent one athlete, Demba Jarju, who failed to advance from his heat in the men's 100 meters T54 event. ## Background The Gambia had made its debut in Paralympic competition at the 2012 Summer Paralympics., but have never won a Paralympic medal. The Gambia has participated in every Summer Olympic Games since the 1984 Los Angeles Games. The 2016 Summer Paralympics were held from 7–18 September 2016 with a total of 4,328 athletes representing 159 National Paralympic Committees taking part. The only athlete sent by the Gambia to Rio was Demba Jarju. He was chosen as the flag bearer for the opening ceremony. ## Disability classifications Every participant at the Paralympics has their disability grouped into one of five disability categories: amputation, which may be congenital or sustained through injury or illness; cerebral palsy; wheelchair athletes, though there is often overlap between this and other categories; visual impairment, including blindness; and Les autres, which is any physical disability that does not fall strictly under one of the other categories, like dwarfism or multiple sclerosis. Each Paralympic sport then has its own classifications, dependent upon the specific physical demands of competition. Events are given a code, made of numbers and letters, describing the type of event and classification of the athletes competing. Some sports, such as athletics, divide athletes by both the category and severity of their disabilities. Other sports, for example swimming, group competitors from different categories together, the only separation being based on the severity of the disability. ## Athletics Demba Jarju was 27 years old at the time of the Rio Paralympics. He made his second Paralympic, having first represented The Gambia at the 2012 Summer Paralympics. He lost the use of both legs from contracting polio at the age of ten, and races in a wheelchair. He qualified for these Paralympics at an event in Morocco. On 16 September, he competed in the heats of the men's 100 meters T54. Drawn into the first heat, he completed the race with a time of 18.82 seconds, which put him seventh and last in his heat, and therefore unable to advance to the final eight. The gold medal was ultimately won by Leo-Pekka Tähti of Finland, the silver by China's Liu Yang, and the bronze medal was taken by Kenny van Weeghel of the Netherlands. ## See also - The Gambia at the 2016 Summer Olympics
20,117,307	Izzat Darwaza	1,138,748,920	Palestinian politician and historian (1888–1984)	[ "1888 births", "1984 deaths", "20th-century Muslim scholars of Islam", "20th-century Palestinian historians", "20th-century memoirists", "20th-century short story writers", "Academic staff of An-Najah National University", "Anti-Zionism", "Arab people in Mandatory Palestine", "Arabs in Ottoman Palestine", "Date of birth missing", "Date of death missing", "Independence Party (Mandatory Palestine) politicians", "Ottoman Arab nationalists", "Palestinian Arab nationalists", "Palestinian memoirists", "Palestinian nationalists", "Palestinian short story writers", "People from Nablus", "People of the 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine" ]	Muhammad 'Izzat Darwazeh (Arabic: محمد عزة دروزة; 1888–1984) was a Palestinian politician, historian, and educator from Nablus. Early in his career, he worked as an Ottoman bureaucrat in Palestine and Lebanon. Darwaza had long been a sympathizer of Arab nationalism and became an activist of that cause following the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire in 1916, joining the nationalist al-Fatat society. As such, he campaigned for the union of Greater Syria (modern-day Levant) and vehemently opposed Zionism and foreign mandates in Arab lands. From 1922 to 1927, he served as an educator and as the principal at the an-Najah National School where he implemented a pro-Arab nationalist educational system, promoting the ideas of Arab independence and unity. Darwaza's particular brand of Arab nationalism was influenced by Islam and his beliefs in Arab unity and the oneness of Arabic culture. Later, Darwaza co-founded the nationalist Istiqlal party in Palestine and was a principal organizer of anti-British demonstrations. In 1937, he was exiled to Damascus as a result of his activities and from there he helped support the Arab revolt in the Mandatory Palestine. He was incarcerated in Damascus by French authorities for his involvement in the revolt, and while in prison he began to study the Qur'an and its interpretations. In 1945, after he was released, Darwaza eventually compiled his own interpretation entitled al-Tafsir al-Hadith. In 1946, he joined the Arab Higher Committee led by Haj Amin al-Husseini, but resigned the next year after being disenfranchised by al-Husayni's methods. He left for Syria afterward and briefly aided in the unity talks between Syria and Egypt in the mid-1950s. By the time of his death in 1984, Darwaza had written over thirty books and published numerous articles on the Palestinian question, Arab history, and Islam. ## Biography ### Early life and background Darwaza was born to a middle-class Sunni Muslim mercantile family in Nablus. The Darwaza family had long been involved in textiles and had extensive trade relationships with merchants in Beirut and Damascus. In his memoirs, Izzat writes "The import of [textile] goods from the outside was, for the most part, through Beirut and Damascus." Izzat's father, 'Abd al-Hadi Darwaza and his paternal grandfather Darwish Darwaza, owned a store in the Khan al-Tujjar of Nablus. Izzat recalled, "From what I remember from my father and through my grandfather, the title merchant or merchants in Nablus mostly referred to owners of commercial textile and cloth shops. In Nablus, these shops were confined, or mostly confined, to a caravansary called Khan al-Tujjar, in the middle of Nablus." Izzat received elementary and preparatory education in Ottoman government-run schools in the city. In addition to Arabic, he learned Turkish and English, as well as a basic knowledge of French which he strengthened in by the end of his formal education. Darwaza left school without going to Istanbul or Beirut to finish his education as was the custom of his generation. Instead, he educated himself, and according to Rashid Khalidi, became "a self-taught intellectual." ### Loyalty to dissidence toward the Ottoman Empire Originally, Darwaza supported the Ottoman Empire based on his feelings of identification with Islam and of belonging to the larger Ottoman Muslim ummah ("nation"). In 1906, he served in the local Ottoman administration as a clerk in the Department of Telegraphic and Postal Services (DTPS) in Nablus. His first assignment in that department was for the District of Beisan and northern Palestine (the Galilee and northern Samaria). He was also an Arabist and was enthusiastic about the Young Turk Revolution in 1908, expecting that the new Ottoman government would institute reforms and grant the Arabs autonomy within the framework of the empire. His loyalty to the Ottomans eroded, however, due to the impact of the new governments's Turkification policies which he viewed as repressive against his ideals. Because of his dissatisfaction with the Young Turks, Darwaza was driven to support Arab independence from the empire. In 1908, he joined the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), but withdrew soon after because of its Turkish nationalist political agenda. He played an active role in establishing a branch for the Party of Harmony and Freedom in Nablus in 1911. The party was founded in Istanbul and joined by Arab members to counter the policies of the CUP. In 1913, he joined an anti-Zionist group based in Nablus that sought to prevent the sale of Arab-owned land to Jews by submitting petitions to the Ottoman sultan, or by buying land for sale to preempt its purchase by Jews. In June 1913, he helped to prepare and became secretary of the First Palestinian Congress (also known as the Arab Congress of 1913) in Paris. In congress, he was also the delegate for the Jamma'in subdistrict of the District of Nablus. Meanwhile, Darwaza was still working in the DTPS. In 1914, he established the Arab Scientific Society whose purpose was to spread Arabic culture in the region through the establishment of Arabic schools. The society did not succeed, however, due to the outbreak of World War I. Within the DTPS, Darwaza was appointed commissioner and deputy for the Nablus Post Office. He was promoted again—this time as director of postal stamp sales in Beirut. ### Promoting unity with Syria During World War I, Darwaza served as Postal Directorate-General of Beirut and retained this post until 1918. In 1916, while serving with the Ottoman army in the Sinai Peninsula, he joined the underground al-Fatat organization through Ahmad Qadri, a high-ranking member from Damascus. The aim of al-Fatat was to liberate and unite the Arab lands under Ottoman rule. In the wake of the Arab Revolt of 1916, Darwaza left the Ottoman civil service to serve in King Faisal's provisional government in Damascus. Ideologically, Darwaza became an Arab nationalist endorsing the concept of a Greater Syrian Arab state. Following the World War I Armistice, Darwaza held several political posts including Secretary-General of al-Fatat from May 1919 to March 1920, Secretary of the Muslim-Christian Association's Nablus branch, and Secretary of the First Palestine Arab Congress in Jerusalem in 1919. During the spring and summer of 1919, a vigorous political campaign was waged by the Arab politicians in Palestine who were divided into "Younger Politicians" and "Older Politicians". The campaign was centered on the political future of Palestine, and Darwaza, a Younger Politician, played a central role. The Younger Politicians consisted of Arab nationalists who sought to unite Palestine with King Faisal's Syria while the Older Politicians consisted of Palestinian nationalists who preferred that Palestine be an independent entity. Darwaza and Hafiz Kanaan—another leading al-Fatat member from Nablus—lobbied Arab groups in Jerusalem to advocate Syro-Palestinian unity before the arrival of the King-Crane Commission on 10 June 1919. They first met with Haj Amin al-Husseini and Kamil al-Husayni of al-Nadi al-Arabi party and they immediately expressed their support. They also suggested that Darwaza meet Raghib al-Nashashibi, Hussam ad-Din Jarallah, and Aref al-Dajani, supporters of independence. Darwaza convinced Nashashibi to gather some of the Older Politicians of Jerusalem to a meeting at his house. When it was made clear that Musa al-Husayni, a leader of the Older Politicians, was now in favor of unity, all of the other Older Politicians followed suit. When the commission arrived in Jaffa, it concluded on 27 June that it was in favor of Syro-Palestinian unity under a British Mandate. In the first week of July 1919, the General Syrian Congress (GSC) held its first meeting in Damascus and Darwaza was its secretary. The GSC called for the immediate independence of Syria as a sovereign state under a constitutional monarchy and underlined its opposition to the establishment of Zionism in southern Syria (Palestine). Along with Haj Amin al-Husseini and Aref al-Aref, Darwaza founded and became an officer of the Palestinian Society in Damascus. The organization urged all societies and clubs in Palestine to cooperate and condemn the San Remo Conference's decision to grant Great Britain a mandate over Palestine and Transjordan. The hope of Darwaza and the Younger Politicians for unity with Syria were curtailed when it became known that King Faisal was aligning himself with the leaders of the Zionist movement because "they [the Zionists] were helping us [the Arabs] in the [Paris Peace] conference." Afterward, Darwaza believed King Faisal did not devote to the Palestine issue its deserved attention. Faisal was deposed by the French in July 1920. An event that further deteriorated Darwaza's ambitions of Arab unity was the confirmation of the British Mandate over Palestine at the San Remo Conference on 24 April 1920. His experience in Damascus revealed to him that the universalism of Arab nationalism was not as concrete as its advocates had thought, and the military might of the European powers—France and Great Britain—were an overwhelming force to contend with. ### Educator in Nablus Darwaza continued his political activity, representing Nablus in the Fourth Palestinian Congress in May 1921 and the Seventh Palestinian Congress in June 1928. From 1922 to 1927, he served as the principal of the an-Najah National School (later to become an-Najah National University) where he initiated and nurtured an Arab nationalist political educational process. Darwaza wrote textbooks and was an educator himself. One of his students who later became a nationalist politician, Akram Zu'aiter, wrote that Darwaza "used to give us a weekly lesson on the principles of Nationalism and [modern] society, in a way which sharpened our thought and broadened our horizons." Zuaiter also recalls that Darwaza wrote up nationalist and historical plays that his students would perform in. In 1927, Rashid al-Haj Ibrahim, the leader of the Young Men's Muslim Association of Haifa, a prominent merchant, and future associate of Darwaza, invited him to his home to speak to a large group of students and notables about nationalist (qawmiyya) and patriotic (wataniyya) education. This was recognition that Darwaza's contribution to the spread of Arab nationalist sentiments gained influence not only in an-Najah School, but throughout Palestine. ### Fight against the British Mandate Darwaza became a member of the Arab Executive Committee and in 1930 was appointed by rival nationalist Haj Amin al-Husseini (then the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem) as the General Administrator of the Waqf (Islamic religious trust) under the Supreme Muslim Council. In 1931, he convinced his city's MCA to change its name to the Patriotic Arab Association. Unlike other Arab politicians at the time, Darwaza supported a combination of pan-Arabism, Islamism, and dedication to the Palestinian nationalist ideal. He began to edit in the al-Ja'miyya al-Arabiyya newspaper in the early 1930s and in December 1931-January 1932, he wrote articles encouraging Arabs to protest against British policies in the Middle East, to unite in the face of growing dangers, and to renew their drive towards freedom and independence. In August 1932, he along with Awni Abd al-Hadi and others founded the Istiqlal (Independence) party in Palestine, an offshoot of al-Fatat. Originally, the Istiqlal operated in Syria, then Transjordan, but reassembled in Palestine after facing disappointing circumstances in both those territories. The party coaxed Palestinians towards defying British rule by staging demonstrations and political and social boycotts. Darwaza refused to allow the Istiqlal to participate in meetings between local Palestinian political parties and the British high-commissioner. Darwaza wrote an article on 21 June 1933, vehemently attacking Palestinian "vested interests". He argued that the wealthy Arab notables of Palestine were subservient to the British and the Zionists and would willingly leave Palestine for other countries, while the poor and middle-class Arabs were forced by economic circumstances to remain in Palestine during their political struggles. Darwaza helped instigate and organize the 1933 demonstrations in Jaffa which protested British policies in Palestine and continued allowances of Jewish immigration. Darwaza was one of the principal organizers of the 1936–39 Arab revolt in Palestine which first erupted in his hometown of Nablus with the launch of the Palestinian general strike. Along with Abd al-Hadi, Darwaza was arrested by the British authorities in June and imprisoned in the military camp at Sarafand al-Amar. The Mufti sent a delegation consisting of Darwaza, Mu'in al-Madi, and Abd al-Hadi to Baghdad, then to Riyadh to discuss the situation and upon their return on 6 January 1937, they revealed that the advice given to them was to cease hostilities. During the revolt, in 1937, Darwaza was exiled from Palestine by British authorities to Damascus. Later in that year, Darwaza held several meetings with Nuri al-Sa'id of Iraq to explore various solutions to help the Arabs avoid appearing intransigent. Despite attempts to calm the situation, in Damascus, Darwaza established and headed the Central Committee for National Jihad in Palestine which echoed Izz al-Din al-Qassam's call for a "holy war" against the British and Zionism. Darwaza had many encounters with al-Qassam, describing him as "a man lacking in arrogance or self-love. He was open and available to all of the people and the people loved him. And he lived the life of a mujahid." Darwaza worked closely with the Mufti, who was now under house arrest in Beirut, to garner support and supplies for the revolt and supervise the Arab rebels in Palestine. In late 1939, he was accused by French military authorities of helping Palestinian rebels in the revolt, tried by a military court, and sentenced to five years imprisonment in the Citadel of Damascus. While his exile by the British abruptly curtailed his political life, his imprisonment marked the beginning of a new life wherein the Quran becomes a major concern for the next several years. He was released in November 1944. After his release, Darwaza was unable to return to Nablus because British authorities had issued an order preventing him from entering Palestine. As a result, he left for Turkey, mostly staying in Bursa until the end of 1945. The Mufti re-established the Arab Higher Committee (AHC) in late 1946 and Darwaza joined the ten-member council upon a request from the Mufti. Darwaza, along with Emil Ghuri and Mu'in al-Madi, served as the AHC's delegates to the September 1947 convention of the Arab League's Political Committee in Lebanon. With support from the Transjordanian representative, Salih Jaber, the Prime Minister of Iraq, openly criticized the delegates and questioned the AHC's right to even send delegates to the convention. Later that year, Darwaza resigned from the AHC due to the Mufti's unbending attitude towards wider representation. ### Later life After resigning from the AHC, Darwaza spent the rest of his life in the modern state of Syria where he left politics to concentrate on literature. Although he did much of his writing in the 1930s and 1940s, he did not have any of his works published until the 1960s. As a pan-Arab intellectual, Darwaza aided in establishing the union between Syria and Egypt forming the short-lived United Arab Republic. After Egypt adopted its 1956 constitution declaring that it was an Arab country and its people a part of the Arab nation, Darwaza concluded that Egypt and Syria were in a position to unite. When unity negotiations underwent, he suggested several forms of federation, such as the American, Soviet, and Indian models, but did not recommend any specific model for an Arab state. Darwaza did, however, suggest that the institution of a federation between Egypt and Syria would be the first step towards the realization of a comprehensive union. In 1983 Darwaza granted Palestinian historian Muhammad Y. Muslih an eight-day interview and allowed him to photo-copy his memoirs in entirety. Muslih noted that Darwaza was failing in health at the time. He died in Damascus in 1984 at the age of 96. Darwaza had three daughters, Najah, Salma, and Rudaina and a son, Zuhair. ## Literary works One of the first modern histories of the Arab nation in contrast to a history of an individual Arab country was composed by Darwaza in the late 1920s under the title Lessons of Arab History: From Antiquity to Present Times. In the book, Darwaza begins by describing the origins of the Semitic peoples, the rise of Islam, the end of Arab rule in the Middle East by Turkic groups, and the foreign rule over the Arabs by Western powers. The book was intended to be used as a textbook in primary and secondary schools throughout the British Mandates of Palestine and later Iraq, hence its simplified and direct language. Nonetheless, it played a pioneering role in the development of pan-Arabism. In 1934, Darwaza published a widely read story, The Angel and the Land Broker, reflecting popular Arab sentiments against the growing "Zionist threat" and attacking brokers who tempted Palestinian land owners to sell their land to Jews. The story describes methods used by Zionists to entice Arab landowners to sell their land and the main characters in the story are an illiterate farmer and a Jewish girl from Tel Aviv who encourages the former to spend himself deep into debt, forcing him to sell his land at a price far below its value. Later in his lifetime after leaving politics, Darwaza published memoirs that discussed in detail the city of Nablus in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. According to Youssef Choueiri, "he gives a graphic and almost exhaustive description of his hometown... its mosques, residential quarters, orchards, industries, and inhabitants. Moreover, he dwells at length of the social composition of the town endeavoring to reveal the open conflict between 'feudal families' and the new generation of middle traders, functionaries, civil servants, and teachers." ### Quranic studies and interpretations While he was imprisoned in Damascus, Darwaza was provided with an opportunity to read and reflect upon the Quran. He states "I considered [this opportunity] an act of divine [favor] and started reading whatever books of exegesis and qur'anic studies were accessible to me." During his incarceration, he compiled three books dealing with the Quran and conceived the idea of writing a modern tafsir ("interpretation"). His time in Turkey exposed him to the libraries of Bursa and it was there where he wrote the rough draft of his tafsir entitled al-Tafsir al-Hadith. Darwaza states in this exegesis he would "uncover the wisdom of revelation, the fundamental concepts of the Qur'an and the whole range of its subject matter and present it in a new style and new sequential order." Al-Tafsir al-Hadith was generally aimed at the Muslim youth who had been alienated by the traditional interpretations of the Quran. Darwaza placed much emphasis on the close relationship between the text of the Quran and the environment in which it was revealed. He rejected the hadith which states the Qur'an was originally preserved on a tablet in the seventh heaven, sent down to lowest heaven and from there gradually to Muhammad. After the completion of the rough draft, he wrote a volume of four chapters, Qur'an al-Majid, which served as an introduction for the tafsir. Darwaza stresses a close connection between the Quran and the biography of the Muhammad (sira) and states that the Quran fully reflects various stages between the Quran and the career of Muhammad. He also emphasizes that both the angels and the jinn are spoken in the Quran not for their own sake, but to reinforce Muhammad's missions and goals. He contends that the presentation of the Quran and its suras was dictated by Muhammad and that the task of Abu Bakr was to collect the Quran between its two covers and transcribe it into one copy, while Uthman's task was to fix the transcription and unify it to prevent variant readings. He also expresses doubts that Ali, as it is alleged, had made a chronologically arranged collection. Darwaza was very critical of other modern interpreters who used certain verses of the Quran to deduce and support scientific theories. He argues that those people have done harm to Islam by trivializing the sacred character of the Quran. Darwaza was convinced that interpretations of the Quran were the only possible basis for any renewal and development of Islamic religious, political and social thought, and that the Quran was the only resource for Muslim reinterpretation of traditional norms in Islam and Islamic thinking. Since it was quite uncommon to follow a chronological order for a whole tafsir—which Darwaza did—he had to justify his position by seeking a fatwa from the muftis of Aleppo and Damascus. ## Legacy Throughout his life, Darwaza was an Arab nationalist and supported the unity of Syria and Palestine. His particular brand of Arab nationalism was influenced by Islam, his belief in Arab unity, and the oneness of Arabic culture. According to his perspective, the ideology's main points were the Arabic language, the Arab homeland, a shared Arab history and common Arab interests. Although Darwaza believed that Arab nationalism pre-dated Islam, he also maintained that Islam expanded Arab territory and "stamped them with the eternal mark of Arab nationalism." According to Muhammad Y. Muslih, this meant that Islam had provided Arabs with "spiritual, cultural, and legal unity and within the framework of that unity the Arab individual formed his moral and social beliefs, irrespective of where he lived and through it the Arabs were able to preserve national identity and maintain their culture in the face of foreign invaders, including the Ottomans". Darwaza contends that Arab nationalism is not a new concept borrowed from the West and asserts the constituents of Arab nationalism are stronger than those which make up the modern forms of nationalism in the world. His ideas helped the spread the word of secular pan-Arabism against religious nationalists and those who believed in separate Syrian, Lebanese, and Palestinian destinies. In the mid-1950s, Darwaza asserted that the first stage of Arab union should be based on a merger between Egypt and Syria. In his opinion, a union between the northern Arabs (Syria) and the southern Arabs (Egypt) would facilitate the adherence of other Arab states. He believed that Egypt's capabilities and human resources compelled it to fill the role of an Arab "Prussia". Darwaza remarked on Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egyptian president and founder of the short-lived union, saying "Since the Arab revolt against the Turks, no Arab leader has been up to the level of events except for Jamal 'Abd al-Nasir. He emerged and vanished like a shooting star." Rashid Khalidi states about Darwaza, "Moved as he was by the civilization of Arabs, he evoked a distant Arab past. For obvious reasons Islam was central to that past. But in the case of Darwaza, Islam was important not as the binding substance of the nation, but as a culture and civilization. In other words, culture, language, and history not religious solidarity were posited as the glue that was to hold the Arab nation together." According to Khalidi, Darwaza contributed to Arab nationalism in the practical and intellectual domains greatly. ## List of works ### History - Turkīya al-ḥadīta. (1946). - Ta'rīḫ Banī Isrā'īl min asfārihim. (1958). - Al-äḍīya al-filasṭīnīya muḫtalaf marāḥilihā. (1959). - Al-'Arab wal-'urūba min al-qarn at-tālit ḥatta l-qarn ar-rābi' 'ašar al-hiǧrī. (1959). - 'Urūbat Misr fi l-qadīm wal-hadīt au qåbl al-islām wa-ba'dahu. (1963). - 'Asr an-nabī 'alaih as-salām wa-bai'atuhu qabl al-ba'ta. (1964). - Našʼat al-ḥaraka al-ʻarabīja al-ḥadīta. (1971). - Fī sabīl qaḍīyat Filasṭīn wal-waḥda al-'arabīya wa-min waḥy an-nakba wa li-aǧl mu'āla-ǧatihā. (1972). - al-Jihād fī sabīl Allāh fi l-Qur'an̄ wal-ḥadīt. (1975). - Az-ziʻāmāt wa-'l-usar al-lubnānīja al-iqṭāʻīja ʻalā iḫtilāf aṭ-ṭawā'if. (1978). - Al-imārāt al-ʻarabīya as-šāmila fī Lubnān. (1978). - Al-imārāt al-ʻarabīya as-šāmila fi Jazīrat al-Furāt wa-šamāl Sūrīya. (1978). - al- Yahūd fi 'l-qurān al-karīm: sīratuhum wa-ah̲lāquhum wa-aḥwāluhum qabla 'l-baʻt̲a. Wa-ǧinsīyat al-Yahūd fi 'l-Ḥiǧāz fī zaman an-nabī. Wa-aḥwāluhum wa-ah̲lāquhum wa-mawāqifuhum min ad-daʻwa al-islāmīya wa-ma. (1980). - Al-imārāt al-ʻarabīya as-šāmila fī šarq al-Urdunn wa-Filasṭīn. (1981). - Al-imārāt al-ʻarabīya as-šāmila fī Wādi 'n-Nīl. (1981). - Al-imārāt al-ʻarabīya as-šāmila fi 'l-Maġrib al-aqṣā wa-'l-Jazā'ir wa-Tūnis wa-Lībīya. (1981). - Al-imārāt al-ʻarabīya as-šāmila fī Sūrīya al-wusṭā. (1981). - Al-imārāt al-ʻarabīya as-šāmila fi 'l-ʻIrāq. (1981). - Al-imārāt al-ʻarabīya as-šāmila fi Jazīrat al-ʻarab. (1983). - Mudakkirāt: siǧill ḥāfil bi-masīrat al-ḥaraka al-ʻarabīya wa-'l-qaḍīya al-filasṭīnīya hilal qarn min az-zaman: 1305-1404 hijra, 1887-1984. (1993). ### Islamic - Ad-Dustūr al-qur 'ānī fī šu'ūn al-ḥayāt. (1956). - At-Tafsīr al-ḥadīt̲ as-Suwar. (1962). - Sīrat ar-Rasūl. (1965). - Ad-Dustūr al-qur'ānī was-sunna an-nabawīya fī šu'ūn al-ḥayāt. (1966). - Al-Mar'a fi l-Qur'an was-sunna. (1967). ## See also - List of people from Nablus
1,033,785	I'm Afraid of Americans	1,162,701,800	null	[ "1995 songs", "1997 singles", "Anti-Americanism", "David Bowie songs", "Industrial rock songs", "Nine Inch Nails songs", "Song recordings produced by David Bowie", "Songs about the United States", "Songs written by Brian Eno", "Songs written by David Bowie", "Techno songs" ]	"I'm Afraid of Americans" is a song by English musician David Bowie, released as a single from his album Earthling on 14 October 1997 through Virgin Records. The song was co-written by Bowie and Brian Eno and originally recorded during the sessions for Bowie's 1995 album Outside; this version was released on the soundtrack of the 1995 film Showgirls. The song was then remade during the sessions for Earthling with his then-current band, guitarist Reeves Gabrels, pianist Mike Garson, bassist Gail Ann Dorsey and drummer Zack Alford. The remake was recorded between August and October 1996 at Looking Glass Studios in New York City and featured rewritten lyrics, overdubs and transposed verses. An industrial and techno track, it presents a critique of America through the eyes of a stereotypical "Johnny" and is characterised by drum patterns, synthesisers, various loops and vocal distortions. Following its release on the album, Virgin Records issued the song as a maxi-single in North America only with six different remixes. The remixes were mostly created by Trent Reznor and his Nine Inch Nails band members, continuing his and Bowie's association following the Outside Tour; the V3 mix featured Ice Cube while the V5 mix was created by Photek. Reznor subsequently appeared in the music video, which reflected the song's theme of a frightened European in an American city. A top 20 hit in Canada, the single peaked at number 66 on the Billboard Hot 100 and spent 16 weeks on the chart. It was the final Bowie single to chart on the Hot 100 until 2015. Reznor's V1 mix has since appeared on several compilation albums. The song has received positive responses from critics and biographers. Rolling Stone named it one of the 30 most essential songs of Bowie's catalogue in 2016. Some American commentators later acknowledged the significance of the lyrics in the late 2010s. Bowie performed "I'm Afraid of Americans" frequently on his concert tours, from the 1997 Earthling to 2003 A Reality tours. Live performances have been released on numerous live albums. Reznor has performed the song live with Nine Inch Nails as well. ## Writing and recording "I'm Afraid of Americans" was written by David Bowie and Brian Eno and originally recorded during the sessions for Bowie's 1995 album Outside. According to biographer Chris O'Leary, recording took place in late 1994 at Mountain Studios in Montreux, Switzerland and the early weeks of 1995 at the Hit Factory in New York City. Titled "Dummy", it featured different lyrics, such as "I'm afraid of the animals" instead of "Americans". Eno recalled in 2016: "I remember [David] recording 'I'm Afraid of Americans' and saying, after one of the early takes, 'No, [the 'Dummy' character's] got to be more self-doubting than that.'" This version was intended for release on the soundtrack for the 1995 film Johnny Mnemonic but was instead released on the soundtrack for the 1995 film Showgirls. During the sessions for his next album Earthling (1997), Bowie decided to remake the song with his current band—guitarist Reeves Gabrels, pianist Mike Garson, bassist Gail Ann Dorsey and drummer Zack Alford. Bowie stated: "That was something that Eno and I put together, and I just didn't feel it fit Outside, so it didn't go on it. It just got left behind. So then we took just the embryo of it, and restructured it with this band." Recording for the remake took place between August and October 1996 at Looking Glass Studios in New York City with engineer Mark Plati, who had extensive experience there. Plati and Gabrels were credited as co-producers while Bowie himself mostly self-produced. Regarding the remake, Plati explained: "We pulled things off several different reels to make this new composite. It was quite a clean-up job, not the most enjoyable." Bowie revised the lyrics, changing "Dummy" to "Johnny", and transposed verses while the band provided additional overdubs. Gabrels stated that he added fuzz boxes "until I ran out". ## Composition In an interview with Mojo magazine in 1997, Bowie described the song as "one of those stereotypical 'Johnny' songs: Johnny does this, Johnny does that". The absurdist lyrics present a critique of America, in line with Bowie's 1975 track "Young Americans". Commentators have insighted similarities between the song's titular Johnny and the Johnny of the Lodger track "Repetition" (1979); while the Johnny of the former craves objects of status through self-entitlement, the Johnny of the latter emotionally abuses his wife due to his lower status. The song concludes with the revelation that "God is an American", which biographer Marc Spitz considers an "ironic jingoism". Musically, reviewers have categorised it as techno, with author James Perone writing that it mixes various industrial and techno styles of the 1980s and 1990s. The Guardian's Caroline Sullivan found the melody reminiscent of Bowie's "Ashes to Ashes" (1980), with a "perky jungle percussion loop", ultimately creating "a most singular fusion of rock and drum & bass". Characterised by drum patterns, synthesisers, various loops and vocal distortions, O'Leary writes that the remake retained the original's "'laughing' hook" and "synth hook pinging around an E octave". Both the original and remake are also in the key of F major. Biographer Nicholas Pegg calls the remake "darker" and "funkier" compared to the original, while Spitz compares the track's "loud/quiet/loud anthem[ic]" quality to the Pixies. Perone notes the musicality as "richer" than other Earthling tracks. ## Releases The original version of "I'm Afraid of Americans" was released on the Showgirls soundtrack on 26 September 1995. Earthling was released on 3 February 1997 on CD and LP formats through RCA Records in the UK, Virgin Records in the US, and Arista Records and its parent distributor BMG elsewhere. "I'm Afraid of Americans" was sequenced as the eighth and penultimate track, between "The Last Thing You Should Do" and "Law (Earthlings on Fire)". Virgin issued "I'm Afraid of Americans" as a maxi-single in North America only on 14 October 1997, where it was backed by six remixes; the V3 mix featured guest vocals from rapper Ice Cube while the V5 mix was created by producer Photek. The project was instigated by Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor, continuing his and Bowie's association following the Outside Tour. Reznor, who stated that he "tried to make it a bit darker", stripped the production to its roots to create what biographer David Buckley calls "an eerie, psychotic track". The ending result is an almost 40-minute project that, in Bowie's words, was "not just a remix [but] almost...an album piece in itself. I was absolutely knocked out when I heard what [Reznor] had done. It was great." Commercially, the single reached number 66 on the Billboard Hot 100 and remained on the chart for 16 weeks, becoming Bowie's biggest hit in the country since "Day-In Day-Out" ten years earlier. It was the final Bowie single to chart on the Hot 100 until the release of "Blackstar" in 2015. It also stayed in the Canadian top 50 for six months. Reznor also starred as the titular Johnny in the Dom and Nic-directed music video, which was shot in New York City in October 1997 during the American leg of the Earthling Tour. Regarding the choice of Dom and Nic, Bowie explained that the duo were "making very interesting, quite hard-edged British videos at the moment. I felt it was important that it retained that outsider's perspective of America, you know." The video depicts Bowie as a man who is chased around the streets of New York by a stalker portrayed by Reznor, reflecting the song's theme of a frightened European in an American city. Discussing his character, Reznor stated: "They wanted a kind of Taxi Driver feel to the whole thing. That's kind of what it's based on. That's why I'm in my Travis Bickle outfit!" According to Spitz, the video received heavy rotation on MTV, a first for Bowie in over a decade. It also earned Bowie a nomination for Best Male Video at the 1998 MTV Video Music Awards. O'Leary states that while the track has no "definitive" version, Reznor's V1 mix is the most recognisable, which has appeared on the compilation albums Best of Bowie (2002), Nothing Has Changed (2014), and Bowie Legacy (2016). The Showgirls version, V1 mix and Plati's "Original Edit" were included on the bonus disc of the Earthling expanded edition in 2004. ## Reception and legacy Reviewing Earthling on release, Mojo's Andy Gill considered "I'm Afraid of Americans" the "most direct" track on the album. In another review for Rolling Stone, Mark Kemp acknowledged the song as "a stuttering rocker" that "seems detached from the other songs". Upon release of the single, Billboard writers Larry Flick and Shawnee Smith praised Reznor's remix as an improvement on the "already deeply moody and largely sharp" original. They further opined that the Ice Cube remix could provide a successful foray into a hardcore hip hop album. Reviewing the maxi-single for AllMusic, Christian Huey criticised it as "too derivative of Downward Spiral-era Nine Inch Nails" to please Bowie's fans. He argued that it acts better when viewed as a Reznor project rather than a Bowie one. He nevertheless praised Reznor's work on the remixes as well as Photek's contribution. In later decades, Pegg describes the track as "terrific" while Spitz considered it Bowie's finest single since 1984's "Loving the Alien". Following Bowie's death in 2016, Rolling Stone named "I'm Afraid of Americans" one of the 30 most essential songs of Bowie's catalogue. That same year, Ultimate Classic Rock placed "I'm Afraid of Americans" at number 23 in a list ranking every Bowie single from worst to best, calling it the best song on Earthling and Bowie's best song in over a decade, further commenting: "It would be another decade and a half before he was this good again." A year later, Consequence of Sound placed "I'm Afraid of Americans" at number 66 on their list of Bowie's 70 best songs, writing: > Many aging rock stars may have been sunk by toying with industrial electronic or having a song feature in the Showgirls soundtrack, but David Bowie excels in even the most theoretically ill-fitting suits, looking sleek and charming. He’s telling tales of humans in ruin, of futility and idealism, and while the original version that appeared in the schlocky midnight movie was afraid of 'the animals,' the eventual final take changed it to 'Americans,' an electro-crunchy slab of sardonic delight. In 2017, Vice's Jill Krajewski commented on the song's relevance during the presidency of Donald Trump, stating: "'I'm Afraid of Americans' has a darker resonance today not through its chorus, but in a context that gives it unnerving prescience: a snapshot of the [era we live in today]." She argued that the "working-class everyman" (Johnny) were responsible in sharpening the political divide and widespread hate on the internet, presenting a sense of unease living in America as she concludes, "I am afraid of Americans". The same year, Lior Phillips of Consequence of Sound opined that "The title is a picture-perfect distillation of what it means to live in this world." ## Live versions Following its release, Bowie performed "I'm Afraid of Americans" frequently on concert tours and television appearances. He first performed the track ahead of Earthling's release on 9 January 1997 at his fiftieth birthday concert in New York City with the band Sonic Youth. The song then made regular appearances throughout the Earthling Tour later that year. Three separate live performances of the song were released on live albums included in the box set Brilliant Live Adventures (2020–2021): A July 1997 performance (released on Look at the Moon!), an October 1997 version recorded in New York (included on LiveAndWell.com (1999/2021)), and a version from the Hours Tour in November 1999 on David Bowie At The Kit Kat Klub (Live New York 99). Bowie performed the song again at Howard Stern's forty-fourth birthday concert in 1998. Bowie's 25 June 2000 performance of the song at the Glastonbury Festival was released in 2018 on Glastonbury 2000. Another live version, recorded at the BBC Radio Theatre, London on 27 June 2000, was released on the bonus disc accompanying the first releases of Bowie at the Beeb in 2000. A performance from his 2003 A Reality Tour was included on the A Reality Tour DVD (2004), and later on the A Reality Tour album (2010). Reznor has performed the song live with Nine Inch Nails as well. ## Track listing All tracks are written by David Bowie and Brian Eno. 12" and CD: Virgin / 7243 8 38618 1/2 (US) A-side: 1. "I'm Afraid of Americans" (V1) – 5:31 2. "I'm Afraid of Americans" (V2) – 5:51 3. "I'm Afraid of Americans" (V3) (with Ice Cube) – 6:18 4. "I'm Afraid of Americans" (V4) – 5:25 B-side: 1. "I'm Afraid of Americans" (V5) – 5:38 2. "I'm Afraid of Americans" (V6) – 11:18 V1, V2, V3, V4 and V6 remixed by Nine Inch Nails, V5 remixed by Photek. ## Personnel According to biographer Chris O'Leary: Original version - David Bowie – lead and backing vocals, keyboards, loops, producer - Brian Eno – keyboards, synthesisers, loops, producer - Carlos Alomar – guitar - David Richards – engineer ''Earthling version - David Bowie – lead and backing vocals, keyboards, producer - Reeves Gabrels – guitar, producer - Mark Plati – keyboards, synthesisers, loops, producer, engineer - Mike Garson – electric piano - Gail Ann Dorsey – bass - Zack Alford – drums V1 version''' - Trent Reznor - Danny Lohner - Charlie Clouser - Dave Ogilvie - Keith Hillebrandt ## Charts
200,679	USS Casablanca	1,140,459,843	Casablanca-class escort carrier of the US Navy	[ "1943 ships", "Casablanca-class escort carriers", "S4-S2-BB3 ships", "Ships built in Vancouver, Washington", "World War II escort aircraft carriers of the United States" ]	USS Casablanca (AVG/ACV/CVE-55) was the first of fifty Casablanca-class escort carriers built for the United States Navy during World War II. She was named after the Naval Battle of Casablanca, conducted as a part of the wider Operation Torch, which pitted the United States Navy against the remnants of the French Navy controlled by Vichy France. The American victory cleared the way for the seizure of the port of Casablanca as well as the Allied occupation of French Morocco. The ship was launched in April 1943, commissioned in July, and served as a training and transport carrier throughout the war. Postwar, she participated in Operation Magic Carpet, repatriating U.S. servicemen from throughout the Pacific. She was decommissioned in June 1946, when she was mothballed in the Atlantic Reserve Fleet. She was sold for scrap in April 1947. ## Design and description Casablanca was the lead ship of the Casablanca-class escort carriers, the most numerous type of aircraft carriers ever built, and designed specifically to be mass-produced using prefabricated sections, in order to replace heavy early war losses. Standardized with her sister ships, she was 512 ft 3 in (156.13 m) long overall; at the waterline, she was 490 ft (150 m) long. She had a beam of 65 ft 2 in (19.86 m), at her widest point, this was 108 ft (33 m). She also had a draft of 20 ft 9 in (6.32 m). She displaced 8,188 long tons (8,319 t) standard, 10,902 long tons (11,077 t) with a full load. She had a 257 ft (78 m) long hangar deck and a 477 ft (145 m) long flight deck. She was powered with two Skinner Unaflow reciprocating steam engines, which drove two shafts, providing 9,000 shaft horsepower (6,700 kW), thus enabling her to make . The ship had a cruising range of 10,240 nautical miles (18,960 km; 11,780 mi) at a speed of 15 knots (28 km/h; 17 mph). Power was provided by four Babcock & Wilcox water-tube boilers. Her compact size necessitated the installation of an aircraft catapult at her bow, and there were two aircraft elevators to facilitate movement of aircraft between the flight and hangar deck: one each fore and aft. One 5-inch (127 mm)/38 caliber dual-purpose gun was mounted on the stern. Anti-aircraft defense was provided by eight Bofors 40-millimeter (1.6 in) anti-aircraft guns in single mounts, as well as 12 Oerlikon 20-millimeter (0.79 in) cannons, which were mounted around the perimeter of the deck. By the end of the war, Casablanca-class carriers had been modified to carry thirty 20 mm cannons, and the amount of 40 mm guns had been doubled to sixteen, by putting them into twin mounts. These modifications were in response to increasing casualties due to kamikaze attacks. Although Casablanca-class escort carriers were designed to function with a crew of 860 and an embarked squadron of 50 to 56, the exigencies of wartime often necessitated the inflation of the crew count. Casablanca-class escort carriers were designed to carry 27 aircraft, but the hangar deck could accommodate more, which was often necessary during transport or especially training missions, due to the constant turnover of pilots and aircraft. ## Construction Her construction was awarded to Kaiser Shipbuilding Company, Vancouver, Washington, under a Maritime Commission contract, on 18 June 1942, with the classification symbol AVG-55, indicating that she would be the 55th escort carrier, AVG representing an aircraft escort vessel, numbered in the same series as the escort carriers. On 20 August, the future carrier was reclassified as ACV-55, the hull symbol representing an auxiliary aircraft carrier. The escort carrier was laid down on 3 November 1942 under the name Ameer, with the original plans calling for her transfer to the Royal Navy under the lend-lease program. She was laid down as MC hull 1092, the first of a series of fifty Casablanca-class escort carriers. On 23 February 1943, it was determined that her sister ship Liscome Bay, the second Casablanca-class carrier to be constructed would be transferred under lend-lease in Casablanca's place. Therefore, she was renamed Alazon Bay, a misspelling of Alazan Bay, located in Kleberg County, Texas, as part of a tradition which named escort carriers after bays or sounds. She was then further renamed to Casablanca on 3 April, with her previous name later being assigned to the hull of her sister Lunga Point. She was launched on 5 April; sponsored by the First Lady Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt; transferred to the Navy on 8 July, commissioned and reclassified as CVE-55 on 15 July, with Commander Steven Ward Callaway in command. ## Service history Upon being commissioned, it was discovered that Casablanca had a propeller defect, handicapping her speed and handling, which rendered her completely unsuitable for frontline or even transport service. Therefore, the Navy used her as a training vessel, operating in the Strait of Juan de Fuca to provide pilot certifications. For the next year, until August 1944, a steady stream of carrier squadrons were trained on board Casablanca, rotating off for service on a frontline carrier once they had finished qualifications. In addition, she was used as a training vessel for crews bound for the other Casablanca-class carriers prior to commissioning, with crews typically spending two weeks learning how to operate the equipment and how to maneuver the ship. These crews would therefore report for service on their newly commissioned Casablanca-class carriers with a modicum of experience. The Navy also used Casablanca as a ship to gather data on how the escort carriers fared during prolonged periods at sea, measuring her material readiness and the ability of her equipment. Lessons learned on Casablanca were therefore implemented on Casablanca-class carriers to come. In the summer of 1944, Casablanca was put into dry dock, and her propeller defect was corrected. Hence, she was certified to begin transport missions. On 24 August, after taking on a load of personnel, airplanes, and aviation gasoline at Naval Air Station Alameda, she put through the Golden Gate Bridge, and passed San Francisco en route to Manus Island in the Admiralty Islands. She returned to Seattle on 8 October, and immediately continued her previous duties in Puget Sound as a training carrier, carrying out much of the same activities, this time preparing the pre-commissioning crews of Commencement Bay-class escort carriers. During this period, she was damaged by a storm, and proceeded into San Diego harbor on 22 January 1945 for repairs. On 12 February, Captain John Lewis Murphy raised his flag over the vessel. Casablanca returned to sea on 13 March, and with her repairs completed, she proceeded westwards for another transport mission. Stopping at Pearl Harbor, she headed to Guam, where she unloaded some of her cargo. She then carried out transport runs between Samar in the Philippines, Manus, and Palau until 12 May, when she proceeded back to the West Coast for overhaul, carrying on board a load of medically unfit personnel. Upon arrival, she replenished and was sent west again, delivering passengers to Pearl Harbor on 24 June. She spent the summer making transport runs from the West Coast to Pearl Harbor and Guam. During one of these transport missions, whilst arriving at Guam, the Surrender of Japan was announced. After a brief period in which Casablanca yet again served as a training carrier providing pilot qualifications off of Saipan in August, she was retrofitted into a troopship, and joined the Operation Magic Carpet fleet, which repatriated U.S. servicemen from around the Pacific. Her first run concluded in San Francisco on 24 September. She then ferried some personnel to Pearl Harbor in September and October. At Pearl Harbor, she made her second run, stopping at Espiritu Santo and Nouméa, repatriating servicemen to the West Coast. Her third and final run, which ran from 8 December to 16 January 1946, was a run from San Francisco to Yokohama, occupied Japan. Casablanca left San Francisco harbor on 23 January, proceeding to Norfolk, Virginia, arriving on 10 February. There, she was mothballed in the Atlantic Reserve Fleet on 30 May. She was decommissioned on 10 June, and struck from the Navy list on 3 July. She was sold on 23 April 1947 for scrapping, ultimately being broken up in Chester, Pennsylvania, throughout the latter half of 1947.
1,987,675	Expedition Everest	1,170,247,444	Steel roller coaster built by Vekoma	[ "2006 establishments in Florida", "Asia (Disney's Animal Kingdom)", "Audio-Animatronic attractions", "Disney's Animal Kingdom", "Enclosed roller coasters", "Fictional mountains", "Mount Everest", "Roller coasters at Disney's Animal Kingdom", "Roller coasters introduced in 2006", "Roller coasters manufactured by Vekoma", "Steel roller coasters", "Tibet in fiction", "Yeti in fiction" ]	Expedition Everest – Legend of the Forbidden Mountain, also known as "Expedition Everest", is a steel roller coaster built by Vekoma at Disney's Animal Kingdom at the Walt Disney World Resort in Lake Buena Vista, Florida. The ride is themed around the Yeti protecting the Forbidden Mountain next to Mount Everest. It is the only roller coaster at Disney's Animal Kingdom, and the tallest roller coaster at any Disney theme park. The 2011 edition of Guinness World Records lists Expedition Everest as the most expensive roller coaster in the world, a record the ride held until 2019 when Hagrid's Magical Creatures Motorbike Adventure at Universal's Islands of Adventure opened. Including sets and extras, its total cost was reported to be US\$100 million for six years of planning and construction. It is the tallest artificial mountain in all of the Walt Disney parks, and Disney's 18th mountain-themed attraction. It is also the most recently opened attraction at Walt Disney World not based on pre-existing intellectual property. ## History The attraction was announced publicly on April 22, 2003, during an event to celebrate the fifth anniversary of Disney's Animal Kingdom. Construction of the new attraction began a month before the announcement in March 2003. It took three years and required more than 38 miles (61 km) of rebar; 5,000 tons of structural steel; and 10,000 tons of concrete. Expedition Everest opened for previews on January 26, 2006, and had its grand opening on April 7, 2006, in ceremonies led by Disney CEO Bob Iger and theme parks chairman Jay Rasulo. At 199.5 feet (60.8 m), it is the tallest attraction at Walt Disney World, beating The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror at Disney's Hollywood Studios by 6 inches (15 cm). Disney keeps all of its attraction buildings under 200 feet (61 m) because aviation laws require structures of that height and taller to have a blinking red light beacons for low-flying aircraft, which would take away the theming in their attraction. ## Ride experience ### Queue The attraction features a stand-by, FastPass+, and a single-rider line. The queue starts at the office of the fictional "Himalayan Escapes" travel agency, progressing to a replica temple with little holy figures. Visitors next enter a tea garden, followed by a room with equipment from a successful expedition, and then the "Yeti Museum", which contains information on the Yeti and a moulding of a Yeti footprint. There are also about 8,000 artifacts brought from the Nepal trip in the museum. The single-rider line skips all of the exhibits. ### Ride The riders board the roller coaster in the model village of Serka Zong, to begin a speedy route through the Himalayas to the base of Mount Everest. The train blows its "whistle" and departs the station to the right and climbs a small lift leading to a short drop, then circles around to the 112-foot (34 m) lift hill, carrying the riders into the mountain. On the way up, it passes through a ransacked temple with murals of the yeti, warning the riders that the mountain is its territory. A noise can also be heard during this lift hill, foreshadowing the yeti. At the top of the mountain, the train curves around the main peak and goes through a cave. When it emerges from the other side, the train suddenly comes to a halt due to the track in front of the guests being broke apart, presumably by the yeti. To the left of the broken tracks is a secret bird animatronic sitting on a stick. The train itself is held in place by a series of rubber tires while an automatic switch rotates the piece of track directly behind the train. The train then rolls backwards along a new route that spirals down through the mountain by track switches. It eventually comes to a stop in a large cave, where riders see the yeti's shadow on the wall as it tears up more track. This effect distracts riders from noticing another automatic track switch in front of them. As the shadow moves away, the train rolls forward out of the mountain, going past the on-ride camera and plunging down the main 80-foot (24 m) drop. It enters a 250° turn and speeds back up through another cave in the mountain, where the roars of the yeti are heard once more. The train exits from the rear of the mountain and enters a large helix before being lifted back into the mountain a final time. The train drops through a cave, where the yeti is reaching down toward it. On reaching the bottom of this drop, riders return to the unloading dock and depart into a gift shop. The ride lasts 2 minutes and 50 seconds. ### Trains Expedition Everest has six steam-like trains, each with six cars. Each train has 17 rows seating two abreast, for a total of 34 riders per train. The trains are themed as the "Anandapur Rail Service" and are made to look old and rusty. Riders must be at least 44 inches (110 cm) tall and are secured by a lap bar. The "locomotive" itself is designed to resemble a vertical boiler configuration and is placed at the rear of the train rather than the front, so not to obstruct the riders' view. Up to five trains usually operate at once, but fewer can be used if guest demand is low. To create the illusion of a "steam powered" train, engineers placed vents under the station. When a train comes into the station, steam comes up through the vents and enters the loading platform. ### Track The steel track is 3,884.5 feet (1,184.0 m) long and the lift is about 112 feet (34 m) high. Expedition Everest uses a track system by Dutch manufacturer Vekoma, where the rails are mounted on the outer surface of the ties, rather than on the inner surface. This was the first large-scale installation of such a system. ## Facts and details Although moderate in height and length by contemporary standards, Expedition Everest was the first ride for Disney to have its trains travel both forward and backward. This is accomplished through two sets of track switches, one before the rear segment and one after. This was the second Disney roller coaster to run backwards, the first being Indiana Jones et le Temple du Péril: Backwards! at Disneyland Resort Paris (2000–2004). Expedition Everest, however, was the first Disney roller coaster to switch between forward and backward sections during the same ride. The mountain façade, the Yeti audio-animatronic, and the roller coaster are three independent structures. Each structure reaches the ground-level and does not touch the other two structures. This was achieved via a 4-D scheduling software that provided the exact details on how to construct it. ### The Mountain Expedition Everest is often compared to the 1959 Matterhorn Bobsleds roller coaster at Disneyland, which also features a snowy mountain setting and an "abominable snowman" figure throughout the ride. Expedition Everest's mountain is made from 1,800 tons of steel and painted with 2,000 gallons of paint. At 199.5 feet (60.8 meters), to avoid the Floridian legal requirement to place a light atop structures 200 feet or taller to alert planes), it is the tallest artificial mountain in the world, but not, as occasionally cited, the tallest point in Florida. It was the 18th mountain-themed attraction built on Disney property. The artificial mountain is not a model of Mount Everest, but rather of the fictional "forbidden mountain" guarded by the yeti in the story created for the attraction by Walt Disney Imagineering. Everest is represented by the barren background peak on the far right, which is made to seem far in the distance (an example of forced perspective). Moreover, there is a small shrine on the ground level in the Asia area of the park which has been designed to perfectly overlap with the view of the distant attraction. ### The Yeti The yeti was the largest and most complex audio-animatronic figure ever built by Walt Disney Imagineering at the time of its construction. It is 25 feet (7.6 m) tall. Its "skin" measures 1,000 square feet (93 m<sup>2</sup>), and is held in place by 1,000 snaps and 250 zippers. Its movement is controlled by 19 actuators when functioning in "A-mode", its full mode of operation. In "A-mode," it can move 5 ft (1.5 m) horizontally and 18 in (46 cm) vertically. A few months after the ride opened in 2006, the yeti figure's framing split, threatening catastrophic malfunction if it were to be operated further in "A-mode". Since then it has been operated only in the alternative "B-mode", in which a strobe-light effect is used to give the appearance of movement, earning it the nickname "Disco Yeti" from some fans. It is speculated that the problem was caused by damage to the yeti's concrete base structure, which is unlikely to be repaired until a major refurbishment in the distant future, because the design limits access to the yeti without major disassembly of the superstructure. The problem with the concrete is rumored to have occurred due to a glitch in the 4-D scheduling software that prevented adequate curing of a portion of the Yeti's foundation before the fabrication of mountain elements and roller coaster track. Joe Rohde, the Imagineer in charge of building the attraction and Animal Kingdom, was asked about the yeti at the 2013 D23 Expo. Rohde responded, "You have to understand, it's a giant complicated machine sitting on top of, like, a 46-foot tall tower in the middle of a finished building. So, it's really hard to fix, but we are working on it. And we continue to work on it. We have tried several 'things', none of them quite get to the key, turning of the 40-foot tower inside of a finished building, but we are working on it... I will fix the Yeti someday, I swear." Rohde retired from Walt Disney Imagineering effective January 4, 2021, never having completed the repairs to the Yeti animatronic. ## Promotions ### Discovery Networks In 2005, Disney, Discovery Networks (now Warner Bros. Discovery), and Conservation International conducted expeditions to Nepal as part of the promotion for Expedition Everest. The purpose was to conduct scientific and cultural research in remote areas of the Himalayas, the location of the yeti legend. Participants included Joe Rohde from Walt Disney Imagineering and scientists from Conservation International and Disney's Animal Kingdom. The expeditions and the making of the attraction were chronicled in three documentaries broadcast on Discovery's cable television channels in April 2006. The first was Expedition Everest: Journey to Sacred Lands, broadcast on the Travel Channel on April 9 to coincide with the attraction's grand opening. The second, Building A Thrill Ride: Expedition Everest, was aired on April 10 on the Science Channel and on April 12 on the Discovery Channel. It detailed the planning and construction of the ride, along with some of the ideas that made it possible. (During construction, for example, instead of traditional scaffolding the Imagineers used interior poles that poked through the outside of the mountain and were connected by wooden platforms.) This documentary also featured survival tips from Les Stroud. The third, Corwin's Quest: Realm of the Yeti, was broadcast on Animal Planet in April and featured American animal and nature conservationist Jeff Corwin. ### Everest in the City On February 15, 2006, Disney staged an elaborate publicity stunt called "Everest in the City" in New York City's Times Square. They draped large billboards over the sides of several buildings, depicting Everest with a coaster car careening down the mountainside and the yeti looking on from another peak, its eyes glowing red and flashing when the text message "Disney” was sent to “4Yeti” as provided by Disney. ## Incidents - On December 18, 2007, a 44-year-old guest was found unconscious after the train returned to the station. He was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead. A preliminary autopsy by the Orange County medical examiner's office concluded that the victim had died of dilated cardiomyopathy. - On May 19, 2018, a 26-year-old man suffered a seizure after riding the attraction. - On July 5, 2019, a 41-year-old woman suffered a seizure after riding the attraction. ## Awards and records The 2011 book of Guinness World Records lists Expedition Everest as the most expensive roller coaster in the world. Including sets and extras, the total cost of the ride was reported to be US\$100 million over six years of planning and construction. In 2019, this record was surpassed by Hagrid's Magical Creatures Motorbike Adventure at The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, which cost US\$300 million. Expedition Everest won the 2006 Theme Park Insider Award for the "World's Best New Theme Park Attraction". It has also been ranked in the Golden Ticket Awards and the Best Roller Coaster Poll. It was ranked second for "Best New Ride For 2006" in the Golden Ticket Awards. ## See also - Matterhorn Bobsleds - Big Grizzly Mountain Runaway Mine Cars
23,869,666	Miami Vice (video game)	1,171,503,126	1986 video game	[ "1986 video games", "Amstrad CPC games", "Commodore 64 games", "Detective video games", "Europe-exclusive video games", "Miami Vice", "Ocean Software games", "Video games about police officers", "Video games about the illegal drug trade", "Video games developed in the United Kingdom", "Video games scored by Martin Galway", "Video games set in Miami", "ZX Spectrum games" ]	Miami Vice is an action video game developed by Canvas and published by Ocean Software. It was first released in the United Kingdom for the Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, and ZX Spectrum in 1986. It was later re-released in Germany and Italy for the Commodore 64 in 1989. The game is based on the television series of the same name and follows the two central characters, James "Sonny" Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs, as they attempt to derail a Miami drug ring which is led by series antagonist "Mr J". The game was published by Ocean Software, who were renowned for developing video games related to their respective films and television shows. The main objective of the game is to apprehend criminals throughout the streets of Miami, which is accomplished by driving to various locations around the city. Miami Vice received mixed reviews upon release; the game was mainly criticised due to its poor mechanics and graphics, though some reviewers praised the overall experience. ## Gameplay The game is presented in a top-down perspective with elements of 2D side-scrolling gameplay. The main objective of the game is to derail various shipments of drugs controlled by the Miami Vice series antagonist, Mr J. The player assumes control of series protagonists James "Sonny" Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs, in which they must eliminate gangsters throughout Miami. To accomplish this end, Crockett and Tubbs can drive their car through the streets of Miami in order to get to various destinations, such as City Hall, Vines Bar, State Hotel, Shark Club, Joes Bar, Flag Hotel, Grand Casino, Palm Club, Murk Club, Ocean Warehouse, Acme Warehouse and Sierra Hotel, quicker. If the player collides into a wall or another car whilst driving, a small explosion will occur and a life will be deducted. At a labelled building, the player can get out of the car and enter, though enemies will only appear during certain times of the day. If the player arrives too early, the enemy gangsters will attempt to escape. If the player arrives too late, the building will be found vacant. A timetable of all meetings are included in the game's instruction manual. The aesthetic interior of buildings include two rooms, with limited decorations such as a pool table and chairs. Some buildings contain evidence bags which can be collected for extra points. Once the player comes into contact with an enemy, a separate window will appear which will display his name. The player can apprehend him by either catching or trapping him. Once caught, the player may take him to the city hall to interrogate him in order to receive information such as the location of the next gangster meetup. Points are gained by apprehending criminals, returning evidence bags or destroying cars. ## Reception The game received mixed to negative reviews upon release. Pete Shaw of Your Sinclair praised the overall experience of the game, including the "fast paced" gameplay and lack of an intrusive plot, however he criticised the "terrible" attribute clash issues in the 'Frankie goes to Florida' mode, in which he states that the mode causes graphical errors. Three reviewers of Zzap!64 stated that the graphics were "simplistic", but found them to be crisp and colourful. Chris Bourne of Crash, however, criticised the graphics as "dodgy" and "drab". Jim Lloyd of Computer and Video Games praised the music and its ability to change once the player moves from a car to building, however theorised that the game would sell due to "its name". Bourne criticised the game's lack of music for the Amstrad port and limited range of sound effects. Miami Vice received particular criticism at the difficulty of manoeuvring the car. Edward Drury of Computer Gamer, though finding the game to be enjoyable at times, stated that his only dislike was the manoeuvrability of the car, remarking that the game "gets boring" due to the amount of collisions. Bourne was highly critical of the mechanics of the car, finding it to be "ludicrous" and taking "at least half an hour to get used to". He concluded that the game was "very bad". Jim Lloyd of Computer and Video Games and a reviewer of Zzap!64 concurred that the controlling the car was a major issue.
538,262	Herbert Chapman	1,164,013,116	English association football player and manager (1878-1934)	[ "1878 births", "1934 deaths", "Alumni of the University of Sheffield", "Arsenal F.C. managers", "Ashton North End F.C. players", "Deaths from pneumonia in England", "English Football Hall of Fame inductees", "English football managers", "English men's footballers", "Footballers from South Yorkshire", "Grimsby Town F.C. players", "Huddersfield Town A.F.C. managers", "Kiveton Park F.C. players", "Leeds City F.C. managers", "Men's association football inside forwards", "Men's association football player-managers", "Northampton Town F.C. managers", "Northampton Town F.C. players", "Notts County F.C. players", "People from Kiveton Park", "Sheffield United F.C. players", "Stalybridge Rovers F.C. players", "Swindon Town F.C. players", "Tottenham Hotspur F.C. players", "Worksop Town F.C. players" ]	Herbert Chapman (19 January 1878 – 6 January 1934) was an English football player and manager. Though he had an undistinguished playing career, he went on to become one of the most influential and successful managers in the early 20th century, before his sudden death in 1934. He is regarded as one of the game's greatest innovators. As a player, Chapman played for a variety of clubs, at Football League and non-League levels. His record was generally unremarkable as a player; he made fewer than 40 League appearances over the course of a decade and did not win any major honours. Instead, he found success as a manager, first at Northampton Town between 1908 and 1912, which he led to a Southern League title. This attracted the attention of larger clubs and he moved to Leeds City, where he started to improve the team's fortunes before the First World War intervened. After the war ended, City were implicated in an illegal payments scandal and were eventually disbanded. Chapman was initially banned from football but successfully appealed. He took over at Huddersfield Town, winning an FA Cup and two First Division titles in the period of four years. In 1925, Arsenal successfully tempted Chapman to join them, and he led the club to its first ever silverware by winning one FA Cup and two First Division titles. His work at Arsenal resulted in their becoming the dominant team of the 1930s – they won five League titles and two FA Cups in the decade before the suspension of football due to the outbreak of the Second World War – but he did not live to see the entirety of his team's success, dying suddenly from pneumonia in 1934, at the age of 55. He is credited with improving Arsenal. He introduced new tactics (the WM formation, which forms the core of most modern-day formations) and training techniques to the game and the use of physiotherapists. He led the team, rather than letting board members lead. He also used floodlighting and numbered shirts, entered European club competitions, and has received many posthumous honours in recognition. ## Early life Chapman was born in Kiveton Park, near Rotherham on 19 January 1878. His father, John, was a coal miner, but rather than spend his own life working down the pit, the young Herbert was bright enough to win a place at Sheffield Technical College (later to become part of the University of Sheffield), where he studied mining engineering. Chapman was one of eleven children and was born into a keen sporting family, with two of his brothers also playing professional football. The most successful of these was his younger brother Harry, who played for The Wednesday during the 1900s, winning two League Championships and an FA Cup. His elder brother Thomas played for Grimsby Town, while another brother, Matthew, later became a director of the same club. ## Playing career Chapman's playing career was that of a typical journeyman, owing mostly to the fact he often played as an amateur; this meant that whether he could play for a particular club was dictated by whether he could find an appropriate job nearby. He first played as a youth for his local side, Kiveton Park Colliery, winning the Hatchard Cup in 1896 alongside team-mates Walter Wigmore and William Ross. He left the village that summer to join Ashton North End, before moving on to Stalybridge Rovers and then Rochdale (not to be confused with the modern-day Rochdale) – all three clubs being members of the Lancashire League. Chapman played at inside right, and although he lacked the skill of his brother Harry, he compensated for it with his strength and robustness. In 1898, he moved to Second Division Grimsby Town. Though now playing in the professional Football League, Chapman was still an amateur at this stage and obtained a job with a firm of local solicitors to earn his way. Grimsby started the season poorly – they were near the bottom of the division by Christmas and were beaten 7–0 by Preston North End in the FA Cup, but rallied to finish tenth at the end of the 1898–99 season. By this time Chapman had been dropped from the team, having been unsuccessfully moved to centre forward, an unfamiliar position for him. He was released by Grimsby and drifted down into non-league football with a brief spell at Swindon Town, playing three games and scoring twice, but had to leave the club as he was unable to find a job in the area. He moved on to see out the season with Sheppey United, who finished bottom of the Southern League in 1899–1900. Chapman finished as United's top scorer but was injured at the end of this season, and still unable to find a job. Disheartened, he returned to his home town and turned out for Worksop Town of the Midland League in 1900–01, while resuming his studies, this time at Old Firth College in Sheffield. Because of his studies, he mainly played for Worksop's reserves, but in a first-team match against Northampton Town he caught the opposition's eye and they offered him a contract, leading him to turn professional for the first time in 1901. He played for Northampton for the whole 1901–02 season, finishing as top scorer with 14 goals in 22 games for the club. During that season he had impressed in an FA Cup match against Sheffield United, leading them to offer Chapman a contract at the end of the season; Chapman accepted but dropped down to amateur status, wishing to make use of his engineering qualifications in the local area. He played 22 matches and scored twice for United, but struggled to keep his place in a team full of internationals, and was sold to Notts County for £300 at the end of 1902–03. Chapman turned professional again, but only made seven appearances in two years for County, scoring once. In 1904, Chapman moved back to his old club Northampton Town, playing a season effectively on loan from Notts County (as they kept his registration), before being transferred permanently in 1905 to Tottenham Hotspur for £70. He scored eleven goals for Spurs in their 1905–06 Southern League campaign. He spent 1906–07 in and out of the side, scoring just three goals. With the season drawing to a close, he decided that he had had "a good innings" and decided to leave Tottenham and professional football for good, in favour of pursuing his career in engineering. ## Managerial career ### Northampton Town In 1907, as he was about to leave Tottenham Hotspur, Chapman had recommended Spurs team-mate Walter Bull to his old club Northampton Town, as their new manager. However, Bull changed his mind, and in turn recommended that Chapman take the job instead. Chapman changed his mind about retiring from the game, and instead agreed to become player-manager of Northampton Town. Northampton had finished bottom of the Southern League two seasons running immediately before Chapman's appointment, but Chapman turned the club around within a short period of time. At the time, teams rarely employed tactics of any sort – Chapman would later remark: "No attempt was made to organise victory. The most that I remember was the occasional chat between, say two men playing on the same wing." As a manager, he sought to change that; after seeing Northampton lose to Norwich City despite dominating, Chapman opined that "a team can attack for too long". He thus set about creating a tactical framework for all his players; he dropped the half backs (midfield) back to give his forwards more space and draw the opposition defenders out of the penalty area, while encouraging his own back line to pass their way out of trouble. Gradually, he created a style of highly organised, counter-attacking football, which was at odds with the prevailing orthodoxy but nevertheless highly effective; Swindon Town's England international Harold Fleming, after losing 4–1 at home to Northampton, remarked to Chapman: "You have something more than a team: you have a machine." To allow his system to reach its full potential, Chapman encouraged his chairman to spend money on new players. The club's first ever transfer fee, £400, was paid for Welsh international Lloyd Davies who remains Northampton's most capped player, winger Fred McDiarmid and playmaking centre half David McCartney. With this new talent, in his first season in charge, Chapman led Northampton to eighth place; with additional new signings, such as inside forward Albert Lewis from Coventry City, he used this as a springboard to take the Southern League title in 1908–09, with Lewis finishing as top scorer. By now, Chapman had retired as a player in first-class football, having played his last match against Watford in January 1909, but filled the gap he left, as well as showing his eye for spotting talent, by signing players such as future England international Fanny Walden. As Southern League champions, Northampton contested and lost the 1909 FA Charity Shield, 2–0 to Newcastle United, and although they did not win the Southern League title again during Chapman's time as manager, they finished in the top four in each of the following three seasons. Additionally, they proved their mettle in the FA Cup against First Division sides, knocking out The Wednesday and taking Nottingham Forest and Newcastle United to replays, losing 1–0 both times. Chapman was keen to get Northampton Town into the Football League, but with no automatic promotion or relegation rules at the time this proved very difficult. Chapman proposed a new two-division Football Alliance underneath the two divisions of the Football League, with automatic promotion and relegation (a similar system to the four-division League setup introduced in 1921), but this was rejected at the time (and would not come about until 1920). In the 1912 close season, he was offered the chance to manage Second Division Leeds City, and with Northampton's blessing moved north again to join the League club. ### Leeds City Leeds City had finished 19th in the Second Division in the season preceding Chapman's arrival, and were facing re-election. Chapman played an essential part in lobbying for the side's readmission and Leeds City were duly re-elected. That done, Chapman signed new talent such as Jimmy Speirs from Bradford City and despite some erratic performances – losing 6–0 in between two 5–1 wins, for example – City finished sixth in 1912–13, Chapman's first season. Attendances rose at Elland Road from 8,500 to 13,000 in his first year, as Chapman's attacking side scored 70 goals, the second-highest total in the entire division. With a strengthening of the defence, City's form improved further the next season, in 1913–14, coming fourth, two points outside the promotion places. Despite having failed on his promise to get the team promoted within two years, City's rising attendances and resulting better profits for the club kept the directors happy, and the club were confident of promotion in 1914–15. However, the declaration of the First World War disrupted Leeds City's season, with attendances down as men signed up to fight. Chapman by now had amassed a very large squad and was unable to pick a consistent side, continually changing his first-choice lineup. Leeds City lost six of their last eight games of the season, finishing just fifteenth. League football was suspended for the rest of the war, with Leeds City playing in regional competitions. With many players away fighting or having left the game due to a drop in wages, Leeds relied heavily on guest players during these matches. Chapman, meanwhile, had decided to help the war effort by taking up a position as manager of a munitions factory at Barnbow, near Cross Gates in 1916. For the next two years, City's assistant manager, George Cripps stood in for Chapman on the administrative side, while chairman Joe Connor and another director took charge of the team. Chapman returned to Leeds City from Barnbow after hostilities had ended, but resigned suddenly in December 1918, eventually moving to Selby to take up a position as a superintendent at an oil and coke works. No reason was given for his resignation, but as football resumed in 1919–20, Leeds City were accused by a former player of financial irregularities, involving illegal payments to guest players during wartime matches. No documentary evidence was produced, but Leeds' refusal to allow the authorities access to their financial records was deemed a sign of guilt, and they were expelled from the Football League in October 1919 and five club officials, including Chapman, were banned from football for life. The club was dissolved, with the players auctioned off and their Elland Road ground taken over by the newly formed Leeds United. ### Huddersfield Town Chapman was still working at the coke works in Selby when his ban was imposed, but by Christmas 1920 the company was sold up and he was laid off. Soon after, however, he was approached by Huddersfield Town to become assistant to Ambrose Langley, who had been a former team-mate of Herbert Chapman's brother Harry at The Wednesday. Huddersfield Town backed Chapman in an appeal against his ban, arguing that as he had been working at the factory in Barnbow during the war, he had not been in charge of Leeds City during the time illegal payments were supposed to have been paid. The ban was overturned, and Chapman was formally installed as Langley's assistant on 1 February 1921. Chapman was promoted to full secretary-manager, replacing Langley, the following month, and soon made an impact, signing players such as England international Clem Stephenson from Aston Villa (who became captain under Chapman) and 18-year-old unknown George Brown (who went on to become Huddersfield's all-time top scorer). In Chapman's first full season in charge (1921–22), Huddersfield Town won the FA Cup, beating Preston North End 1–0 in the final at Stamford Bridge, the club's first major trophy. In the league, however, his side had spent most of the season fighting relegation and had finished 14th, so Chapman looked to strengthen his squad. As at Northampton, Chapman's tactics were based upon the principles of a strong defence and a fast, counter-attacking response, with the focus on quick, short passing and mazy runs from his wingers, who would pass low inside the defence instead of crossing from the byline. He had been granted control of all footballing affairs at the club and made this responsibility work to his advantage, encouraging the club's reserve and third teams to play the same style of football so that their players would function effectively in the first team if selected. He employed a wide-ranging scouting network to find the right players for his tactical system. Bolstered by the money from the cup run, Chapman was able to make further signings such as goalkeeper Ted Taylor and forward Charlie Wilson (later to be joined by George Cook). With new players and using Chapman's system, Huddersfield were transformed. They finished third in 1922–23 and went on to win their first League title in 1923–24. This success was by the narrowest of margins – equal on points with Cardiff City, Huddersfield won by a difference of 0.024 (1.818 to 1.794) in goal average. The final goal by Brown in a 3–0 win over Nottingham Forest on the final day of the season proved crucial, although ultimately it was Huddersfield's superior defensive record which had given them the advantage. Following the title win, Chapman kept faith with his squad, making only one new signing – outside right Joey Williams – as they successfully defended their League title in 1924–25. Huddersfield started brightly but a poor run of form in October and November (in part caused by an injury to goalkeeper Ted Taylor) saw them drop to ninth at one point. Taylor was replaced by new signing Billy Mercer and a resurgence in form saw Huddersfield climb the table, regaining top spot with a 5–0 win over Arsenal in February, and eventually finishing two points clear of runners-up West Bromwich Albion. As a testament to Chapman's philosophy of relying on a strong defence, it was the first time a title-winning side had gone through a season without conceding more than two goals in any match. ### Arsenal In the 1925 close season, Chapman had already set about improving his squad for Huddersfield to seek a third successive title (something which had never been achieved before). At the same time, Arsenal was looking to replace Leslie Knighton, who had been sacked. Arsenal chairman Sir Henry Norris placed an advertisement in the Athletic News: > Arsenal Football Club is open to receive applications for the position of TEAM MANAGER. He must be experienced and possess the highest qualifications for the post, both as to ability and personal character. Gentlemen whose sole ability to build up a good side depends on the payment of heavy and exhorbitant [sic] transfer fees need not apply. Although Arsenal had been fighting relegation in both the two previous seasons, and despite the chairman's restriction on spending, Chapman nevertheless moved to Arsenal soon afterwards, attracted both by the London club's larger crowds and a salary of £2,000, double what he earned at Huddersfield Town. At Arsenal, Chapman immediately made an impact by signing 34-year-old Charlie Buchan, an England international and Sunderland's all-time record goalscorer, whom he made Arsenal captain. Chapman came to Arsenal promising to make them the "Newcastle of the South". Chapman and Buchan's arrival at the club also coincided with a change in the laws of the game in June 1925, that modified the offside law. The change had reduced the number of opposition players that an attacker needed between himself and the goal-line from three to two (including the goalkeeper). Buchan's idea, implemented by Chapman, was to move the centre half from a roaming position in midfield to a "stopper" position in defence. With the inside forwards brought back to help the midfield, this changed the usual formation from 2–3–5 to 3–4–3, or a "WM", so called after the shape it formed spelled out the letters. This meant the offside trap was now the responsibility of the single centre half, while the full backs were pushed wider to cover the wings. Arsenal were by no means the only team to have come up with the idea of dropping the centre half into defence – Newcastle United beat Arsenal 7–0 that season employing such a system with Charlie Spencer at centre-half; Queen's Park and Tottenham Hotspur had also adopted similar systems. Chapman, however, was able to refine and improve on the idea better than his rivals, melding the tactical change with his own ideas on counter-attacking football, pacy wingers and a strong defence. Chapman himself summed it up by saying: "the most opportune time for scoring is immediately after repelling an attack, because opponents are then strung out in the wrong half of the field." Arsenal went on to finish second in 1925–26, five points behind Chapman's old side Huddersfield Town, as they became the first club in England to win three titles in succession. It proved to be an early dawn for Arsenal, who spent most of the rest of the 1920s in mid-table, as Chapman took his time finding the right players to fit his new system, outlining a five-year plan for success. He retained relatively few players of his predecessor Knighton's era – Bob John, Alf Baker and Jimmy Brain being the exceptions – and instead looked to bring in talent from elsewhere. In February 1926, he signed the pacy winger Joe Hulme, followed that summer by forward Jack Lambert and full-back Tom Parker, who would later succeed Buchan as captain. Although Arsenal's league form was indifferent, in 1927 they reached the FA Cup Final, their first, but lost 1–0 to Cardiff City after an error by goalkeeper Dan Lewis. In the same year, Arsenal became embroiled in a scandal; footballers' pay at the time was limited by a maximum wage, but an FA inquiry found that Charlie Buchan had secretly received illegal payments from Arsenal as an incentive to sign for the club. Sir Henry Norris was indicted for his part and banned from football, but Chapman escaped punishment, and with the autocratic Norris replaced by the more benign Samuel Hill-Wood, Chapman's power and influence within the club increased, allowing him control over all aspects of the club's business. He persevered in building the team, strengthening his attacking lineup with the signings of David Jack in 1928, and Alex James and Cliff Bastin in 1929. As at his previous clubs, Chapman worked on improving the defence, notably through the signings of Herbie Roberts and Eddie Hapgood at centre half and left back respectively. It was the signing of David Jack in particular that highlighted Chapman's cunning when it came to transfer negotiations. Bolton Wanderers had originally asked for a fee of £13,000, almost double the existing record. Bob Wall, Chapman's personal assistant at the time, later recounted the negotiations he made with Bolton's directors as follows: > We arrived at the hotel half-an-hour early. Chapman immediately went into the lounge bar. He called the waiter, placed two pound notes in his hand and said: "George, this is Mr Wall, my assistant. He will drink whisky and dry ginger. I will drink gin and tonic. We shall be joined by guests. They will drink whatever they like. See that our guests are given double of everything, but Mr Wall's whisky and dry ginger will contain no whisky, and my gin and tonic will contain no gin. Chapman's subterfuge succeeded, as he managed to bargain the inebriated Bolton directors down to £10,890. He was less successful in his attempt to sign Jimmy McGrory from Celtic. He had set up a meeting with Celtic manager Willie Maley and young McGrory in summer 1928 when Maley and McGrory were on their way to a pilgrimage in Lourdes. A huge sum was offered (a blank cheque, some say) for the prolific McGrory, and Maley was more than ready to accept, for Celtic needed money to pay for its new stand. The deal fell through when McGrory, a homesick young Scotsman with an intense love for Celtic, refused to sign. He later (in 1935) broke the all-time goalscoring record. Chapman had laid out a five-year plan for success in 1925, and it came to fruition exactly on schedule, as his Arsenal won their first major trophy in the 1930 FA Cup Final, beating his old side, Huddersfield Town, 2–0. Despite having finished only 14th in the League the same season, the win spurred Arsenal on and laid the foundations for a decade in which Arsenal would become the dominant team in England and eventually win five league titles. Chapman had by now perfected Arsenal's ruthless, counter-attacking strategy. He employed a robust front line of Lambert supported by David Jack and Alex James as deep-lying inside forwards, filling the gap vacated by the movement of the centre half into defence; Alex James in particular, with his passing supplying the front men, became celebrated as the engine of the team during the coming decade. Chapman employed Bastin and Hulme as pacy wingers who could cut inside instead of hugging the touchline; they could either shoot for goal themselves or pick each other out if the centre forward was marked out of the game. With the exception of James, keeping and dwelling on the ball and individuality were discouraged in favour of a quick passing game, although Chapman still conceded: "All the men are expected to play to plan, but not so as to stifle individuality." Chapman's tactics of fast-moving play meant the wing half line of John and Jones were now pushed in to cover central midfield, pivoting around the halfway line so that they could drop back to defend when necessary. Chapman was equally committed to a strong defence, saying that maintenance of a back line was "the rock bottom of football". Arsenal's defence were told to play deep and, with the support of the wing halves, fall back into their own penalty area when the opposition had the ball; this allowed the opposition plenty of possession in Arsenal's half, until they reached the 18-yard line and faced a massed defence. Once Arsenal regained the ball – usually through the centre half Herbie Roberts – the ball would be quickly passed forward and the wing halves would push up to support the attackers, meaning Arsenal could quickly commit as many as seven men forward as a unit to rapidly attack and try to score. Chapman's system demanded a high level of fitness from his players, something which he strongly emphasised. He balanced the need for players suited to each task – in which his skill in spotting the right players and his extensive scouting network proved vital – with adapting his system to account for their abilities. Though highly effective, Chapman's fast, counter-attacking passing approach to football contrasted with how the game was traditionally played in England at the time, with its emphasis on dribbling, possession and dwelling on the ball, and thus brought accusations of "Lucky Arsenal" or "Boring Arsenal" from commentators and opposition. Nevertheless, despite the stereotype, in Arsenal's first title-winning season of 1930–31, they scored 127 goals in the League, which still stands as a club record. Having won both League and Cup in separate seasons with two clubs, Chapman was determined to go one better and win the Double – which had not yet been won in the 20th century – in 1931–32 but ended up missing out on both, finishing second in the League behind Everton and losing the 1932 FA Cup Final controversially to Newcastle United, with Newcastle's equaliser coming after the ball had gone behind for a goal kick. Undeterred, Chapman kept faith with his side and launched a bid for the 1932–33 title. However, it was during this season that Arsenal suffered one of the most infamous defeats in their history. In the FA Cup third round, Arsenal had been drawn against Walsall of the Third Division North. Arsenal, as the previous season's losing finalists and league leaders, were clear favourites to win the match. On the day, five of the Arsenal first team were out with injury or flu and had their places taken by reserves. Arsenal lost 2–0 in one of the greatest FA Cup upsets. Chapman was enraged by the result, and showed his ruthlessness by selling one player, Tommy Black, who had conceded a penalty in the game, to Plymouth Argyle within a week of the result; another, striker Charlie Walsh, was sold to Brentford a week later. Despite the FA Cup setback, Arsenal bounced back in the League, and with the same scoring form as in 1930–31, finished the season having scored 118 League goals in total, including a 5–0 win over rivals Aston Villa in that season's title-deciding match. In the following close season, Chapman became the first professional manager in charge of England, albeit in an ad hoc unofficial capacity, for a summer tour of Europe. He did not have any input into the selection process, the team being determined by the FA's International Selection Committee, but did advise on tactics and gave pre-match team talks. Chapman was in charge for a friendly against Italy in Rome on 13 May 1933, which finished 1–1, and England's 4–0 win over Switzerland a week later. Wary of his ageing Arsenal team and the club's inadequate reserves (as proven by the Walsall match), it was around this time that Chapman noted to club director George Allison: "The team's played out, Mr Allison, we must rebuild". Chapman started the process, signing Ray Bowden, Pat Beasley and Jimmy Dunne, and had converted the young George Male from left half to right back. Chapman would not live to see the end of the season, let alone complete the task of rebuilding his side. Arsenal went into 1933–34 looking to retain the title, and started consistently; they worked their way to the top of the league and were a comfortable four points clear after a goalless draw with Birmingham on 30 December 1933. This proved to be Chapman's last match in charge. ## Death Chapman celebrated New Year in London before travelling north on a scouting trip to see Bury play Notts County on 1 January 1934. The following day, he travelled to his native Yorkshire to watch Sheffield Wednesday, Arsenal's next opponents, before spending a final night in his home town of Kiveton Park. He returned to London nursing a cold but was well enough to watch an Arsenal third-team match against Guildford City. Soon afterwards, his illness suddenly worsened; pneumonia set in, and Chapman quickly succumbed. He died in the early hours of 6 January 1934 at his home in Hendon. He was buried four days later in St Mary's Churchyard, Hendon. Chapman was survived by a widow, Annie, two sons, Ken (born 1908) and Bruce (born 1911), and two daughters, Molly (born 1915) and Joyce (born 1919). Ken was a rugby union player for Harlequins, and later served as president of the Rugby Football Union. ## Legacy Chapman was one of the first football managers in the modern sense of the word, taking full charge of the team, rather than letting board members pick the side. As well as his tactical innovations, he was a strong believer in physical fitness in football – he instituted a strict training regime and the use of physiotherapists and masseurs. He encouraged his players to openly discuss tactics and the game, instituting weekly team meetings at his clubs, and encouraged them to socialise in extra-curricular activities such as golf. He wrote regularly on football for the Sunday Express newspaper, and a collection of his writings was published after his death in a book, entitled Herbert Chapman on Football. Unlike many of his contemporaries in Britain, Chapman was a fan of the continental game and counted among his friends Hugo Meisl and Jimmy Hogan, coaches of the Austrian "Wunderteam" of the 1930s. As long ago as 1909, he had taken his Northampton side on a tour of Germany to play 1. FC Nürnberg, and at Arsenal he had instituted an ongoing series of home-and-away friendlies against the likes of Racing Club de Paris. Chapman had proposed a Europe-wide club competition more than twenty years before the European Cup was instituted, and regularly took his teams abroad to play foreign sides. He was one of the first managers to consider signing black and foreign players; as well as signing Walter Tull, one of the first black professionals in the game, for Northampton Town in 1911, he attempted to recruit Austrian international goalkeeper Rudy Hiden for Arsenal in 1930, but was blocked by the Ministry of Labour, after protests from the Players' Union and the Football League. However, in the same year he did succeed in signing Gerard Keyser, the first Dutchman to play English league football, as an amateur, and Hiden was signed by Jimmy Hogan for Racing Club de Paris. After attending a night-time match in Belgium in 1930 with his friend Hugo Meisl, Chapman became an early advocate of floodlights. He had lights installed in Highbury's new West Stand when it was constructed in 1932; however, they were used only for training, and Arsenal would have to wait until the 1950s for their officially sanctioned use in matches. Chapman oversaw much of the development of Highbury in the early 1930s, including the building of the West Stand and the addition of a clock which was eventually placed by the south terrace, giving it the name of the "Clock End". He is also credited with being behind the renaming of London Underground's Gillespie Road station to Arsenal. He even designed the scoreboard and turnstiles at the stadium. Chapman advocated the use of white footballs and numbered shirts, as well as adding hoops to Arsenal's socks to make it easier for players to pick each other out. He later made a further change to Arsenal's kit, adding white sleeves to the previously all-red shirt and brightening the colour, before a match against Liverpool on 4 March 1933; the same kit theme of red with white sleeves or trim survives to this day. The tradition of both teams walking out together at the FA Cup Final was started in 1930 due to Chapman's involvement with both clubs, and has continued since. ## Honours Although he did not win any major honours as a player, as a manager Chapman won a Southern League title in 1908–09 with Northampton Town, four Football League titles (1923–24 and 1924–25 with Huddersfield Town, 1930–31 and 1932–33 with Arsenal) and two FA Cups (1921–22 with Huddersfield Town, 1929–30 with Arsenal). After his death the team he had built at Arsenal, under his successors Joe Shaw and George Allison, went on to win the 1933–34 and 1934–35 titles, emulating his Huddersfield Town team by completing a hat-trick. No team was to repeat the feat until Liverpool between 1982 and 1984. Chapman was honorary president of Scottish amateur football club Chirnside United until his death in 1934. In 2003, Chapman was inducted into the English Football Hall of Fame in recognition of his impact as a manager. An English Heritage blue plaque commemorating Chapman was unveiled in March 2005, at the house in Hendon where Chapman lived from 1926 until his death. Chapman was the first footballer or football manager to be commemorated in this way by English Heritage. In 2004, on the seventieth anniversary of his death, The Sunday Times named him the greatest British manager of all time in a poll. In tribute to his achievements at Arsenal, a bronze bust of Chapman, sculpted by Jacob Epstein resided inside the marble halls of the East Stand of Arsenal Stadium, Highbury until its closure in 2006 and will be reinstated there once redevelopment work in the stadium is completed. A replica sits in the Directors' Entrance at Emirates Stadium; he is one of only two Arsenal managers to be honoured this way, the other being Arsène Wenger. Furthermore, Arsenal's white away kit for the 2007–08 season was dedicated to Chapman and his achievements. Huddersfield Town were presented with a replica of Chapman's bust by Arsenal, to celebrate their centenary in 2008. Additionally, as part of their centennial, Huddersfield contested the inaugural Herbert Chapman Trophy against Arsenal at the Galpharm Stadium on 6 August 2008, which Arsenal won 2–1. On 9 December 2011, Arsenal unveiled a statue of Chapman outside Emirates Stadium in celebration of the club's 125th anniversary. The club also unveiled statues of former players Tony Adams and Thierry Henry. ### Honours overview Northampton Town - Southern League: 1908–09 Huddersfield Town - FA Cup: 1921–22 - First Division (2): 1923–24, 1924–25 - FA Charity Shield: 1922 Arsenal - FA Cup: 1929–30 runner-up: 1931–32 - First Division (2): 1930–31, 1932–33 - FA Charity Shield (3): 1930, 1931, 1933 Individual - World Soccer 9th Greatest Manager of All Time: 2013 - France Football 24th Greatest Manager of All Time: 2019 ## See also - List of English football championship-winning managers
10,766,374	Delaware Route 5	1,160,380,145	State highway in Sussex County, Delaware, United States	[ "State highways in Delaware", "Transportation in Sussex County, Delaware" ]	Delaware Route 5 (DE 5) is a 19.49-mile-long (31.37 km) state highway in Sussex County, Delaware. The route runs from River Road and Oak Orchard Avenue on the Indian River Bay in Oak Orchard north to an intersection with DE 1 north of Milton. Along the way, DE 5 passes through rural areas along with the communities of Long Neck, Harbeson, and Milton. The route has concurrencies with DE 23 and DE 24 in the Long Neck area and crosses U.S. Route 9 (US 9)/DE 404 in Harbeson and DE 16 in Milton. DE 5 features one alternate route, DE 5 Alternate (DE 5 Alt.), which provides a bypass of Milton. DE 5 was built as a state highway in the 1920s and 1930s. The road between Long Neck and north of Milton, including present-day DE 5 north of DE 24, was designated as part of a short-lived DE 22 in the 1930s. DE 5 was designated to its current alignment by 1938. DE 5 Alt. was designated by 2001. ## Route description DE 5 heads northwest on two-lane undivided Oak Orchard Road from the intersection with River Road and Oak Orchard Avenue on the northern shore of the Indian River Bay, passing through the residential areas of Oak Orchard. The road continues through a mix of farms and woods with some housing developments, passing northeast of the Nanticoke Indian Museum before coming to an intersection with DE 24. At this point, DE 5 turns northeast to form a concurrency with DE 24 on John J. Williams Highway. The road heads north through residential and commercial development with some fields as it enters the Long Neck area, where it intersects DE 23. At the DE 23 intersection, DE 5 splits from DE 24 and turns northwest onto DE 23, which is called Indian Mission Road. The road crosses Guinea Creek and heads through a mix of farmland and woodland with some housing subdivisions, intersecting Harmons Hill Road/Phillips Branch Road. In Fairmount, DE 23 branches off to the northeast, and DE 5 continues to the northwest through more rural areas. At the intersection with DE 24 Alt. in Hollyville, the name changes to Harbeson Road. Farther northwest, the road comes to a junction with Anderson Corner Road/Forest Road. The route turns north and reaches Harbeson. In Harbeson, DE 5 heads past homes and crosses the Delmarva Central Railroad's Lewes Industrial Track line before it passes east of an Allen Harim Foods chicken plant and intersects US 9/DE 404 near businesses. Past this intersection, the road runs north through more rural land before curving northwest. Farther northwest, the route runs along the western border of the town of Milton as it passes west of residential development before reaching a junction with Shingle Point Road/Chestnut Street. The route turns north again and comes to an intersection with the southern terminus of the DE 5 Alt. bypass to the west of Milton, which heads west on Sand Hill Road. Also at this junction, the name changes from Harbeson Road to Federal Street. DE 5 continues northeast into Milton, crossing the Milton Rail-Trail and passing several homes. At the intersection with Front Street, the route turns northwest onto Union Street, running through the downtown and heading across the Broadkill River. The road continues through residential areas in the northern part of Milton. At the north end of town, DE 5 intersects DE 16 along with the northern terminus of DE 5 Alt., which heads west on DE 16. DE 5 continues north on Union Street Extended, passing through agricultural areas with some woods and homes. The route turns northeast and comes to its northern terminus at DE 1; this intersection has no access from northbound DE 1 to DE 5. The section of DE 5 between the southern terminus and DE 16 serves as part of a primary hurricane evacuation route from the Oak Orchard and Long Neck areas to points inland while the section of DE 5 between DE 16 and DE 1 serves as part of a secondary hurricane evacuation route from the coastal areas. The section of the route between US 9/DE 404 in Harbeson and DE 16 in Milton is designated as part of the Delaware Bayshore Byway, a Delaware Byway and National Scenic Byway. DE 5 has an annual average daily traffic count ranging from a high of 19,031 vehicles at the intersection with DE 23 and DE 24 to a low of 2,260 vehicles at the south end of the DE 24 concurrency. ## History By 1920, what is now DE 5 existed as an unimproved county road. The road was upgraded to a state highway between Harbeson and Milton by 1924. The following year, the road was proposed as a state highway north of Milton and from Oak Orchard to the present-day north end of the DE 24 concurrency. The entire length of the present DE 5 was completed as a state highway by 1931. DE 22 was designated in 1936 to run from Long Neck north to DE 14 (now DE 1) north of Milton. DE 5 was assigned to its current alignment by 1938, running between Oak Orchard and DE 14 north of Milton. DE 5 replaced DE 22 north of the DE 24 intersection while the former DE 22 south of there became unnumbered (now a part of DE 23). By 1994, DE 23 was designated to run concurrent with a portion of DE 5 in the Long Neck area. ## Major intersections ## Delaware Route 5 Alternate Delaware Route 5 Alternate (DE 5 Alt.) is a 3.8-mile-long (6.1 km) alternate route of DE 5 that bypasses the town of Milton. The route travels west from DE 5 south of Milton along two-lane undivided Sand Hill Road through areas of farms and woods with some homes. The route turns north to join DE 30 on Gravel Hill Road, crossing an abandoned railroad grade just east of the terminus of the Delmarva Central Railroad's Milton Industrial Track line. DE 5 Alt. splits from DE 30 by turning east onto DE 16, following that route through more rural areas on Milton Ellendale Highway. The route ends at an intersection with DE 5 north of Milton. In some locations, the route is signed as "DE 5 Truck Alt." The section of the route concurrent with DE 16 is designated as part of the Delaware Bayshore Byway, a Delaware Byway and National Scenic Byway. The route was designated in 1998 as an alternate truck route bypassing the section of DE 5 in Milton. Despite this, the route was not suited as a truck bypass, and truck traffic continued to follow DE 5 through Milton. Construction of a truck bypass along the route of DE 5 Alt. was completed in 2005 in order to reduce truck traffic along DE 5 through Milton. This project made improvements to Sand Hill Road and DE 30 to upgrade the route to a truck bypass including intersection improvements at DE 5 and Sand Hill Road and DE 30 and Sand Hill Road, reconstructing Sand Hill Road, and replacing a bridge. Major intersections ## See also
35,525,802	2012 Scottish Cup final	1,165,105,214	null	[ "2010s in Glasgow", "2011–12 in Scottish association football cup finals", "Heart of Midlothian F.C. matches", "Hibernian F.C. matches", "May 2012 sports events in the United Kingdom", "Scottish Cup finals" ]	The 2012 Scottish Cup Final was the 127th final of the Scottish Cup. The match took place at Hampden Park on 19 May 2012 and was contested by the Edinburgh derby rivals, Hibernian (Hibs) and Heart of Midlothian (Hearts). It was Hibs' 12th Scottish Cup Final and Hearts' 14th. It was also the first time the clubs had met in a Scottish Cup Final since 1896. As Scottish Premier League (SPL) clubs, Hibs and Hearts both entered the competition in the fourth round. Hibs won all four of their ties at the first attempt, defeating two other SPL clubs and two Scottish Football League clubs. After winning against Junior club Auchinleck Talbot in the fourth round, Hearts defeated three other SPL clubs to reach the final. Hearts needed a replay to eliminate St Johnstone then they beat St Mirren, then beat cup holders Celtic in the semi-final. The match was Hibs' 12th appearance in the Scottish Cup final and Hearts' 14th. Hibs had previously won two finals and Hearts had won seven. Because both teams were from Edinburgh, many of the city councillors requested that the final be held in Edinburgh at Murrayfield Stadium, instead of the traditional venue of Hampden, in Glasgow. The previous final between the two clubs in 1896 had been held in Edinburgh but on this occasion it stayed in Glasgow. Hearts won a one-sided match 5–1. They took an early 2–0 lead by goals from Darren Barr and Rudi Skácel. Hibs reduced the deficit to 2–1 at half-time through captain James McPake. Soon after half-time, however, Pa Kujabi was sent off and conceded a penalty kick, which was converted by Danny Grainger. Hearts scored two further goals with their one-man advantage to complete the scoring. ## Route to the final ### Hibernian Scottish Premier League club Hibernian entered the competition in the fourth round. They began their campaign against Second Division leaders Cowdenbeath at Central Park, which was suggested as a possible cup upset due to Hibs' poor league form. Cowdenbeath took the lead after just 15 seconds, but Hibs recovered to win 3–2. Hibs then took on fellow SPL club Kilmarnock at their home ground, Easter Road, having made several signings in January 2012. An early goal by Irish striker Eoin Doyle was enough to give Hibs a 1–0 win. In the quarter-final Hibs were drawn against the other senior club from Ayrshire, away to Ayr United. Again the match was tipped as a possible cup upset, as Ayr had beaten Hibs (after a replay) in the 2010–11 Scottish Cup competition. Hibs scored two early goals and progressed to the semi-final with a 2–0 victory. In the semi-final, Hibs took on Aberdeen at Hampden Park. Garry O'Connor scored an early goal, and Rory Fallon equalised for Aberdeen in the second half with a spectacular looping volley. Hibs won 2–1 thanks to a late winning goal by Leigh Griffiths. ### Hearts Heart of Midlothian, also a Scottish Premier League club, entered the competition in the fourth round. They began their campaign against Junior club Auchinleck Talbot in a home match at Tynecastle Stadium. A late goal by Gordon Smith gave Hearts a 1–0 victory. Hearts then faced fellow SPL side St Johnstone in the fifth round. Hearts led 1-0 after a David Templeton goal. Despite St Johnstone defender Dave Mackay being sent off after 74 minutes, Cillian Sheridan equalised to force a replay. In the replay, Murray Davidson put St Johnstone in the lead with an 83rd-minute goal. St Johnstone then could have been further ahead before Jamie Hamill converted a controversial stoppage-time penalty to force extra time. During extra time Marius Zaliukas scored the winning goal from a corner. In the quarter-final Hearts faced another SPL side, St Mirren. Hearts conceded early on after a Graham Carey free-kick before Craig Beattie scored and then set up Rudi Skácel to put Hearts in front. Zaliukas then scored a late own goal after deflecting a Nigel Hasselbaink shot into his own net to level the match. In the replay at St Mirren Park, Carey had an early penalty saved, after a handball by Zaliukas, and Hasselbaink then scored a goal which was ruled out because the referee had not given St Mirren an advantage. Hearts then came back into the match as Hamill and Skácel scored to give Hearts a 2–0 win. In the semi-final at Hampden Park, Hearts were drawn against cup holders Celtic. Skácel scored shortly after half-time for Hearts before Gary Hooper scored a late equaliser for Celtic. Hearts were then awarded a stoppage-time penalty which former Celtic striker Beattie converted. There was controversy around both Hooper's goal and Beattie's penalty after the match as Hooper had looked offside when he scored his goal and Hearts' penalty was considered to have been wrongly awarded by the referee. ## Pre-match This was Hibs 12th appearance in the Scottish Cup Final. They had previously won two Scottish Cups (in 1887 and 1902), and been beaten in nine finals (in 1896, 1914, 1923, 1924, 1947, 1958, 1972, 1979 and 2001). Hearts were appearing in their 14th Scottish Cup Final. They had won seven Scottish Cups (in 1891, 1896, 1901, 1906, 1956, 1998 and 2006) and been beaten in the final six times (in 1903, 1907, 1968, 1976, 1986 and 1996). The only previous meeting of the two clubs in a Scottish Cup Final was in 1896, when the match was played at New Logie Green (home of St Bernard's) in Edinburgh. With two clubs from Edinburgh qualifying for the final, some City of Edinburgh Council members called for the match to be played at Murrayfield Stadium instead of Hampden Park, the traditional venue for Scottish Cup Finals. A survey by the Edinburgh Evening News found that 37 of 58 councillors favoured Murrayfield, with nine favouring Hampden. Supporters of moving the game to Murrayfield cited its greater capacity, convenience for the majority of fans and the precedent of the 1896 Scottish Cup Final. The Scottish Football Association stated that no venue other than Hampden would be considered. Supporters of keeping the game at Hampden cited that the players would prefer to play at the national football stadium and that some fans had already begun to make arrangements for the tie being in Glasgow. First ScotRail provided additional capacity on their routes between Edinburgh and Glasgow. Both clubs received an allocation of approximately 20,000 tickets, out of a total capacity of 52,063. The remaining seats are accounted for by Hampden Park debenture holders, hospitality, sponsors, media and segregation areas. In excess of 1,000 unused debentures were distributed to each club. The allocation was enough to provide for the season ticket holders of each club, with Hearts having 10,000 and Hibs 7,500 approximately, although both clubs anticipated that there would be little or no need for a general public sale. Hearts decided to sell tickets using their loyalty points system, while Hibs connected their allocation to sales of season tickets and memberships. Due to high demand, Hearts tightened the criteria needed for a ticket during the sales process. Regular tickets cost £35 or £28 for adults and £10 for children under 15 years old. ## Match Hibs suffered an injury during the semi-final, when their regular goalkeeper Graham Stack had to be substituted due to a thigh injury. A scan following the match showed that he would be unable to play for between 10 and 12 weeks, and therefore would miss the final. Hibs secured their place in the Scottish Premier League with one game to spare and rested several players for the final game of their league programme. Defender Matt Doherty suffered a foot injury in that league game, but manager Pat Fenlon said he was confident Doherty would be able to play in the final. Fenlon then took his squad to his home town of Dublin to prepare for the cup final and told the media that he had almost finalised his team selection. Having finished in the top half of the 2011–12 Scottish Premier League, Hearts were involved in the battle to qualify for the 2012–13 UEFA Europa League competition. A victory against St Johnstone in their penultimate league match lifted Hearts into fifth place, a qualifying position. Hearts then rested some players for their final league match, a 5–0 defeat by Celtic. Entering the week before the cup final, Hearts had concerns about the fitness of striker Craig Beattie, who was unable to train due to a hamstring injury. Craig Thomson was appointed to referee the match. Thomson decided to donate his match fee of £1,000 to a hospice in Paisley, where his late mother had been treated. ### Report Hearts started the match as the brighter of the two teams. Rudi Skácel headed wide early on from an Andrew Driver cross. Hearts took the lead through Darren Barr in the 15th minute, scoring from close range. Hearts continued to control the match and Pa Kujabi picked up a booking for fouling Suso Santana. Skácel then doubled Hearts' lead after receiving the ball on the edge of the area and turning to hit a shot which deflected off James McPake before going in. Hibs then had an opportunity as Kujabi's cross came to Garry O'Connor, but he hit his shot over the bar. McPake then made a goal-line clearance from a Suso shot which had beaten Hibs' keeper Mark Brown. McPake got Hibs back into the game from a corner. Tom Soares' initial delivery was cleared but he got the ball back out on the wing and put in a low cross which McPake converted. Almost immediately after the start of the second-half Hearts were awarded a penalty kick. Kujabi fouled Suso by pulling his jersey and catching his heel, but television replays showed that the foul had taken place outside the penalty area. Hibs were also reduced to ten men as Kujabi received his second yellow card, resulting in a red. Danny Grainger converted the penalty, which was also his first goal for Hearts. Soon afterwards, Ryan McGowan scored with a header after Hibs keeper Brown had initially saved from Stephen Elliott. Skácel finished the scoring with another shot from just outside the box to make it 5-1 for Hearts. ### Details ## Aftermath Hibernian manager Pat Fenlon received a four-match ban for being sent to the stands during the match. He later described the result as a 'disaster' and that he would look to address some of the problems highlighted in the Hibs team during his summer rebuilding of the squad. ## Media coverage In the United Kingdom, the match was broadcast live on BBC One Scotland and Sky Sports. Radio commentary of the match was aired on BBC Radio Scotland.
5,276,305	Argo Tea	1,147,934,188	Chain of tea cafes in Chicago, US	[ "Companies based in Chicago", "Restaurants established in 2003", "Restaurants in Chicago", "Tea brands in the United States", "Tea companies of the United States", "Tea houses" ]	Argo Tea began as a chain of tea cafes that was founded in the Lincoln Park community area in Chicago, Illinois, in June 2003. It was headquartered in Chicago's Loop community area. It had more than a dozen locations in the Chicago metropolitan area before expanding in 2010 to New York City, where it opened four locations that year and then expanded to St. Louis and Boston. the chain had 26 locations and distribution in over 3,000 grocery stores. In its first decade, it has grown simultaneously with the tea market. Its expansion into grocery stores occurred in 2010 and 2011. Arsen Avakian is the current chief executive officer. By spring 2013, it had opened in Beirut with plans to add locations in five Middle East cities by year end. Argo Tea primarily sells a variety of hot and cold tea-based signature drinks. In addition, it offers about three dozen international varieties of loose-leaf tea (tea brewed from loose tea leaves, as opposed to tea leaves in bagged tea), coffee, baked goods, small entrées, and teaware. The tea menu included a variety of black, green, white teas, and natural herbal teas, served hot or iced. Argo Tea has formed a special relationship with Whole Foods Market to distribute Argo products. According to the description in Bloomberg Businessweek, Argo's specialty foods include pastries, sandwiches, salads, and quiches. Argo markets from a lifestyle perspective with awareness of modern design and sustainable environment. It also sells audio CDs. In 2020, Argo Tea began selling bottled tea in Walgreens and other stores, “shifting its focus to a ready-to-drink premium tea line derived from one of its most popular café beverages.” [from cafés], and it was acquired by Golden Fleece. “Golden Fleece Beverages, Inc. took ownership of the Argo Tea brand, and has continued to operate the business as Argo Tea.” Loose tea is sold online. ## History Argo set out to be the Starbucks of tea. Argo Tea was launched in 2003 by three partners: Arsen Avakian, Simon Simonian, and Daniel Lindwasser. Avakian and Simonian are boyhood friends from Armenia. They grew up in Yerevan and emigrated in the 1990s to the United States, where Simonian, a computer scientist, and Avakian, a startup company specialist, teamed up following the dot-com bubble. Avakian first came to the United States as a Fulbright scholar. Lindwasser is a Frenchman who moved to the U.S. in 1997. He is a former management consultant. Avakian's father, Yuri, holds multiple wind and solar technology patents. The original 900-square-foot (84 m<sup>2</sup>) cafe for Argo Tea, which had 24 indoor seats and 20 patio seats in its 2003 configuration, is located at 958 West Armitage Avenue on the corner of Sheffield Avenue in Chicago. The venture, which opened in June 2003, was the first tea cafe in Lincoln Park. It was across the street from a Starbucks. Argo borrowed its name from the story of Jason and the Argonauts in Greek mythology. The original store was financed by its founders, who were all experienced management consultants, without outside investors. They used their own credit cards as lines of credit. Chicago architect Mark A. Cuellar was hired to design Argo's early cafe interiors. At first, the company experimented with expansion by distributing boxed dry tea at Whole Foods, but quickly restrategized. Barely six months after opening, Argo was planning expansion in Chicago and beyond. Late in 2004, Argo signed a lease to make its first expansion beyond its original location (at Loyola University in the Near North Side community area on Rush Street). By the beginning of 2006, there was a third location (in the Loop community area on Randolph Street near State) with a fourth on the way. In March 2006, Argo expanded to the South Side of Chicago at the University of Chicago Medical Center, which is located in the Hyde Park community area, with a location that is described as a teaosk, a themed kiosk. By 2007, the company decided to pursue consistency across its locations and began a centralized concentrate brewing process. After five years, the franchise had 10 locations ranging from 1,000 to 2,000 square feet (93 to 186 m<sup>2</sup>), all in Chicago. In Chicago, several of the early cafes, including the 11th inside Merchandise Mart and the 13th at O'Hare International Airport, have been located in close proximity to a Starbucks storefronts with the thought that Starbucks is expanding demand for tea. By February 2009, the company was still a Chicago metropolitan area business with all 13 of its locations. In July 2011, Argo became the first outside retail tenant of the Tribune Tower in six years when it leased space. Argo opened its flagship New York City location in January 2010 by signing a 10-year lease in the Flatiron Building. It promptly followed with a Chelsea neighborhood storefront and then a Columbus Circle store in the spring. It opened a total of four cafes in New York City in 2010, taking advantage of the late-2000s recession, which allowed the company to procure prime retail locations such as Union Square, Columbus Circle and the Flatiron District at reasonable rates. The business replaced a Dean & Deluca in the Union Square neighborhood. Among the investors in the New York City expansion were Sam Zell, Glen Tullman and Oxford Capital. In May 2011, the company added its fifth tea room in New York City. By 2010, the company eschewed its aspiration to be the Starbucks of tea, "Starbucks is more like Windows PC—it's old, less healthy and designed for everyone—and we want to be more like Mac: young, healthy, cool and a more unique, innovative brand." Avakian said the company hopes to build the Apple of tea. At the time, it was opening its 18th store (14 in Chicago and 4 in New York) and had \$10 million in annual sales, making it the largest chain focused on tea, according to Technomic Inc. In 2011, the San Francisco Chronicle credited Argo as being the company that caused the 21st century tea shop revolution, while Time ran a story claiming that Argo has gotten America to drink tea. , the United States market had grown to over 3,000 tearooms, according to the Tea Association of the USA. According to Beverage Digest, between 2006 and 2009, coffee consumption declined 2.3 percent in the United States, while tea consumption rose 4.5 percent. The growth of teas has caused Starbucks to drop the word coffee from its name and build the Tazo brand. Starbucks had a total 2010 revenue of \$9 billion, while the entire tea industry was \$7.7 billion, including \$443 million by the top 6 U.S. tea chains. By early October 2011, Argo claimed 26 locations in four cities (Chicago, New York, Boston and St. Louis) and distribution in 3,000 grocery stores around the country including Whole Foods, Safeway and Dominick's. When the lease came up for renewal at the original location on April 30, 2013, the company did not extend the deal, but the company would open a “greenhouse” location, with mainly glass walls, near Rush Street the following month. By March 2013, bottle drinks, which they had begun in 2010 were 20% of the company's business. By that time Argo Tea had opened a business location in Beirut and had planned to follow that with one in Doha in April 2013. It also intended to open 2013 Middle East locations in Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Kuwait and Riyadh. By September 2013, Doha was opened and that month a second Beirut location opened. In 2020, Argo Tea changed its focus from cafés to sale of bottled tea drinks, and it was acquired by Golden Fleece Beverages. It made an agreement with Walgreens to vend the bottled teas. The company still uses the Argo Tea name. Argo tea is the tenth largest seller of tea in the US. ## Products Tea is the second most consumed beverage in the world, after water. Argo was founded in response to a realization that Americans had so few tea offerings that they generally were unfamiliar with anything but bagged teas. At the time, most tea retailers either supplied bulk tea for home brewing or traditional sit-down service, but Argo focused on premium specialty drinks in paper cups. Meanwhile, a minority of Asian immigrants from countries such as India, Vietnam and China where tea is the national beverage were spreading some of their traditions. Argo endeavored to emphasize the healthy aspects of tea as an alternative to coffee. When it was founded, Argo was part of a field of blossoming tea cafe franchises meeting a burgeoning demand. By 2002, there were 1,100 tearooms with sit-down service. In 2003, retail sales of tea totaled \$5.1 billion, and in 2005, as the specialty tea market was growing 20 percent per year, the total retail tea market was expected to surpass \$10 billion by 2010. Argo began with 35 teas from around the world, including black tea, green tea and chamomile tisane as well as exotic teas. From the outset, it included a mix of traditional Asian teas as well as teas from exotic locations. One of the companies staple drinks came from a vacation to Ipanema beach in Rio de Janeiro in which Avakian paid a juice bar operator to close shop to allow him to experiment with flavor combinations during business hours. Several of Argo's teas are seasonal. One of its signature drinks is the teappuccino, a black tea mixed with steamed milk and froth, which the company has trademarked. The menu leverages the new wave of specialty teas that may be served sweetened or spiced and that are blended with milk, sparkling water or fruit juices. In the early years, its favorite offerings were Bubble tea, Pomegranate tea, Matte Latte or Chai tea and milk and Tea sangria. In its first years, the company sold illy brand coffee. While the company imports its teas from sources around the world, it now brews its teas at a centralized location in downtown Chicago. Argo started out selling loose tea in 1- and 4-ounce bags or in bulk. Among Argo's Americanized drink varieties is a version of the national drink of both Argentina and Uruguay, the mate, which Argo serves as a Mate late. By 2010, the company ventured into the grocery store market (Whole Foods and Treasure Island) with bottled specialty teas in Chicago and had plans for its own bottling facility. By the time the company opened its New York locations, it offered fair trade certified coffee. In 2011, the company expanded its distribution to grocery stores around the country. According to the company's press release for the opening of its 20th location in 2011, the menu included "all natural tea-based signature drinks, over 30 varieties of loose leaf teas, fair-trade organic coffee, fresh-baked pastries, specialty foods, and a selection of teaware and accessories. The signature drink menu features healthy and unique options such Maté Laté with earthy maté, almond and milk, Green Tea Ginger Twist with Japanese green tea and ginger root, MojiTea with cool mint tea and lime juice as well as many others. The food menu features a wide assortment of freshly baked gourmet pastries, French quiches, and a SpecialTea Foods made with tea-infused ingredients such Teanie Panini, Tea Bites and wholesome Teapot Grains. Argo Tea’s ready-to-drink bottled beverages can also be found outside the cafés, in the finest grocery retailers across the country." Bloomberg Businessweek summarized Argo Tea's business as follows: "Chicago-based Argo Tea strives to redefine the message of tea as a healthy beverage and lifestyle choice, to create unique, all-natural tea-based beverages and to provide customer experiences that reflect modern designs and a sustainable environment." The tea ware and accessories include tea pots, high-tech tea infusers, and wide variety of tea cups. ## Social efforts Although there are both proponents and opponents of the health effects of tea, Argo tea is a proponent of the health benefits of tea and advocates for its use in research. Argo Tea has donated a large amount of white teas, which have high concentrations of antioxidants, to the University of Chicago Hospitals. This contribution prompted the University of Chicago to invite Argo to open the kiosk inside the hospital lobby. The company also holds tea seminars in conjunction with Northwestern University and the University of Chicago to build awareness of the possible health benefits and research possibilities for tea. Argo Tea advocates for sustainability, demonstrates concern and awareness of environmental issues in their business plan and uses charitable donations to promote research as noted above. The company has an environmentally friendly business plan that includes encouraging use of reusable service-ware such as ceramic mugs and plates and washable silverware by its dine-in customers. Argo also markets reusable tea tumblers, which enable its customers to obtain discounted pricing on its drinks. The company considers sustainability and environmental consciousness in all phases of its business including supplier, operations, store design and product decisions. ## Corporate information Although the company was founded in Lincoln Park, the official business address is at the third location in the Loop (16 West Randolph Street Chicago, IL 60601). The company has mostly part-time employees, but offers medical benefits to employees who work 20 hours per week. the workforce was about 200 people. Despite its wide-ranging menu, , 80 percent of Argo's \$15 million annual sales came from tea beverages. In August 2011, Chicago Alderman Brendan Reilly ceded control of Connors Park in the Gold Coast to Argo Tea for development of a 1,200-square-foot (110 m<sup>2</sup>) store. The area had been neglected by the Chicago Park District and become run down. In exchange for a 15-year lease, Argo assumes responsibility for maintaining the park. The business opened its location in the park within a greenhouse in late May 2013.
7,072,641	Santiago Casilla	1,170,574,806	Dominican baseball player (born 1980)	[ "1980 births", "2013 World Baseball Classic players", "Age controversies in sports", "Albuquerque Isotopes players", "Arizona League Athletics players", "Baseball players from San Cristóbal, Dominican Republic", "Dominican Republic expatriate baseball players in Canada", "Dominican Republic expatriate baseball players in the United States", "Fresno Grizzlies players", "Kane County Cougars players", "Leones del Escogido players", "Living people", "Major League Baseball pitchers", "Major League Baseball players from the Dominican Republic", "Oakland Athletics players", "Sacramento River Cats players", "San Francisco Giants players", "San Jose Giants players", "Stockton Ports players", "Vancouver Canadians players", "World Baseball Classic players of the Dominican Republic" ]	Santiago Casilla (born July 25, 1980) is a Dominican former professional baseball relief pitcher. He played in Major League Baseball (MLB) from 2004 to 2018 for the Oakland Athletics and San Francisco Giants. Casilla threw four pitches: a fastball, slider, curveball, and changeup. Casilla originally signed with Oakland under the name of Jairo Garcia, listing his birthdate as 1983. He debuted with Oakland in 2004, pitching briefly for them that year and the next. In January 2006, he revealed his true name and age. 2007 marked the first time he pitched more than four games in a year for Oakland; he an initial boost to their bullpen but missed the latter part of the season with an injury. He appeared in 51 games in 2008, then was allowed to become a free agent after posting a 5.96 earned run average (ERA) in 2009. The Giants signed Casilla in 2010; after starting the season in the minor leagues, he was called up in May and remained with the team for the rest of the season. Casilla won the World Series with the Giants that fall; he also won World Series championships in 2012 and 2014, one of only eight players with the team for all three championships. He replaced Brian Wilson as the closer for the Giants in late 2011 and again at the beginning of 2012, when Wilson was injured. Sergio Romo replaced him as the closer halfway through 2012, but Casilla reclaimed the role in 2014, holding it until the end of 2016. Three times with the Giants, he posted an ERA under 2.00. After Casilla struggled in 2016, he became a free agent. The Athletics signed him in 2017, and he closed for them until they acquired Blake Treinen in August. He pitched the first half of 2018 with them, then finished the year in the minor leagues for the Colorado Rockies. ## Early life Santiago Casilla was born on July 25, 1980, in San Cristóbal, Dominican Republic. He attended high school in Sabana Grande de Palenque. Casilla wanted to be a baseball player, but he was still unsigned at the age of 19, and most Major League Baseball (MLB) scouts in the Dominican Republic were more interested in signing younger prospects. Obtaining false papers from a friend, Casilla began pitching under the name of Jairo Garcia, listing his birthday as March 7, 1983. On January 31, 2000, he was signed as an amateur free agent by the Oakland Athletics. ## Professional career ### Minor leagues Casilla made his professional debut with the rookie league Dominican Summer League Athletics in 2000. Appearing in 11 games, 10 of which he started, he had a 6–2 record and a 3.26 earned run average (ERA). In 2001, he pitched in 12 games (7 starts) for the rookie league Arizona League Athletics, posting a 4–2 record, a 2.85 ERA, 50 strikeouts, 7 walks, and 37 hits allowed in 47+1⁄3 innings pitched. When the 2002 season began, Casilla remained with the Arizona League Athletics. In 13 games (8 starts), he had a 2–1 record, a 2.44 ERA, 66 strikeouts, 17 walks, and 56 hits allowed in 59 innings pitched before getting promoted to the Vancouver Canadians of the Single-A short season Northwest League on August 24. He finished the year with three starts for the Canadians, losing all of them and posting a 7.30 ERA. Casilla participated in extended spring training in 2003, delaying the start of his minor league season until May 19, when he was assigned to the Kane County Cougars of the Single-A Midwest League. He pulled his left hamstring in July and was on the disabled list from the 12th to the 29th. In 14 games (9 starts), he had an 0–1 record, a 2.55 ERA, 28 strikeouts, 19 walks, and 40 hits allowed in 42+1⁄3 innings pitched. ### Oakland Athletics, first stint (2004–2009) #### 2004 In 2004, Casilla became a full-time relief pitcher. Starting the season with Kane County, he was used as the Cougar closer, recording 16 saves while posting a 1–0 record, an 0.30 ERA, 49 strikeouts, 6 walks, and 16 hits allowed in 25 games (30 innings pitched). On June 24, he was called up by the Double-A Midland RockHounds of the Texas League. In 13 games, he had a 2–0 record, two saves, a 1.50 ERA, 32 strikeouts, 15 walks, and 10 hits allowed in 18 innings pitched. On July 30, he was promoted to the Sacramento River Cats of the Triple-A Pacific Coast League (PCL); he made three appearances for them before getting called up to Oakland for the first time on August 9. Casilla made his Major League Baseball (MLB) debut that same day, holding the Minnesota Twins scoreless for the final 2 innings of an 8–2 victory. He appeared in two more games before being sent back to Sacramento on August 18. In 11 games for Sacramento, he had a 1–2 record, 1 save, a 3.95 ERA, 21 strikeouts, nine walks, and 10 hits in 13+2⁄3 innings. The Athletics called him back up in September, but he only appeared in one more game. In his four outings for Oakland, he had no record, no saves, a 12.71 ERA, five strikeouts, nine walks, and five hits allowed in 5+2⁄3 innings. #### 2005 Casilla started the 2005 season with Midland. Serving as their closer, he recorded six saves in 10 games, with a 1.08 ERA, 30 strikeouts, nine walks, and nine hits allowed in 16+2⁄3 innings. On May 10, he was promoted to the River Cats, where he also served as the closer. The Athletics called him up on June 17, and he faced the Philadelphia Phillies that evening in his lone appearance before getting returned to Sacramento four days later. In 44 games with Sacramento, he had a 3–6 record, 20 saves, a 4.47 ERA, 73 strikeouts, 20 walks, and 45 hits allowed in 48+1⁄3 innings pitched. Promoted to Oakland again in September, he pitched in two more games before the end of the year. In his three total appearances for Oakland, he had a 3.00 ERA, 1 strikeout, 1 walk, and 2 hits allowed in 3 innings pitched. #### 2006 In January 2006, during the MLB offseason, Casilla had his agent tell the Athletics his real name and age. "It certainly changes what you ultimately think his upside would be," said Athletics assistant general manager (GM) David Forst, though Forst also observed that the ability to throw 94 miles per hour (151 km/h) kept Casilla a viable MLB prospect. Due to U.S. security concerns over the name change, Casilla was a month late reporting to spring training and was instantly assigned to work with the minor leaguers. Called up from Sacramento on May 21, he appeared in two games, posting an 11.57 ERA before getting returned to Sacramento on May 27. His season ended on June 21 because of a right shoulder strain. In 25 games for Sacramento, he had a 2–0 record, 4 saves in 8 opportunities, a 3.27 ERA, 32 strikeouts, 10 walks, and 25 hits allowed in 33 innings. #### 2007 In 2007, Casilla was recalled by the Athletics on June 3 after going 2–1 with a 4.13 ERA and 29 strikeouts in 24 innings for Sacramento. He stepped into a depleted bullpen that had lost Huston Street, Justin Duchscherer, and Kiko Calero to the disabled list. Casilla started off well, going 2–1 with two saves and an 0.43 ERA in his first 17 games. He picked up his first MLB save on June 6, retiring Manny Ramirez on a fly ball to end the eighth inning and pitching a scoreless ninth in a 3–2 win over the Boston Red Sox. On June 19, he entered a game against the Cincinnati Reds with the bases loaded and struck out Brandon Phillips to keep a run from scoring. He then struck out three batters in a scoreless top of the ninth inning, pumping his fist as he walked off the mound, though the Athletics failed to rally in the bottom of the inning and lost 5–2. Starting on July 15, however, he had a 7.28 ERA in 29 games over the remainder of the season. Umpire John Hirschbeck ejected Casilla from a game against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays on August 23 for throwing a pitch at Brendan Harris. In 46 games for Oakland, he had a 3–1 record, two saves, a 4.44 ERA, 52 strikeouts, 23 walks, and 43 hits allowed in 53+2⁄3 innings pitched. #### 2008 Casilla opened the season on a major league roster for the first time in 2008. He pitched well in his first 21 games, posting an 0.93 ERA and limiting hitters to a .185 batting average against. Then, he was on the disabled list from May 16 through June 19 with right elbow soreness. In 30 games after returning, he recorded a 5.81 ERA, and opponents batted .353 against him. He appeared in a total of 51 games, posting a 2–1 record, two saves, a 3.93 ERA, 43 strikeouts, 20 walks, and 60 hits allowed in 50+1⁄3 innings. Over the offseason, he made nine appearances for the Leones del Escogido of the Dominican Winter League, allowing no earned runs and collecting 4 saves. #### 2009 A member of Oakland's Opening Day roster again in 2009, Casilla posted a 1.59 ERA and .079 opponent batting average in his first 9 games. Then, he was on the disabled list with a sprained right knee from May 2 through May 15. His ERA was 7.30 thereafter, and the Athletics only used him eight times in the season's final 58 days. In 46 games, he had a 1–2 record, 0 saves, a 5.96 ERA, 35 strikeouts, 25 walks, and 61 hits allowed in 48+1⁄3 innings. After the season, the Athletics chose not to offer him a contract, making him a free agent on December 10. He again pitched for the Leones in the offseason, this time making 15 appearances. Casilla posted a 1–1 record and a 2.51 ERA, recording three saves. ### San Francisco Giants (2010–2016) #### 2010 Casilla signed a minor league contract with the San Francisco Giants on January 2, 2010. Visa problems delayed his return to the United States for a month, and he began the season with the PCL's Fresno Grizzlies. In four games for Fresno, he allowed no runs and recorded two saves. On May 21, he was recalled by the Giants when Brandon Medders was placed on the disabled list. He made his Giants debut on May 21 against his former team in Oakland, striking out the only batter he faced (Daric Barton) in a 6–1 defeat. On June 6, after Giants closer Brian Wilson had blown a save against the Pittsburgh Pirates but San Francisco had retaken the lead in the 10th inning, Casilla relieved Wilson with one out and runners on first and second, retiring both batters he faced to earn his first National League (NL) save. After he allowed three runs and blew a lead against the Arizona Diamondbacks on July 23, though the Giants still won the game 7–4, his ERA rose from 2.25 to 3.48. However, in his final 28 games of the season, Casilla's ERA was 1.04. On August 10, he set a career high with three innings pitched, allowing no runs, though the Giants lost 8–6 to the Chicago Cubs. In 52 games, he had a 7–2 record, two saves, a 1.95 ERA, 56 strikeouts, 26 walks, and 50 hits allowed in 55+1⁄3 innings pitched. On Casilla's success with the Giants, sportswriter Carl Steward observed that the Giants' signing of him "turned out to be the biggest theft [Giants GM] Brian Sabean ever made against his cross-bay counterpart Billy Beane". The Giants reached the playoffs as winners of the NL West. In Game 4 of the NL Division Series (NLDS) against the Atlanta Braves, with San Francisco leading 3–2, Casilla pitched a scoreless seventh inning. He also got two outs in the eighth inning before left-hander Javier López was summoned to finish the inning. The Giants won 3–2, clinching a trip to the NL Championship Series (NLCS) against the Philadelphia Phillies. Casilla came on in relief in Game 2 with the Giants trailing 3–1, the bases loaded, but two outs in the seventh. However, he gave up a bases-clearing double to Jimmy Rollins, and San Francisco lost 6–1. In Game 4, he allowed another bases-clearing double, this time to Placido Polanco but with only two men on base. Casilla also gave up a run of his own on a wild pitch. However, the Giants won 6–5 and went on to defeat the Phillies in six games. Against the Texas Rangers in Game 1 of the World Series, Casilla entered with the Giants up 8–4 and two runners on in the sixth. He struck out Elvis Andrus, then pitched a scoreless seventh as the Giants won 11–7. Casilla earned his first World Series ring as the Giants won the series in five games to win their first title since 1954. #### 2011 Casilla returned to the Giants in 2011, but after pitching on Opening Day (March 31), he was placed on the disabled list with inflammation in his right elbow. The injury had affected his velocity since spring training. After returning on May 28, he pitched well, keeping his ERA under 2.00 for most of the season. He took over as San Francisco's closer after Wilson went on the disabled list on August 21. Over the remainder of the year, he was a perfect 6-for-6 in save chances. In 49 games, he had a 2–2 record, a 1.74 ERA, 45 strikeouts, 25 walks, and 33 hits allowed in 51+2⁄3 innings pitched. Among NL relief pitchers, only Eric O'Flaherty had a lower ERA, with an 0.98 figure. #### 2012 In 2012, Casilla took over as the Giants closer again after Wilson was injured and lost for the season in April. He converted 20 of his first 21 save opportunities but blew 5 of his next 9 save situations, posting a 7.71 ERA from June 23 through August 7. Bochy removed him from the role on August 7, replacing him with Sergio Romo and Javier López for the rest of the year. Casilla picked up his first career base hit, a bases-loaded, two-out RBI ground ball single between Diamondbacks first baseman Paul Goldschmidt and second baseman Aaron Hill, on September 14 in a 6–2 win. "I think we were all kind of shocked he made contact," Giants manager Bruce Bochy stated. "He found a good place." In 73 games, he had a 7–6 record, a 2.84 ERA, 55 strikeouts, 22 walks, and 55 hits allowed in 63+1⁄3 innings pitched. Despite only serving as the closer for part of the year, Casilla tied with Kenley Jansen for 10th in the NL with 25 saves. The Giants won the NL West again in 2012. Casilla appeared in all five games of the NLDS against the Cincinnati Reds. In Game 1, he came on with San Francisco trailing in the ninth and allowed two runs, though only one was earned, as the Giants lost 5–2. However, he allowed no runs in the other four games, as San Francisco won the series in five games. In the NLCS against the St. Louis Cardinals, Casilla pitched in his sixth playoff game in a row in Game 1, did not pitch in the next three, and pitched in three straight to finish the series. He did not allow any runs as San Francisco rallied from a 3–1 deficit to defeat the Cardinals in seven games. Against the Detroit Tigers in Game 2 of the 2012 World Series, Casilla relieved Madison Bumgarner to begin the eighth with the Giants leading 1–0. He threw a scoreless inning, helping preserve a 2–0 victory. In Game 4, he came on with two outs in the ninth and got Gerald Laird to ground out to end the inning, then picked up the win after the Giants scored in the 10th, sweeping the Detroit Tigers to win the series. #### 2013 On December 17, 2012, Casilla received a contract extension for \$15 million over three years, along with an option for a fourth season. Prior to the 2013 MLB season, Casilla represented the Dominican Republic in the World Baseball Classic, pitching five scoreless innings as his country won the tournament. He pitched two scoreless innings for a save on April 13 against the Cubs when Romo was unavailable after pitching 4 out of the 5 previous days. On May 21, Casilla was placed on the 15-day disabled list with knee soreness, ultimately requiring surgery to remove a cyst. He did not return until July 13. On September 11, he had his second save of the year, pitching a scoreless ninth in a 4–3 win over the Colorado Rockies. In 57 games, he had a 7–2 record, two saves, a 2.16 ERA, 38 strikeouts, 25 walks, and 39 hits allowed in 50 innings pitched. #### 2014 On May 22, 2014, Casilla was placed on the disabled list after tweaking his hamstring while running to first base. Bochy had told him not to even bother swinging, but he disregarded his manager's orders. "I was shocked he was running like that. Guess he thought he had a hit," Bochy said. He was activated on June 16. In 28 outings through June 29, Casilla posted a 1.11 ERA. On June 30, Bochy removed the struggling Romo from the closer role on that date, announcing that the team intended to go to a closer-by-committee. However, Casilla got most of the opportunities for the rest of the season. He converted 17 saves for the rest of the year, blowing only one on August 27, in a game the Giants won anyway. In 54 games, he had a 3–3 record, 19 saves, a 1.70 ERA, 45 strikeouts, 15 walks, and 35 hits allowed in 58+1⁄3 innings. The Giants made the playoffs in 2014 as a Wild Card team, then defeated the Pirates in the NL Wild Card Game. In the NLDS against the Washington Nationals, Casilla made three scoreless appearances, earning two saves as the Giants defeated Washington in four games. Against the Cardinals in the NLCS, he pitched scoreless innings in three of the first four games, earning saves in Game 1 and Game 4. He entered a tied Game 5 in the top of the ninth and loaded the bases by giving up a walk and a couple of hits, but Jeremy Affeldt got Oscar Taveras to ground out to end the inning with no runs scoring, and Travis Ishikawa homered in the bottom of the inning to give the Giants a 6–3 triumph, clinching a 4–1 series victory. He made only two appearances in the World Series against the Kansas City Royals, recording an out apiece in Games 2 and 3, both losses. For the third time in his career, Casilla became a World Series champion as the Giants defeated Kansas City in seven games. #### 2015 Casilla remained the Giants closer in 2015. He picked up back-to-back wins against the Los Angeles Dodgers on April 22 and 23, pitching scoreless innings in 3–2 victories. From May 2 through May 29, he converted 9 straight saves, posting an 0.87 ERA. On May 17, in a 9–8 win over the Cincinnati Reds at Great American Ball Park, Casilla entered the bottom on the ninth inning and struck out three batters on nine pitches, recording the save. Casilla was first Giant to pitch an immaculate inning since Trevor Wilson did so in 1992. From August 13 through September 27, he converted 10 straight saves, posting an 0.56 ERA. In 67 games, he had a 4–2 record, 38 saves in 44 opportunities, a 2.79 ERA, 62 strikeouts, 23 walks, and 51 hits allowed in 58 innings. He tied with Francisco Rodríguez for fifth in the NL in saves. #### 2016 After his successful 2015 season, Casilla struggled in 2016. He did achieve a milestone on April 25, pitching the final 1+1⁄3 innings against the San Diego Padres for his 100th save. On May 12, Bochy pulled him from a save situation against the Diamondbacks, opting to have left-hander López face the left-handed Jake Lamb after Casilla had loaded the bases. López got the out, but Casilla was angry with Bochy afterwards, saying, "I thought he had confidence in me." He blew his ninth save of the year on September 17 and drew boos from the fans at AT&T Park. Afterwards, he told reporters, "I’m having bad luck. I try to do my best. I’m not going to be sad or kill myself. It’s a game." Steward wrote that "after that night, public opinion essentially forced Bochy’s hand not to use him again in an important situation, particularly at home." In 62 games, he had a 2–5 record, a 3.57 ERA, 65 strikeouts, 19 walks, and 50 hits allowed in 58 innings. He finished sixth in the NL with 31 saves but led the NL and tied with Nate Jones for the major league lead in blown saves, with nine. The Giants reached the playoffs again as a Wild Card team in 2016, then defeated the New York Mets in the 2016 NL Wild Card Game. His only appearance of the NLDS against the Cubs came in Game 2, when he got the final two outs of the sixth inning in a 5–2 loss. In Game 4, the Giants led 5–2 entering the ninth. Though it was a save situation, Bochy opted not to use Casilla. The Cubs rallied against five other Giants relievers and won 6–5 to clinch the series. After the season, the Giants declined their option on Casilla, making him a free agent. Steward observed, "He was one of their pillar players during this still-magnificent era, one of just eight to be part of all three World Series championship teams." With the Giants, his playoff ERA was 0.92. His 123 saves rank sixth on the franchise's all-time list. Steward suggested that had Casilla not pitched for the Giants, the team would not have won any of those World Series. ### Oakland Athletics, second stint (2017–2018) On January 20, 2017, Casilla signed a two-year, \$11 million contract with the Oakland Athletics. Visa problems caused him to be three weeks late to spring training, and he decided not to pitch for the Dominican Republic in the 2017 World Baseball Classic, even though he had initially been selected to the team. He was expected to compete for the closer's role, though Jane Lee of MLB.com wrote in January that the likely favorite was Ryan Madson, who had closed for the Athletics the season before. Oakland began the season without a closer named, though, and on April 11, manager Bob Melvin said in an interview that "It's gonna be [Sean] Doolittle or Casilla depending on the match-ups". Doolittle was out during the month of May with a strained left shoulder, however, giving Casilla the bulk of the early-season opportunities. He converted saves in 14 of 17 chances through the end of June but struggled in July, blowing three of five save opportunities. In August, he was replaced as closer by the newly acquired Blake Treinen. He was 16 for 23 in save opportunities. In 63 games, he had a 4–5 record and an ERA of 4.27 with 57 strikeouts in 59 innings pitched. Casilla got his only save of 2018 on April 24, when he allowed no runs in the ninth inning of a 3–2 victory over the Rangers. On July 13, he entered a game against the Giants with the bases loaded and no one out in the seventh. He allowed all three of the runners to score, one of which was on a wild pitch, and the Athletics lost 7–1. The next day, he was designated for assignment. Five days later, he was released. In 26 games, he had no record, a 3.16 ERA, 22 strikeouts, 22 walks, and 18 hits allowed in 31+1⁄3 innings. On July 26, Casilla signed a minor league deal with Colorado. He spent the rest of 2018 with the PCL's Albuquerque Isotopes. In 12 games, he had an 0–2 record, an 8.03 ERA, 12 strikeouts, nine walks, and 16 hits in 12+1⁄3 innings. He became a free agent on November 3. ## Career statistics and scouting report Spending parts of 15 seasons in the major leagues, Casilla appeared in 655 games. He had a 42–31 record, a 3.29 ERA, 583 strikeouts, 277 walks, and 552 hits allowed in 645+1⁄3 innings pitched. Used as a closer at times during his career, he recorded 144 saves. Casilla worked with a prototypical power pitcher repertoire, chiefly throwing a low to mid-90s two-seam fastball and a hard-breaking slider. He also threw a curveball and an occasional changeup. Though relief pitchers often specialize in one or two pitches, Casilla's time as a starting pitcher in the minor leagues caused him to develop a four-pitch repertoire. Casilla's fastball travelled up to 98 miles per hour (158 km/h). Scouts praised his slider, and in 2015, Mike Petriello of MLB.com compared it to those thrown by Stephen Strasburg and Matt Harvey. He stopped throwing the curveball from 2007 through 2009. Over the 2009-10 offseason, while Casilla was working out in the Dominican Republic, pitcher Ricardo Rodríguez suggested he work on improving his curveball. Casilla brought it back over 10 percent of the time in 2010, throwing it at least 20 percent of the time from 2014 through the end of his career. "That pitch has helped me a lot," he said. The Los Angeles Times wrote in June 2007 that "Casilla locates his fastball well," but Casilla had issues controlling his pitches at times during his career. Unlike Giants relievers such as Wilson and Romo, Casilla usually maintained a calm demeanor on the mound. "I am emotional, but I try to keep that inside," he says. ## Personal life Casilla is married, and he has four children. A churchgoer, he regularly carries a Bible with him. His native language is Spanish, and even after over 10 seasons in the major leagues, he still used an interpreter when conversing with reporters. His brother, Jose, was a pitcher in the Giants system from 2006 through 2016, making it as far as Triple-A, though he never reached the major leagues.
66,372,506	2021 Conference USA Football Championship Game	1,168,872,454	null	[ "2021 Conference USA football season", "2021 in sports in Texas", "21st century in San Antonio", "American football competitions in San Antonio", "Conference USA Football Championship Game", "December 2021 sports events in the United States", "UTSA Roadrunners football games", "Western Kentucky Hilltoppers football games" ]	The 2021 Conference USA Football Championship Game was a college football game played on December 3, 2021, at the Alamodome in San Antonio, Texas. It was the 17th edition of the Conference USA Football Championship Game and determined the champion of Conference USA (C–USA) for the 2021 season. The game began at 6:00 p.m. CST and aired on CBS Sports Network. The contest featured the hosts and West Division champion UTSA and the East Division champion Western Kentucky. Sponsored by tax services and consulting firm Ryan LLC, the game was officially known as the Ryan Conference USA Football Championship Game. ## Teams The 2021 C–USA title game matched the Western Kentucky Hilltoppers (WKU), champions of the East Division, against the UTSA Roadrunners, champions of the West Division. This was the third meeting between the teams, with the series even at one win apiece. With both teams relatively new to Conference USA – UTSA having joined in 2013 and Western Kentucky in 2014 – and situated in opposite divisions, they did not meet for six years after their initial meeting (a WKU victory by 38 points) in 2014. Entering the title game, the teams' second—and most recent—meeting came in the 2021 regular season, when UTSA defeated Western Kentucky by six points. This was Western Kentucky's third appearance in the Conference USA Football Championship Game, after victories in 2015 and 2016, while UTSA made their first appearance. ### Western Kentucky Under the direction of third-year head coach Tyson Helton, Western Kentucky began their season with a sound defeat of UT Martin, as Bailey Zappe passed for seven touchdowns in the Hilltoppers' 38-point victory. WKU's success was rather short-lived, though, as a four-game losing streak followed. Losses to Army, Indiana, No. 17 Michigan State, and UTSA – three of the four by six points or fewer – put the Hilltoppers in a 1–4 hole just a few weeks into the month of October. Road wins at Old Dominion and FIU and a homecoming victory over Charlotte brought the Hilltoppers close to a .500 record, which they would go on to achieve the following week against Middle Tennessee. Western Kentucky extended their win streak further with victories against Rice and Florida Atlantic, putting their record at 7–4. Their final regular season game, a road contest against Marshall on November 27, would ultimately decide the C–USA East Division title, with both teams in a position to clinch a spot in the championship game with a victory. Western Kentucky won 53–21 and clinched the division title and a championship game berth as a result. ### UTSA The Roadrunners, led by second-year head coach Jeff Traylor, opened their season with a week one road upset of Illinois. This marked UTSA's second win against a Power Five team and their first win against a Big Ten opponent. UTSA's home opener saw the Roadrunners pound Lamar 54–0, which was the first shutout in school history. The Roadrunners earned their first conference victory the following week against Middle Tennessee and finished their non-conference schedule with an upset victory over Memphis (which included a school-record 21-point comeback) and a narrow victory against a winless UNLV team. After another narrow victory against Western Kentucky, the Roadrunners beat Rice in a blowout on homecoming, earning them their first national ranking when they entered the AP Poll at No. 24 the following day. Victories against Louisiana Tech and UTEP followed; the Roadrunners fell out of the poll following the first win but re-entered at No. 23 in time for their November 13 contest against Southern Miss, which they also won. Now 10–0, UTSA clinched the West Division title and their spot in the championship game with a three-point defeat of UAB in their penultimate game. In their final regular season game, a road contest against North Texas, the Roadrunners were unable to complete their undefeated regular season, as the Mean Green dominated to win 45–23 and knock UTSA's record to 11–1. ## Game summary ### First half Scheduled for a 6:00 p.m. CST start, the game began on CBS Sports Network at 6:06 p.m., with the opening kickoff from Hunter Duplessis being returned to the Western Kentucky 22-yard line. The Hilltoppers started their opening drive with a pair of incomplete passes but it took just three additional plays for quarterback Bailey Zappe to find Mitchell Tinsley for a 60-yard touchdown pass, giving the Hilltoppers an early lead. UTSA responded with a touchdown drive of their own; after taking the ball with a touchback, the Roadrunners moved the ball into WKU territory within five plays and capped the drive with a 24-yard Frank Harris touchdown run several plays later. Taking possession after the kickoff at their own 34-yard line, Western Kentucky's ensuing drive was propelled by a 45-yard connection from Zappe to Tinsley that took the ball into the red zone, though the drive stalled from there and the Hilltoppers settled for a 33-yard field goal, which put them back in front by three points. On UTSA's ensuing drive, the Roadrunner offense drove into opposing territory in three plays and ended up finding themselves facing a 4th & 1 on the Western Kentucky 22-yard line; Sincere McCormick carried the ball for two yards to convert it and later carried the ball for the same distance to score a touchdown and give UTSA their first lead. Hunter Duplessis' ensuing kickoff went through the end zone for another touchback, and Western Kentucky reached UTSA territory relatively quickly. The Hilltoppers reached the UTSA 1-yard line but failed to gain yardage on three of the next four plays and converted a 34-yard field goal on 4th down. The UTSA offense did not let up to begin the game's second quarter. Starting their possession on their own 25-yard line, it again took the Roadrunners three plays to reach midfield, and they converted a third down shortly thereafter to prolong the drive. A 24-yard pass from running back Brenden Brady to wide receiver Zakhari Franklin gave UTSA the ball inside the WKU 10-yard line, and Brady scored on a six-yard rush on the following play. Western Kentucky's ensuing drive was the first in the game to not result in points being scored, as the five-play series resulted in a 53-yard field goal missed wide left by placekicker Brayden Narveson. UTSA responded quickly; McCormick scored on a 65-yard touchdown rush on the very next play, increasing UTSA's lead to 28–13, in what would end up being the final score of the first half. The teams traded punts on each of their next drives; Western Kentucky lost a net total of one yard in the game's first three-and-out, and UTSA managed to pick up 33 yards but punted on 4th & 13 near midfield. The Hilltoppers had a chance to narrow the Roadrunners' lead at the end of the second quarter, but Narveson's 53-yard attempt, his second from that distance, was unsuccessful, leaving seven seconds on the clock. UTSA kneeled the ball and went to halftime leading 28–13. ### Second half UTSA received the ball to begin the second half but was unable to move the ball effectively and were forced to punt for the second time. This ended up benefitting them, however, as Western Kentucky's return man, Jerreth Sterns, muffed the punt. The ball was recovered by UTSA, who scored a touchdown two plays later. Things would worsen for Western Kentucky on their next drive; after a Noah Whittington rush went for no gain on the first play, Bailey Zappe's pass was intercepted by Antonio Parks on the second, and Sincere McCormick scored from 17 yards out on the next play, making the score 42–13. The Hilltoppers would put an end to UTSA's streak of 28 unanswered points on their next drive, as WKU drove all the way to the UTSA 12-yard line before facing a 4th & 6, which they converted to score their first touchdown since the game's opening drive. UTSA faced a fourth down on their next drive as well; however, they were unable to convert with one yard to gain, and Western Kentucky took possession at their own 47-yard line. After starting with a false start, WKU reached UTSA territory in three plays, and would go on to score a 13-yard passing touchdown. The third quarter came to an end during UTSA's following drive, after the Roadrunners had driven to the WKU 42-yard line. UTSA was unable to score from this drive; it ended with a missed 46-yard field goal attempt from Duplessis. From there, Western completed a 50-yard pass to reach the UTSA 21-yard line and scored on a one-yard Kye Robichaux receiving touchdown, cutting the deficit to eight points. UTSA responded with a touchdown of their own, as Frank Harris found De'Corian Clark for a 28-yard score on the drive's tenth play. The Hilltoppers got the ball back with just over six minutes to play at their own 28-yard line; they stalled initially but were able to convert a 4th & 6 to keep the drive alive. Five plays later, Bailey Zappe completed a pass to Jerreth Sterns for a 34-yard touchdown, which narrowed UTSA's lead to eight points once again. Western Kentucky's defense was able to force a punt on UTSA's final drive of the game, which gave the Hilltoppers the ball back on their own 22-yard line with just over one minute on the clock, with a chance to tie the game with a touchdown and two-point conversion. The Hilltoppers converted another fourth down, this time at their own 24-yard line, and were able to move the ball to the UTSA 47-yard line. They had to attempt a Hail Mary, but the ball was intercepted, securing an eight-point victory for UTSA. ### Scoring summary ## Statistics
858,575	Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (film)	1,173,473,834	2009 fantasy film directed by David Yates	[ "2000s American films", "2000s British films", "2000s English-language films", "2000s fantasy adventure films", "2009 3D films", "2009 fantasy films", "2009 films", "American 3D films", "American fantasy adventure films", "American sequel films", "British 3D films", "British fantasy adventure films", "British sequel films", "Children's fantasy films", "D-Box motion-enhanced films", "Films about altered memories", "Films about undead", "Films directed by David Yates", "Films produced by David Barron", "Films produced by David Heyman", "Films scored by Nicholas Hooper", "Films set in 1996", "Films set in 1997", "Films set in England", "Films set in London", "Films set in Scotland", "Films shot in County Clare", "Films shot in County Kerry", "Films shot in Gloucestershire", "Films shot in Hertfordshire", "Films shot in Highland (council area)", "Films shot in London", "Films shot in Norway", "Films shot in Surrey", "Films shot in Wiltshire", "Films with screenplays by Steve Kloves", "Harry Potter (film series)", "Heyday Films films", "High fantasy films", "IMAX films", "Poisoning in film", "Warner Bros. films" ]	Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is a 2009 fantasy film directed by David Yates from a screenplay by Steve Kloves, based on the 2005 novel of the same name by J. K. Rowling. It is the sequel to Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007) and the sixth instalment in the Harry Potter film series. It stars Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter, alongside Rupert Grint and Emma Watson as Harry's best friends Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger respectively. The story follows Harry's sixth year at Hogwarts as he receives a mysterious textbook, falls in love, and attempts to retrieve a memory that holds the key to Lord Voldemort's downfall. Filming began on 24 September 2007, leading to the film's worldwide cinematic release on 15 July 2009. With an estimated budget of \$250 million, it is one of the most expensive films ever made and the most expensive film in the Harry Potter film series. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was released in 2D cinemas and IMAX formats in the United Kingdom and the United States on 15 July, by Warner Bros. Pictures. The film received positive reviews, with praise for the story, emotional weight, cinematography and performances. It was a major commercial success, breaking the record for the biggest single-day worldwide gross with \$104 million. In five days, the film made \$394 million, breaking the record for highest worldwide five-day opening. With a total gross of \$934 million, it is the second-highest-grossing film of 2009. The film was nominated for many awards, including the Academy Award for Best Cinematography and the BAFTA Award for Best Production Design and Best Special Visual Effects. It was followed by Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1 in 2010. ## Plot Lord Voldemort tightens his grip on the wizarding and Muggle worlds: his Death Eaters kidnap Mr Ollivander and destroy London's Millennium Bridge. With Lucius Malfoy incarcerated in Azkaban, Voldemort chooses his son, Draco Malfoy, to carry out a secret mission at Hogwarts. Draco's mother, Narcissa, and aunt Bellatrix Lestrange seek out Severus Snape, who gains their confidence by claiming he is a mole within the Order of the Phoenix. Snape makes an Unbreakable Vow with Narcissa to protect Draco and fulfil his task should he fail. Harry Potter accompanies Albus Dumbledore to persuade former Potions professor Horace Slughorn to return to Hogwarts. Then, at the Burrow, Harry reunites with his best friends Ron and Hermione. In Diagon Alley, they see Draco and Narcissa Malfoy, and follow them into Knockturn Alley. The pair meet with Death Eaters, including the werewolf Fenrir Greyback, at Borgin & Burke's. Harry believes Draco is now a Death Eater, but Ron and Hermione are sceptical. On the Hogwarts Express, Harry sneaks into the Slytherin carriage wearing his Invisibility Cloak to spy on Malfoy. Malfoy notices and petrifies Harry, leaving him on the train. Luna Lovegood finds him and counters Draco's spell. Harry discovers that his used Potions textbook is filled with helpful notes and spells added by the "Half-Blood Prince". Using it, Harry excels in class, annoying Hermione and impressing Slughorn, who awards him a Liquid Luck potion. Ron makes the Gryffindor Quidditch team as Keeper and begins dating Lavender Brown, upsetting Hermione. Harry consoles Hermione while acknowledging his own feelings for Ginny Weasley. Harry spends the Christmas holidays with the Weasleys. His suspicions about Draco are dismissed by the Order, but Arthur Weasley reveals that the Malfoys may be interested in a Vanishing Cabinet at Borgin & Burke's. Bellatrix and Greyback attack and destroy the Burrow. At Hogwarts, Dumbledore asks Harry to retrieve Slughorn's memory of a young Voldemort. Slughorn has resisted giving an accurate memory. After Ron accidentally ingests a love potion intended for Harry, Harry takes him to Slughorn for a cure. Slughorn offers the boys some mead he had intended as a gift to Dumbledore. Ron is poisoned upon sipping it. Harry's quick thinking saves Ron. While recovering in the infirmary, Ron murmurs Hermione's name, causing Lavender to end their relationship. Harry confronts Draco about the poisoned mead and also a cursed necklace that nearly killed Katie Bell. A duel erupts, and Harry uses one of the Half-Blood Prince's curses without knowing what it is. The curse severely injures Malfoy, and he is only saved by Snape's timely arrival and reversal of the curse. Fearing the book contains Dark Magic, Ginny persuades Harry to hide it in the Room of Requirement. They then share their first kiss. In Hagrid's hut, Harry uses his Liquid Luck potion to convince the reluctant Slughorn to surrender the memory Dumbledore needs. Viewing it in the Penseive, Dumbledore and Harry learn Voldemort sought information about Horcruxes, magical objects containing pieces of a wizard's soul for immortality. Dumbledore surmises Voldemort divided his soul into six Horcruxes, two of which have been destroyed: Tom Riddle's diary and Marvolo Gaunt's ring. They travel to a cave where Harry aids Dumbledore in drinking a potion that hides another Horcrux, Slytherin's locket. A weakened Dumbledore defends them from Inferi by creating a ring of fire, and apparates them back to Hogwarts, where Bellatrix, Greyback, and other Death Eaters have entered through the Vanishing Cabinet in the Room of Requirement that Draco has secretly connected to one in Knockturn Alley. As Harry hides, Draco appears and disarms the headmaster, revealing Voldemort chose him to kill Dumbledore. Draco hesitates; Snape, however, arrives and kills Dumbledore. As the Death Eaters escape, Snape reveals to Harry that he is the Half-Blood Prince. As Hogwarts students and staff mourn Dumbledore's death, Harry tells Ron and Hermione that the locket is fake and contains a message from "R.A.B.", who stole the real Horcrux intending to destroy it. Harry, Ron and Hermione agree to forgo their final Hogwarts year to hunt for the remaining Horcruxes. ## Cast - Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter: A 16-year-old British wizard who now enters his sixth year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry - Rupert Grint as Ron Weasley: One of Harry's two best friends - Emma Watson as Hermione Granger: One of Harry's two best friends - Helena Bonham Carter as Bellatrix Lestrange: One of Voldemort's principal Death Eaters and Draco Malfoy's aunt - Jim Broadbent as Horace Slughorn: The newly appointed Potions master who had held the position before Severus Snape - Robbie Coltrane as Rubeus Hagrid: The Hogwarts gamekeeper and Care of Magical Creatures teacher at Hogwarts - Warwick Davis as Filius Flitwick: The Charms master and head of Ravenclaw - Tom Felton as Draco Malfoy: Harry's rival and recipient of Voldemort's secret mission - Michael Gambon as Albus Dumbledore: The headmaster of Hogwarts - Alan Rickman as Severus Snape: The former Potions master, current Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher and head of Slytherin - Maggie Smith as Minerva McGonagall: The Hogwarts Transfiguration teacher, deputy headmistress and head of Gryffindor - Timothy Spall as Peter Pettigrew: The Death Eater who betrayed Harry's parents to Voldemort; Pettigrew has no lines in this film, but appears as a servant at Snape's house - David Thewlis as Remus Lupin: A member of the Order of the Phoenix and Harry's ex-Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher - Julie Walters as Molly Weasley: The Weasley matriarch and a mother figure to Harry Gemma Jones returned to the cast as Hogwarts' matron, Poppy Pomfrey. Mark Williams plays Molly's husband, Arthur, who is a member of the Order of the Phoenix, while Natalia Tena plays fellow member Nymphadora Tonks. James and Oliver Phelps play Ron's siblings Fred and George and Bonnie Wright plays their sister Ginny, while Devon Murray, Alfred Enoch and Matthew Lewis play Gryffindor students Seamus Finnigan, Dean Thomas and Neville Longbottom. Evanna Lynch and Katie Leung play Ravenclaw students Luna Lovegood and Cho Chang. Jamie Waylett and Joshua Herdman play Slytherin students Vincent Crabbe and Gregory Goyle. Jessie Cave, Anna Shaffer and Freddie Stroma also play Gryffindor students Lavender Brown, Romilda Vane and Cormac McLaggen respectively, while Rob Knox plays Ravenclaw Marcus Belby. Helen McCrory plays Narcissa Malfoy, Draco's mother and Bellatrix's sister, while David Legeno plays werewolf Fenrir Greyback. Hero Fiennes Tiffin portrayed 11-year-old Tom Riddle, with Frank Dillane playing the 16-year-old version of him. ## Production ### Development and casting Before David Yates was officially chosen to direct the film, many directors had expressed an interest in taking the helm. Alfonso Cuarón, the director of the third film, stated he "would love to have the opportunity" to return. Goblet of Fire director Mike Newell declined a spot to direct the fifth film, and was not approached for this film. Guillermo del Toro turned down the chance to direct the film in order to direct Hellboy II: The Golden Army. Terry Gilliam was Rowling's personal choice to direct Philosopher's Stone. When asked whether he would consider directing a later film, Gilliam said, "Warner Bros. had their chance the first time around, and they blew it." Yates was still working on Order of the Phoenix when he was approached to direct Half-Blood Prince. The producers were happy with his direction, and was asked to start pre-production during the former's marketing. Radcliffe and Grint were initially hesitant to continue, but agreed to reprise their roles. Emma Watson considered not returning for the film, citing fear of being typecast, but eventually decided that "the pluses outweighed the minuses" and could not bear to see anyone else play Hermione. Nicholas Hooper returned to compose the score; he included a reworking of John Williams's "Hedwig's Theme", which has recurred in all films. Other members like costume designer Jany Temime, visual effects supervisor Tim Burke, creature and make-up effects designer Nick Dudman, and special effects supervisor John Richardson continued for this film. Yates and Heyman have noted that some of the events of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows influenced the script of Half-Blood Prince. Christian Coulson, who played the young Tom Riddle in Chamber of Secrets, expressed interest in returning for the role in flashback sequences; but Yates responded that Coulson was too old (nearing 30), to be playing the role. Thomas James Longley was the original choice to take on the role, but Riddle was ultimately played by Hero Fiennes-Tiffin as a child and Frank Dillane as a teenager. Helen McCrory appears as Narcissa Malfoy, Draco's mother and younger sister of Bellatrix. McCrory was originally cast as Bellatrix in Order of the Phoenix, but had to drop out due to pregnancy. Naomi Watts was previously reported as having accepted the role, only for it to be denied by her agency.[^1] Both Clémence Poésy and Chris Rankin, who had played Fleur Delacour and Percy Weasley, respectively, were interested in returning, but did not appear in the film. After Bill Nighy expressed an interest in appearing, Yates confirmed that Nighy would be his first choice for the role of Minister for Magic Rufus Scrimgeour. Scrimgeour's character was ultimately cut from the film, but Nighy appeared in his role in Deathly Hallows. Warner Bros and MSN also ran an online Order of the Phoenix quiz, with the prize being a walk-on part in the Half-Blood Prince. ### Sets Stuart Craig, the production designer of the first five films, stayed on to design all the sets in Half-Blood Prince. Several new sets were introduced, including Tom Riddle's orphanage, the Astronomy Tower, and the cave. Craig noted that the film used several CGI sets, noticeably the interior of the cave where Harry and Dumbledore both go to hunt Horcruxes. The exterior of the scene was filmed at the Cliffs of Moher in the west of Ireland, the only location to be filmed outside of the United Kingdom throughout the film series. The interior of the cave is made up of geometric crystal formations. Radcliffe said that the scene took three-to-four months to prepare. Some of the Hogwarts sets were taken down after the filming, as they would not be used for the following film. ### Filming Before filming began, there was belief that filming might move from the UK, where all previous films were shot. The crew also scouted around Cape Wrath in Scotland, for use in the cave scene. Filming returned to Glen Coe and Glenfinnan, both of which have appeared in the previous films, to preserve the continuity of the landscape. Following a week of rehearsals, principal photography began on 24 September 2007 and ended on 17 May 2008. Radcliffe, Gambon and Broadbent started shooting in late September 2007. Other cast members started much later: Grint did not begin until November 2007; Watson started in December 2007, Rickman and Leung in January 2008, and Bonham Carter in February 2008. On the weekend of 6 October 2007, the crew shot scenes involving the Hogwarts Express in the misty and dewy environment of Fort William, Scotland. A series of night scenes were filmed in the village of Lacock and the cloisters at Lacock Abbey for three nights starting 25 October 2007. Filming took place from 5 pm to 5 am daily, and residents of the street were asked to black out their windows with dark blinds. On set reports indicated that the main scene filmed was Harry and Dumbledore's visit to Slughorn's house. Further filming took place in Surbiton railway station in October 2007, at Gloucester Cathedral, where the first and second films were shot, in February 2008, and at the Millennium Bridge in London in March 2008. In the previous films, the scenes showing Hogwarts Express on its way to the wizarding school were typically shot in Scotland. However, since the screenplay required a snowy atmosphere for the train to go through and it did not snow during planned production dates, the crew decided to film these scenes in Rauma Line, Norway. This included the scene where Harry and Ron are talking about the Unbreakable Vow Snape had to swear to as the train goes through a snowy plot. The filming location in Norway is located in Northern Norway, close to the village of Bjorli. ### Cinematography Due to cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel's use of de-focussing and soft wipes in the digital grade, Warner Bros. asked director David Yates to add more colours to the film. Yates did not want to lose the "very European look" of the film, but after retouching the picture, he said, "It's not what you wanted, but we're happy with it." After five minutes of watching the film, the studio were pleased with the changes. In an interview with Total Film, Yates said that the choice of angles, the extreme close-ups, and the pacing of the scenes made the film "incredibly rich". One of the major challenges for Delbonnel was the lighting of the film. In an interview with the Academy, Delbonnel said that he did not want to change the lighting effects used in the previous films, and finally decided to give it a darker, moody variation of grey. Yates and the other producers supported this new effect, and he went ahead with it. In reference to the cave scene, Delbonnel said, "I wanted to have some kind of 'dynamism' with the light. I thought it could be interesting and more dramatic if the light was floating, circling above the characters faces: sometimes lighting them, sometimes hiding them in a very random and unpredictable way." ### Visual effects The opening scenes of the Death Eaters' attack on Diagon Alley and London was created by Double Negative, led by VFX supervisor Paul Franklin. Double Negative spent six months surveying and documenting the environment around the River Thames and Trafalgar Square to create the swooping views of the city. Double Negative also contributed to the Pensieve sequences, developing complex directed fluid simulations to realise the swirling world of memory and the past. Tim Burke and Tim Alexander were the visual effects supervisors for the rest of the film. Tim Alexander said that completing the Inferi-attack scene took several months. He said that the scene was much bolder and scarier compared to previous films, and director Yates wanted to avoid making them look like zombies. On differentiating them, he commented, "A lot of it came down to their movement – they don't move fast, but they don't move really slow or groan and moan. We ended up going with a very realistic style." He also noted that Inferi are skinnier than zombies, waterlogged and grey. On Dumbledore's ring of fire to combat the Inferi, he added that research was done on molten volcanoes, among other references. He said, "The visual effects team emulated these six fire parameters: heat ripples, smoke, buoyancy, viscosity, opacity, and brightness." Since the scene was very time-consuming, computer-graphics artist Chris Horvath spent eight months finding a faster way to conjure the flames. Eventually, the final effect would look as though someone sprayed propane and then lit it. ### Music The film's score was composed by Nicholas Hooper, who also composed the music for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. The soundtrack was released on an Audio CD format on 14 July 2009, a day before the film was released in cinemas. The album debuted at number twenty-nine on the Billboard 200 chart, thus making it the highest-charting soundtrack among all the six movie soundtracks released. It was nominated for the 2010 Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack Album For Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media. ## Differences from the book Half-Blood Prince added or changed several events in the literary canon. The book begins with a scene involving the Muggle Prime Minister. Yates and his crew debated over this scene, as well as the inclusion of Rufus Scrimgeour. They eventually revised the start of the film to instead include events described but not seen in the book. Yates thought it would give the audience a feel for what the Death Eaters were doing if they showed the collapse of the Millennium Bridge rather than simply describe it (as was done with the Brockdale Bridge in the book). As with Goblet of Fire, the Dursleys were cut, which Steve Kloves did to "break the pattern". Further background of Tom Riddle was removed, such as the Gaunts, because they felt it more important to concentrate on Riddle as a young boy, and an additional action scene at the Burrow was added to keep with the tone of the franchise. Yates felt that they needed "an injection of jeopardy and danger", and that without it, there was too much comedy and lightness. A small battle scene at Hogwarts which happened during the end of the book was also cut; Heyman commented that it was removed to "[avoid] repetition" with the forthcoming adaptation of the Battle of Hogwarts in Deathly Hallows. Dumbledore's funeral was removed as it was believed that it did not fit with the rest of the film. ## Distribution ### Marketing Warner Bros. spent an estimated \$155 million to market and distribute the film. The special-edition two-disc DVD for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix contained two sneak peeks of the film, while the US edition included an additional clip. The first teaser for the film, with a length of 15-seconds, was shown alongside the IMAX release of The Dark Knight. The first full-length US teaser trailer was released on 29 July on AOL's Moviefone website. An international teaser was released on 26 October and another teaser trailer was released later. Another trailer was screened on the Japanese TV station Fuji TV during a screening of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire on 18 January 2009. Scenes from the film were aired during ABC Family's Harry Potter marathon, which took place between 5 and 7 December 2008. On 5 February 2009, the first three promotional teaser posters were released, featuring Dumbledore and Harry. On 5 March and 16 April 2009, new trailers were released by Warner Bros. As with the previous films, EA Games produced a video game based on the film. On 10 March 2009, it was announced that there would be a video game soundtrack, which was released on 17 March 2009. On 27 March, six character posters were released: Harry, Dumbledore, Ron, Hermione, Draco and Snape. A Japanese version of the international trailer was released, alongside the original one on 10 April. On 8 May, The CW aired a 30-second TV spot, which focused on the romantic side of the film. On 20 May, first clip from the film was released through The Ellen DeGeneres Show's official website, showing a love-struck Ron. Another clip of the film, showing Dumbledore visiting Tom Riddle's orphanage, was released on 31 May 2009, at the MTV Awards. ### Theatrical release The film was released in many countries on 15 July 2009. It was originally set to be released on 21 November 2008, but was pushed back by eight months to 17 July, despite being completed. Warner Bros. executive Alan F. Horn noted that the move was meant "to guarantee the studio a major summer blockbuster in 2009," with other films being delayed due to the 2007–08 Writers Guild of America strike. The box-office success of summer WB films Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and The Dark Knight also motivated the decision. An unnamed rival studio executive told Entertainment Weekly that the move was to "stop next year's profits from looking seriously underwhelming after the phenomenal success of The Dark Knight," as "they don't need the money this year anymore." Dan Fellman, WB head of distribution, said that the studio had considered the date change for three to four weeks prior to the announcement, but gave it serious consideration a week before they came to their final decision. Three months before its release in July, the date was again changed by 2 days from 17 to 15 July, so it could open on a Wednesday like most tentpole summer movies. The date change was met with a heavily negative reaction by Harry Potter fans, as the Los Angeles Times noted: "Petitions were circulating, rumors were flying and angry screeds were being posted on Internet sites within minutes of the Thursday announcement." The move was mocked by Entertainment Weekly, which had Half-Blood Prince on the cover on its "Fall Preview Issue". Despite each being owned by Time Warner Inc., Entertainment Weekly was unaware of the change until it was publicly announced by WB and noted that readers would now be in possession of a "Dewey Defeats Truman collectible". Several days after the announcement, Horn released a statement in response to the "large amount of disappointment" expressed by fans of the series. Following the date change, Half-Blood Prince's release slot was taken by Summit Entertainment's Twilight and Walt Disney Pictures' Bolt. The sixth film was simultaneously released in regular cinemas and IMAX 3D everywhere but the United States, due to a conflicting agreement in which Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was given a four-week window by itself in IMAX in that country. Therefore, the IMAX 3D version of the film was released on 29 July 2009 there. The film had been chosen to be screened at the 2008 Royal Film Performance on 17 November but was not shown. Cinema and Television Benevolent Fund chief executive Peter Hore noted he was "very disappointed" with Warner Bros' decision. With a runtime of 153 minutes (2 hours, 33 minutes and 28 seconds), Half-Blood Prince is the third-longest film in the series, behind Chamber of Secrets (161 minutes) and Goblet of Fire (157 minutes). ### Home media Like the previous films, a 1-disc and 2-disc special edition for the film was released on Blu-ray as a digital copy and DVD on 7 December 2009 in the United Kingdom, and 8 December 2009 in the United States. The Blu-ray and DVD include an 11-minute, 38-second feature on the new Wizarding World of Harry Potter mini theme park, which opened on 18 June 2010 at Islands of Adventure in Orlando, Florida. These also include deleted scenes, with a running length of 6 minutes and 31 seconds, and a sneak peek of the next Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1 (2010). The Blu-ray and DVD of the film was also released in India, the Philippines, South Africa, Czech Republic and Israel on 16 November 2009. The Blu-ray and two-disc DVD editions in North America include a digital copy of the film. In the United Kingdom, the DVD release became the fastest-selling DVD of the year, with an estimated 840,000 copies of the film sold in a few hours. In the US, the DVD made a strong debut at number one in both the DVD and Blu-ray markets, widely beating out any competition with sales of 4,199,622 copies. Worldwide DVD and Blu-ray sales of the film show that it is the fastest-selling film of 2009. On 14 June 2011, an Ultimate Edition was released simultaneously with the Ultimate Edition of the Order of the Phoenix film on both Blu-ray and DVD, containing new bonus features, documentaries and collectables. ## Reception ### Box office With an estimated budget of \$250 million, it is one of the most expensive films ever made and the most expensive film in the Harry Potter film series. Advance ticket sales on Fandango.com for Half-Blood Prince surpassed advance ticket sales for Transformers 2 at the same point in sale cycles. It is also in MovieTickets.com's top 25 advance sellers of all time. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince broke the then-record for biggest midnight showings, making \$22.8 million in 3,000 cinemas; The Twilight Saga: New Moon bested this with \$26.3 million in November. Half-Blood Prince opened in the same Wednesday slot that Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix did in 2007. The film's box office run finished on 17 December 2009. The film opened in 4,325 cinemas (rising to 4,455 three weeks later, becoming the largest number of cinemas until The Twilight Saga: Eclipse surpassed it with the 4,468 cinemas in 2010); and grossed \$58.2 million on its opening day at the top of the United States and Canadian box office, the third-highest Wednesday opening of all time behind Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and The Twilight Saga: Eclipse. It is also the nineteenth-highest single-day gross of all time and the third-highest for a film in the Harry Potter franchise behind Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2's \$91.1 million and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1, which made \$61.1 million. It earned an additional \$46 million overseas for a worldwide total of \$104 million, breaking the record for highest single-day worldwide gross, previously held by The Dark Knight. By 20 July, the film had taken in \$158.7 million in the US and \$236 million from 85 other markets, for a worldwide tally of \$394.7 million. This broke the record for biggest-ever worldwide five-day opening, surpassing Spider-Man 3's \$381 million. In the US, it surpassed all of its predecessors by a wide margin, achieving the sixth-largest-ever five-day opening in that country. The film held this worldwide record for two years until it was topped by Deathly Hallows – Part 2 (\$483.2 million). In the UK, the film grossed £19.75 million (equivalent to about \$38.13 million), the highest opening for both the series and releases of 2009. At the end of the film's US and Canadian box office run, the total ticket sales of the film were \$302.3 million; making it the third-most successful film in the franchise, after Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2 and Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, as well as the third-highest-grossing film of 2009 in these regions behind Avatar and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. As with all of the previous films in the franchise, Half-Blood Prince proved to be extremely successful globally with an estimated non-US total gross of \$632.1 million, totalling approximately \$934.5 million worldwide. This made it the second-highest-grossing film of 2009, behind Avatar. It is the fifth-highest-grossing film in the franchise, behind Philosopher's Stone, both parts of Deathly Hallows, and Order of the Phoenix. It was once the eighth-highest-grossing film of all time. In South Africa, the film opened with the number-one position, grossing \$789,176; it maintained the number-one position during the second week, with a total of \$242,336. In Australia, the film broke records with a debut of \$11.5 million. Opening at number one, it maintained a second week at number one with a total of \$5.3 million (down 54%), and grossed a total of \$24.2 million. In France, the film debuted at \$20.5 million from 949 cinemas. In Japan, the film held the top spot in the box office rankings until the release of Kamen Rider Decade: All Riders vs. Dai-Shocker, which took the top spot in its first weekend. ### Critical response On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of based on reviews, with an average rating of . The website's critical consensus reads, "Dark, thrilling, and occasionally quite funny, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is also visually stunning and emotionally satisfying." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 78 out of 100 based on 36 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". The film scored an 87 from professional critics at the Broadcast Film Critics Association; it is the first Harry Potter film to receive a Critic's Choice certificate. Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A−" on an A+ to F scale. The first review of the film came three weeks before the official release: Paul Dergarabedian of Hollywood.com ranked the film with The Lord of the Rings film trilogy and called the film a possible Oscar contender. He highly praised the performance of Sir Michael Gambon, Alan Rickman and Daniel Radcliffe. He commented, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is a tour-de-force that combines style and substance, special effects and heart and most importantly great performances from all of the actors young and not-so-young". Another early review came from Devin Faraci of the UK tabloid Chud.com, who called the film the best in the Harry Potter series, and also in the year. Andrew Pulver of The Guardian gave a positive review, scoring it 3.5 out of 5 stars. Todd McCarthy of the trade magazine Variety said that the film is "dazzlingly well made" and "less fanciful than the previous entries". He praised Alan Rickman's performance, described Helena Bonham Carter as "mesmerising", and Jim Broadbent as a "grand eccentric old professor". BBC News's Tim Masters praised the film's cinematography, visual effects, production design, acting and darker plotline. The Hollywood Reporter's Kirk Honeycutt felt that the film's first half is "jerky and explosive", but in the second half, the film finds better footing. He also praised Nicholas Hooper's composition, Bruno Delbonnel's cinematography, and Stuart Craig's set design. Chris Tilly of IGN UK commented on the length of the film, saying "while on occasion it drags, the 153-minute run-time never feels too long, thanks in no small part to the astonishing visuals and (largely) marvellous performances," and felt that it was the best film in the series. However, Dave Golder of SFX Magazine found some aspects of the film to be a disappointment, mainly due to the large number of opportunities the director and screenwriter had sacrificed to devote "huge swathes of the film to subplots of Harry and his chums' teenage romances," but nevertheless found the film to be a large enjoyment, praising the performances of Broadbent and Rickman. Screen Daily commented, "David Yates and his team struggle to whip J.K. Rowling’s 608-page tome into a consistently thrilling cinematic experience", but praised the shooting of some scenes and Bonham Carter's acting. David Stratton, of Margaret and David at the Movies, gave the film a 2.5 out of a possible 5 stars, remarking, "For non-readers [of the Harry Potter series] the films are now borderline incomprehensible", and that the film was "a little tedious" and "generally less interesting visually than its predecessors." He, however, praised the acting of Gambon and Broadbent. ### Accolades The film was nominated for BAFTA Awards in Production Design and Visual Effects, and was in the longlists for five other categories, including Best Supporting Actor for Alan Rickman. Bruno Delbonnel was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Cinematography at the 82nd Academy Awards. The film was also one of the final seven contenders for Best Visual Effects. Half-Blood Prince'' is the only film in the series to be nominated for the Best Cinematography accolade at the Academy Awards. [^1]:
2,102,617	Faces of Fear	1,150,017,172	Professional wrestling tag team	[ "New Japan Pro-Wrestling teams and stables", "WWE teams and stables", "World Championship Wrestling teams and stables" ]	The Faces of Fear was a professional wrestling tag team of The Barbarian and Meng in World Championship Wrestling (WCW) that existed between 1996 and 1999. The two were first paired together in the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) as part of The Heenan Family, a heel faction, where Meng was known as Haku. In WCW, they teamed together regularly as members of the Dungeon of Doom. They appeared on several WCW pay-per-view events but did not receive a push from the promotion and were unsuccessful in their matches for the World Tag Team Championship. The team separated after The Barbarian turned on Meng in 1998 and they feuded with each other throughout the year. They briefly reunited in 1999 before Barbarian turned on Meng again and the team dissolved. ## Career ### World Wrestling Federation The Barbarian and Haku began teaming in the WWF as early as 1990, as they were both managed by Bobby Heenan. They feuded with The Big Bossman, interfering in several of his matches to attack him. They made their only pay-per-view appearance with the WWF at WrestleMania VII, where they lost to The Rockers. They also appeared on several episodes of WWF Prime Time Wrestling in 1991. They faced the Legion of Doom on April 15 but lost when Haku accidentally kicked The Barbarian. The team's miscommunication was a problem again on the July 22 episode when The Barbarian accidentally kicked Haku in a match against The Bushwhackers, causing Haku to get pinned. The Barbarian and Haku were successful the following week, however, when they defeated Sato and Mr. Fuji. The pair left the WWF, but they later teamed in New Japan Pro-Wrestling. They challenged The Hell Raisers for the IWGP Tag Team Championship but were unable to win the belts. ### World Championship Wrestling The Barbarian was reunited with Fifita, who was now wrestling under the ring name Meng, in WCW. Wrestling under the team name Faces of Fear, they were both members of Kevin Sullivan's Dungeon of Doom, a heel stable formed to oppose Hulk Hogan. The Barbarian and Meng's first major appearance together was at Uncensored 1996, when they competed as part of the Alliance To End Hulkamania, a partnership between the Dungeon of Doom and the Four Horsemen, another heel stable. In a two-versus-eight Doomsday Cage match, Hogan and Randy Savage defeated the Alliance To End Hulkamania. Two months later, at Slamboree 1996, The Barbarian and Meng were on opposing teams in a "Lethal Lottery" tournament that saw partners supposedly chosen at random. The Barbarian teamed with Diamond Dallas Page (subbing for an injured Bobby Walker) in a victory over Meng and Hugh Morrus. The Faces of Fear were not pushed, and they received few high-profile matches in 1996. They competed at WCW's Hog Wild pay-per-view on August 10, but the match was televised on free WCW programming instead of the pay-per-view broadcast. At this event, they teamed with Kevin Sullivan to defeat Joe Gomez, Jim Powers and Mark Starr. The relationship between the Dungeon of Doom and the Four Horsemen broke down as a result of Kevin Sullivan's feud with Horsemen member Chris Benoit. As a result, the Faces of Fear were booked to face Benoit and Steve McMichael, another member of the Four Horsemen, at Halloween Havoc 1996. Benoit pinned Meng to win the match for the Horsemen team. The Barbarian and Meng's next major appearance was at Starrcade 1996, when they faced Scott Hall and Kevin Nash, who were members of another rival heel stable known as the New World Order. Hall and Nash's WCW World Tag Team Championship was on the line, but the Faces of Fear were unable to win the belts, as Nash pinned The Barbarian. At SuperBrawl VII on February 23, 1997, the Faces of Fear competed in a Three Way match. They faced The Public Enemy and Harlem Heat but lost when Rocco Rock from The Public Enemy pinned The Barbarian. At Fall Brawl 1997, The Barbarian and Meng faced Wrath and Mortis. Because Wrath and Mortis were part of a heel group, WCW had the Faces of Fear compete as faces during the match. Wrath and Mortis won the match, as Wrath pinned Meng for the victory. The Faces of Fear were successful at World War 3 1997, however, when they defeated the team of Glacier and Ernest Miller. The Faces of Fear eventually disbanded, as Meng turned face. The former partners faced each other at Road Wild 1998; The Barbarian had heel manager Jimmy Hart in his corner. Meng won the match, but The Barbarian, Hugh Morrus and Hart attacked him after the match. Hart later convinced The Barbarian and Meng to reconcile, however, and they wrestled as a tag team again as part of Hart's First Family stable. The Faces of Fear entered a tournament for the WCW World Tag Team Championship in early 1999 after an injury to co-champion Rick Steiner caused the belts to be vacated. According to the rules of the tournament, teams had to lose two matches before they were eliminated. The Faces of Fear won one match in the tournament, defeating the team of David Taylor and Fit Finlay on the January 25 episode of WCW Monday Nitro. However, they were eliminated after losses to the team of Mike Enos and Bobby Duncum, Jr. and the team of Horace Hogan and Brian Adams. In the latter match, The Barbarian attacked Meng, which caused the loss and led to the team's permanent dissolution. ## Championships and accomplishments - Cauliflower Alley Club - Tag Team Award (2019) - North Carolina Wrestling Association - NCWA Tag Team Championship (1 time, mid-2015)
47,416,556	K-47 (Kansas highway)	1,085,817,371	State highway in Wilson, Neosho, and Crawford counties in Kansas, United States	[ "State highways in Kansas", "Transportation in Crawford County, Kansas", "Transportation in Neosho County, Kansas", "Transportation in Wilson County, Kansas" ]	K-47 is an approximately 61.6-mile-long (99.1 km) state highway in the U.S. state of Kansas. It is an east-west route, and connects small towns and cities in southeast Kansas. K-47's western terminus is at the Fredonia city limits, just west of the intersection with U.S. Route 400 (US-400). The eastern terminus is US-69 in Franklin. Along the way, it intersects several major highways including US-75 in Altoona, US-59 south of Erie, and K-7 in Girard. With the exception of the cities K-47 passes through, the highway travels through rural farmland. K-47 was established as a state highway in 1928, to a highway that ran from Fredonia northeast to Buffalo. By 1929, it was extended east from Fredonia, through Altoona to modern day US-169 south of Chanute. By 1930, K-47 was truncated to end by Fredonia, with the former section between there and Benedict becoming a realignment of K-39. In 1937, K-47 was extended from Fredonia in a northwest direction, along the former alignment of K-96, through New Albany to new K-96. K-47 was extended east to US-59 south of Erie by 1950. In 1953, K-47's western terminus was truncated back to Fredonia. In 2003, K-47 was extended east over the former K-57 to US-69 by Franklin. ## Route description The Kansas Department of Transportation (KDOT) tracks the traffic levels on its highways, and in 2018, they determined that on average the traffic varied from 1,380 vehicles per day slightly west of the junction with US-75 to 4,360 vehicles per day along the overlap with US-59. The second highest was 3,890 vehicles per day slightly west of the junction with US-69. K-47 is not included in the National Highway System, but does connect to the National Highway System at its junction with US-400 east of Fredonia, US-75 in Altoona, US-169 north of Thayer and its eastern terminus at US-69 in Franklin. All but one mile (1.6 km) of K-47's alignment is maintained by KDOT. The section of K-47 within Girard is maintained by the city. ### Wilson County K-47's western terminus is at a continuation as Washington Avenue at the Fredonia city limits. It continues east then meets US-400 at a roundabout intersection east of the city. K-47 then continues east through flat farmland for about 1.1 miles (1.8 km) then crosses an unnamed creek by the junction of Kingman Road. The highway continues east for two miles (3.2 km) then intersects Clear Creek Road. The roadway continues through flat lands with a few houses for two miles (3.2 km) then intersects Million Dollar Highway. K-47 continues east for about 1⁄4 mile (0.40 km) then curves slightly southeast as it enters a forested area. After about 1⁄2 mile (0.80 km) the highway begins to curve northeast. The landscape surrounding the highway soon opens up to farmland as the highway resumes a direct east course. K-47 then crosses the Verdigris River roughly .2 miles (0.32 km) later. The highway continues east for 1⁄2 mile (0.80 km) then expands to four-lanes and enters Altoona as 13th Street. The highway proceeds east through the city for 1⁄4 mile (0.40 km) then has an at-grade crossing with a Union Pacific Railroad track. K-47 then intersects US-75 Business 390 feet (0.12 km) later. The highway continues for 365 feet (0.111 km) to Adams Street and downgrades to two-lanes. The roadway continues east for a short distance and intersects US-75 at a four-way stop. K-47 then exits the city and crosses Little Cedar Creek approximately .1 miles (0.16 km). The highway continues east through flat farmlands with scattered areas of trees for 1.1 miles (1.8 km) then intersects Scott Road. The roadway continues for roughly .55 miles (0.89 km) then crosses Big Cedar Creek. K-47 continues east through flat lands for 3.45 miles (5.55 km) then intersects Wichita Road. The highway then crosses over Chetopa Creek about 1.65 miles (2.66 km) later. The roadway continues east for .3 miles (0.48 km) then enters into Neosho County. ### Neosho County The highway continues east through flat farmlands for three miles (4.8 km) until it meets US-169 south of Chanute. K-47 then has an at-grade crossing with a Kansas and Oklahoma Railroad track then crosses over Elk Creek .4 miles (0.64 km) later. The highway continues for about 3.2 miles (5.1 km) through flat mostly open land then crosses Little Elk Creek. The roadway proceeds another 2.4 miles (3.9 km) and intersects Jackson Road, which travels south to Galesurg. K-47 travels another roughly one mile (1.6 km) where it crosses Rock Creek. The roadway continues through flat farmlands for approximately four miles (6.4 km) and intersects US-59 southwest of Erie. K-47 turns south and begins to overlap US-59 for .9 miles (1.4 km) then turns east and leaves US-59. The highway soon crosses Ogeese Creek the crosses over a Union Pacific Railroad track .75 miles (1.21 km) later. K-47 soon intersects Queens Road then curves slightly southeast and begins to parallel the Neosho River. The highway then crosses the river and curves back east. K-47 enters St. Paul about one mile (1.6 km) later as Washington Street. The highway crosses an old railroad grade then enters into a residential area at the intersection with Front Street. The roadway continues east for .5 miles (0.80 km) then intersects Main Street. K-47 proceeds another .5 miles (0.80 km) then exits the city. The highway soon crosses over Flat Rock Creek, then crosses over Downey Creek about .75 miles (1.21 km) later. The roadway continues through for one mile (1.6 km) before intersecting Wallace Road. K-47 then crosses over Brogan Creek and then enters into Crawford County about 1.5 miles (2.4 km) later. ### Crawford County The highway continues through flat farmland for 1.3 miles (2.1 km) then crosses Murphy Creek. After about 1.7 miles (2.7 km) the roadway intersects 40th Street, which travels south to K-126 and McCune. K-47 continues east for 1.6 miles (2.6 km) then enters forested area and crosses Hickory Creek. The trees clear and the highway enters the unincorporated community of Greenbush. The roadway then intersects the southern terminus of K-3 about 1.3 miles (2.1 km) later. K-3 travels north to Hepler, as K-47 continues east and soon crosses Elm Creek. The roadway continues through flat farmland for approximately 3.1 miles (5.0 km) before crossing Lightning Creek. K-47 continues east for 1.5 miles (2.4 km) before entering Girard as St. John Street. The highway continues for about .7 miles (1.1 km) then passes a hospital, where it expands to four lanes. The roadway enters a more residential area and then after .75 miles (1.21 km) intersects K-7, also known as Summit Street. K-47 continues east for .3 miles (0.48 km) then has an at-grade crossing with a BNSF Railway track. Approximately .25 miles (0.40 km) later the highway downgrades to two lanes as it exits the city. K-47 continues east for 1.3 miles (2.1 km) then crosses Second Cow Creek then Clear Creek. The highway continues through farmland for 3.38 miles (5.44 km) then passes through unincorporated community of Edison. The roadway continues east for 1.1 miles (1.8 km) and crosses over First Cow Creek. K-47 then reaches its eastern terminus at US-69 and US-69 Business (US-69 Bus.) in Franklin, south of Arma. ## History ### Early roads Prior to the formation of the Kansas state highway system, there were auto trails, which were an informal network of marked routes that existed in the United States and Canada in the early part of the 20th century. The highway's western terminus followed the former Capitol Route, which ran from Austin, Texas to Omaha, Nebraska. In Kansas the Capitol Route began at Oklahoma border and travelled north through Independence, Lyndon, Topeka, and Horton to the Nebraska border. K-47 crosses US-169, which closely follows the former Oil Belt Route and one of the former Ozark Trails. K-47 overlaps the section of US-59, which closely follows the former King of Trails, which ran from Galveston and Brownsville in Texas to Winnipeg, Manitoba. In Girard crosses the former Jefferson Highway, which ran from New Orleans, Louisiana to Winnipeg, Manitoba, and the former Kansas City-Ft. Scott-Miami-Tulsa Short Line. The eastern terminus closely follows one of the former Ozark Trails. ### Establishment and realignments In 1926, the section between Fredonia and Altoona was designated K-39, and the section from Erie to Girard was designated as K-57. By 1928, K-47 was established to a highway that ran from K-96 and K-39 in Fredonia northeast to US-75 by Buffalo. By 1929, it was slightly realigned to pass through Benedict, and the southern terminus was extended west over K-39 to Altoona then east over a new highway to K-16 south of Earleton. By 1930, K-47 was truncated to end by Fredonia, with the former section of K-47 between there and Benedict becoming a realignment of K-39 and former section between Benedict and Buffalo being removed from the state highway system. By 1936, K-16 was decommissioned and became US-169. Between 1933 and 1936, K-96 was realigned to travel north from Fredonia along K-39. Then in a July 1, 1937, resolution, it was approved to extend K-47 from Fredonia in a northwest direction, along the former alignment of K-96, through New Albany to K-96. In a January 23, 1946, resolution, it was approved to extend K-47 from US-169 east to US-59 south of Erie. The extension was completed between 1948 and 1950. In a September 9, 1953, resolution, it was approved to truncate K-47's western terminus to end at K-39 and K-96 in Fredonia. Just west of Altoona, K-47 turned south onto modern day Million Dollar Highway. After about .8 miles (1.3 km) it turned east onto 1025 Road, which it followed into the city. In a December 28, 1949, resolution, it was approved to realign the highway to travel directly east into Altoona. That month, condemnation proceedings began to acquire the right-of-way for the new section of highway. In March 1954, a \$155,185 (equivalent to \$ in 2023) contract was awarded to Hixson & Lehenbauer of Topeka to complete the project. The realignment was completed in 1955. In June 1964, construction began to rebuild the highway between Fredonia and the section rebuilt by Altoona in 1955. Sight distances were improved, curves were eliminated, and grades were reduced by making rock cuts. For example, the steep grade on Burton's Hill, three miles (4.8 km) east of Fredonia, was reduced from 5.6% to 2.8% grade. The new section was completed in early October 1965. US-75 originally ran north-south along Quincy Street through Altoona. In September 1963, there was a public hearing to discuss the realignment of US-75 by Altoona. Then in a December 2, 1964, resolution, it was approved to build a new alignment of US-75 slightly east of the old one. The old alignment was redesignated as US-75 Business. The new \$327,000 (equivalent to \$ in 2023) alignment of US-75 was completed in August 1967. In a December 1, 1994, resolution, it was approved to establish US-400 in Kansas, which followed K-96 to Fredonia then turned east and followed K-47 to US-59. In a May 3, 1995, resolution, it was approved to build a new highway between northwest of Fredonia and Neodesha and to move K-96 and US-400 onto it. At that time the overlap between K-47 and US-400 was eliminated. In a December 3, 1998, resolution, it was approved to truncate K-96 to end at US-400 by Wichita. The realignment of US-400 was completed by 1999. In a May 14, 2003, resolution, it was approved to truncate K-57 to end at US-169 by Colony. At this time K-47 was extended east over the former K-57 to US-69 by Franklin. ## Major intersections ## See also - List of state highways in Kansas - List of highways numbered 47
17,477,123	1987 Football League Second Division play-off final	1,170,271,867	null	[ "1986–87 Football League Second Division", "1987 Football League play-offs", "1987 sports events in London", "Charlton Athletic F.C. matches", "EFL Championship play-off finals", "Football League Second Division play-off finals", "Leeds United F.C. matches", "May 1987 sports events in the United Kingdom" ]	The 1987 Football League Second Division play-off Final was an association football match contested between Leeds United and Charlton Athletic over two legs on 23 May 1987 and 25 May 1987 to determine which club would play the next season in the First Division. Charlton Athletic had finished fourth from the bottom in the First Division, while Leeds United finished fourth in the Second Division. They were joined in the play-offs by the teams that had finished third and fifth in the Second Division: Charlton Athletic defeated Ipswich in their play-off semi-final, while Leeds United defeated Oldham Athletic in the other semi-final. The first leg of the final was played at Selhurst Park in London, in front of a crowd of 16,680. Jim Melrose scored the game's only goal to give Charlton Athletic a 1–0 win. Two days later, at Elland Road in Leeds, 31,395 fans saw Brendon Ormsby score the game's only goal as Leeds United won the match 1–0. This meant arranging a replay held at St Andrew's in Birmingham, which was played on 29 May 1987. After full-time, the score remained 0–0. Extra-time was played with John Sheridan scoring first for Leeds in the 99th minute. Peter Shirtliff then scored twice in the 113th and 117th minutes to give Charlton Athletic a 2–1 victory and to preserve their place in the top tier of English football. The following season, Charlton Athletic finished one spot above the relegation zone in the First Division ahead of Chelsea by goal-difference. Leeds United ended their next Second Division campaign in seventh position, eight points below the play-offs. ## Route to the final Charlton Athletic finished the 1986–87 season in 19th place in the First Division. They avoided automatic relegation by defeating Queens Park Rangers on the final day of the season and finished two points ahead of relegated team Leicester City. Leeds United finished the season in fourth place in the Second Division, ten points behind Portsmouth who were automatically promoted to the First Division along with Derby Country. Both Charlton Athletic and Leeds United, along with Oldham Athletic and Ipswich Town, entered the play-offs to determine who would play in the First Division in the 1987–88 season. Leeds United hosted the first leg of the semi-final at Elland Road in Leeds on 14 May 1987 as they faced Oldham Athletic, who were attempting to gain promotion to the top flight where they had last played in 1923. Kick off was delayed by 15 minutes as a result of the large crowd of 29,742. Leeds' Mark Aizlewood received a booking in the 13th minute for a late tackle while Oldham's Mike Milligan was booked a minute later. The best chance of the first half fell to Sheridan whose curling free kick was caught by Andy Goram in the Oldham goal. The only goal of the game came in the 89th minute when Keith Edwards, who had come on as a substitute 17 minutes earlier, scored a header at the near post to give Leeds a one-goal advantage. The second leg of the semi-final was played three days later at Boundary Park. Oldham opened the scoring in the 18th minute when Gary Williams headed in a cross from Denis Irwin. It would take until the 89th minute before Oldham's substitute Mike Cecere headed in from another Irwin cross to put his team ahead 2–0. A minute later, Baird knocked down a cross from Sheridan for Edwards to score through a group of players, making the aggregate score 2–2, and sending the game into extra time. No further goals were scored, and Leeds progressed to the final on the away goals rule. In the second play-off semi-final, Charlton Athletic's opponents were Ipswich Town with the first leg being held at Portman Road in Ipswich on 14 May 1987. It was the clubs' first league meeting in nearly twenty years. In the tenth minute, Ipswich's goalkeeper Paul Cooper made his fifth penalty save of the season after denying Colin Walsh's spot kick. The Charlton goalkeeper Bob Bolder made a save from Kevin Wilson before Jim Melrose hit the Ipswich crossbar. Bolder then made a double save, first from Jason Dozzell and then denying the headed rebound from Tony Humes, and the match ended 0–0. The second leg took place at Selhurst Park three days later. Melrose scored the opening goal of the game with a 15-yard (14 m) header from a John Humphrey cross. Two minutes later Melrose doubled the lead with another header, this time from a Paul Miller pass. In the 85th minute, Ipswich midfielder Steve McCall scored after a shot from Mich d'Avray rebounded from the post, but Charlton Athletic qualified for the play-off final 2–1 on aggregate. ## Match ### Background This was the inaugural season of the English Football League play-offs which was introduced as part of the "Heathrow Agreement", a ten-point proposal to restructure the Football League, which included this mechanism by which the number of clubs in the First Division could be reduced from 22 to 20. For the first two years of the play-offs, one relegation place was decided upon using a single-elimination tournament where each round was played as a two-legged tie: one club from the First Division competed with three clubs from the Second Division for a place in the top tier of English football. The play-offs were not universally lauded: Oldham Athletic manager Joe Royle was scathing of them after losing to Leeds in the semi-final, saying "We finished seven points clear of Leeds. So to go out on away goals to them means there is something unjust. I welcomed the play-offs but possibly hadn't considered the long-term ramifications." Leeds United had played in the second tier of English football since they were relegated in the 1981–82 season. Billy Bremner had been appointed as their manager in October 1985, replacing Eddie Grey. After leading the club to 14th position in the league that season, Bremner made a number of changes to playing staff, including bringing in at least ten players. Along with the fourth-place finish in the league, Bremner oversaw Leeds' run to the semi-final of the 1986–87 FA Cup where they lost to Coventry City. Charlton Athletic had been promoted to the First Division the previous season, having spent five seasons in the Second Division. Their manager Lennie Lawrence had been moved into the caretaker role at the club in November 1982 after Ken Craggs was sacked with them fifth-from-bottom in the Second Division. Despite finishing in 18th place in the First Division, Lawrence's team had made it to the 1987 Full Members' Cup Final where they were defeated by Second Division Blackburn Rovers 1–0 at Wembley Stadium. ### First leg #### Summary The first leg of the play-off final was delayed from a scheduled Friday evening kick-off to a Saturday afternoon game to avoid traffic congestion at a supermarket local to Selhurst Park. The match was played in front of a crowd of 16,680 in damp conditions and was refereed by Roger Milford. Andy Peake's strike from outside the penalty area just flew over the Leeds crossbar before Melrose headed a cross from Walsh goalbound which was saved by Mervyn Day in the Leeds goal. The game was described in The Guardian by Michael Ralph as "an unending series of squabbles" in which both Charlton's Miller and Leeds' Aizlewood were booked. Charlton dominated the match but it took until the 87th minute when Melrose scored the opening goal of the afternoon, and his seventeenth of the season, to give them a 1–0 lead. Charlton manager Lennie Lawrence said after the match, "I can't recall us having less room to play any time this season." #### Details ### Second leg #### Summary The second leg was played on 25 May 1987 Elland Road in front of a crowd of 31,395 and was refereed by Brian Hill. Leeds' John Pearson was ruled out with an injury and was replaced in the starting eleven by Bob Taylor. The first half saw several robust challenges with former Charlton player Aizlewood receiving a yellow card after he fouled Peake. Leeds held possession for most of the first half, but Taylor missed a rebound that came from a Sheridan challenge with Charlton goalkeeper Bolder. But the ball hit the woodwork and Taylor missed the rebound. In the second half, Leeds United forward Brendon Ormsby scored in the 53rd minute; it was to be the only goal of the game. The aggregate score of 1–1 meant a replay had to be played four days later at St Andrew's in Birmingham, a neutral venue. Lawrence reflected on the nature of the match: "It was fiercely contested but you cannot help that when there's so much at stake. It was a good game and we haven't played better than that and lost all season ... there are worse sides in the First Division." #### Details ### Replay #### Summary The replay was held at St Andrew's, the home of Birmingham City, on 29 May 1987 in front of a crowd of 15,841, and was refereed by Allan Gunn. Lawrence chose a blue kit for Charlton for the replay, as he believed that should any neutral supporters be present at the ground, they would support the team in the same colour as the host club. The West Midlands Police had mobilised at least 300 officers, some mounted and some with dogs, in anticipation of the arrival of at least 13,000 Leeds United supporters. Two years prior, Leeds United fans had rioted at St Andrew's, causing a wall to collapse and resulting in injuries to 96 policemen. Only 2,000 Charlton fans were expected to make the journey to Birmingham. Leeds were hoping that Pearson had recovered from a rib injury while Charlton's only selection dilemma was between Shirtliff and Thompson who was recovering from an Achilles injury. During normal time Charlton dominated, but after 90 minutes the game remained goalless with Crooks and Melrose having chances to score. Leeds were a defender down after their captain Ormsby left the field before half-time with an injured leg. In the ninth minute of extra time, Sheridan scored from a free kick to give Leeds the lead. But in the second-half of extra time, two goals from Shirtliff made it 2–1 to Charlton. First, in the 113th minute, he struck a low shot past Day in the Leeds goal. His second goal came in the 117th minute from a Peake free kick as his header was unchallenged. The match ended 2–1 to Charlton who retained their place in the top tier of English football. #### Details ## Post-match After the result, the Charlton manager Lawrence said in an interview, "The play-offs are exciting. I just think the format is wrong." Shirtliff had scored 15 goals in his 17-year career before scoring the two in the play-off final replay. He later said "I had never scored more than one goal in a game before and have never done it since! We were by far the better side so we just carried on playing and showed good patience." The following season, Charlton Athletic finished in 17th place, one place above the relegation zone after finishing their season with a 1–1 draw to Chelsea with only goal difference separating the two teams. Leeds United finished the following campaign in seventh place, eight points behind the play-off spots and it would not be until 1990 where they were automatically promoted into the top flight.
5,866	Council of the European Union	1,168,400,903	Institution of the European Union	[ "Council of the European Union", "Institutions of the European Union", "Intergovernmental organizations", "International organisations based in Belgium", "Organisations based in Brussels", "Politics of the European Union", "Supranational legislatures" ]	The Council of the European Union, often referred to in the treaties and other official documents simply as the Council, and informally known as the Council of Ministers, is the third of the seven Institutions of the European Union (EU) as listed in the Treaty on European Union. It is one of two legislative bodies and together with the European Parliament serves to amend and approve or veto the proposals of the European Commission, which holds the right of initiative. The Council of the European Union and the European Council are the only EU institutions that are explicitly intergovernmental, that is, forums whose attendees express and represent the position of their Member State's executive, be they ambassadors, ministers or heads of state/government. The Council meets in 10 different configurations of national ministers (one per state). The precise membership of these configurations varies according to the topic under consideration; for example, when discussing agricultural policy the Council is formed by the national ministers whose portfolio includes this policy area (with the related European Commissioners contributing but not voting). ## Composition The Presidency of the Council rotates every six months among the governments of EU member states, with the relevant ministers of the respective country holding the Presidency at any given time ensuring the smooth running of the meetings and setting the daily agenda. The continuity between presidencies is provided by an arrangement under which three successive presidencies, known as Presidency trios, share common political programmes. The Foreign Affairs Council (national foreign ministers) is however chaired by the Union's High Representative. Its decisions are made by qualified majority voting in most areas, unanimity in others, or just simple majority for procedural issues. Usually where it operates unanimously, it only needs to consult the Parliament. However, in most areas the ordinary legislative procedure applies meaning both Council and Parliament share legislative and budgetary powers equally, meaning both have to agree for a proposal to pass. In a few limited areas the Council may initiate new EU law itself. The General Secretariat of the Council of the European Union, also known as Council Secretariat, assists the Council of the European Union, the Presidency of the Council of the European Union, the European Council and the President of the European Council. The Secretariat is headed by the Secretary-General of the Council of the European Union. The Secretariat is divided into seven directorates-general, each administered by a director-general. ## History The Council first appeared in the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) as the "Special Council of Ministers", set up to counterbalance the High Authority (the supranational executive, now the Commission). The original Council had limited powers: issues relating only to coal and steel were in the Authority's domain, and the Council's consent was only required on decisions outside coal and steel. As a whole, the Council only scrutinised the High Authority (the executive). In 1957, the Treaties of Rome established two new communities, and with them two new Councils: the Council of the European Atomic Energy Community (EAEC) and the Council of the European Economic Community (EEC). However, due to objections over the supranational power of the Authority, their Councils had more powers; the new executive bodies were known as "Commissions". In 1965, the Council was hit by the "empty chair crisis". Due to disagreements between French President Charles de Gaulle and the Commission's agriculture proposals, among other things, France boycotted all meetings of the Council. This halted the Council's work until the impasse was resolved the following year by the Luxembourg compromise. Although initiated by a gamble of the President of the Commission, Walter Hallstein, who later on lost the Presidency, the crisis exposed flaws in the Council's workings. Under the Merger Treaty of 1967, the ECSC's Special Council of Ministers and the Council of the EAEC (together with their other independent institutions) were merged into the Council of the European Communities, which would act as a single Council for all three institutions. In 1993, the Council adopted the name 'Council of the European Union', following the establishment of the European Union by the Maastricht Treaty. That treaty strengthened the Council, with the addition of more intergovernmental elements in the three pillars system. However, at the same time the Parliament and Commission had been strengthened inside the Community pillar, curtailing the ability of the Council to act independently. The Treaty of Lisbon abolished the pillar system and gave further powers to Parliament. It also merged the Council's High Representative with the Commission's foreign policy head, with this new figure chairing the foreign affairs Council rather than the rotating presidency. The European Council was declared a separate institution from the Council, also chaired by a permanent president, and the different Council configurations were mentioned in the treaties for the first time. The development of the Council has been characterised by the rise in power of the Parliament, with which the Council has had to share its legislative powers. The Parliament has often provided opposition to the Council's wishes. This has in some cases led to clashes between both bodies with the Council's system of intergovernmentalism contradicting the developing parliamentary system and supranational principles. ## Powers and functions The primary purpose of the Council is to act as one of two vetoing bodies of the EU's legislative branch, the other being the European Parliament. Together they serve to amend, approve or disapprove the proposals of the European Commission, which has the sole power to propose laws. Jointly with the Parliament, the Council holds the budgetary power of the Union and has greater control than the Parliament over the more intergovernmental areas of the EU, such as foreign policy and macroeconomic co-ordination. Finally, before the entry into force of the Treaty of Lisbon, it formally held the executive power of the EU which it conferred upon the European Commission. It is considered by some to be equivalent to an upper house of the EU legislature, although it is not described as such in the treaties. The Council represents the executive governments of the EU's member states and is based in the Europa building in Brussels. ### Legislative procedure The EU's legislative authority is divided between the Council, the Parliament and the Commission. As the relationships and powers of these institutions have developed, various legislative procedures have been created for adopting laws. In early times, the avis facultatif maxim was: "The Commission proposes, and the Council disposes"; but now the vast majority of laws are subject to the ordinary legislative procedure, which works on the principle that consent from both the Council and Parliament are required before a law may be adopted. Under this procedure, the Commission presents a proposal to Parliament and the Council. Following its first reading the Parliament may propose amendments. If the Council accepts these amendments then the legislation is approved. If it does not then it adopts a "common position" and submits that new version to the Parliament. At its second reading, if the Parliament approves the text or does not act, the text is adopted, otherwise the Parliament may propose further amendments to the Council's proposal. It may be rejected out right by an absolute majority of MEPs. If the Council still does not approve the Parliament's position, then the text is taken to a "Conciliation Committee" composed of the Council members plus an equal number of MEPs. If a Committee manages to adopt a joint text, it then has to be approved in a third reading by both the Council and Parliament or the proposal is abandoned. The few other areas that operate the special legislative procedures are justice & home affairs, budget and taxation and certain aspects of other policy areas: such as the fiscal aspects of environmental policy. In these areas, the Council or Parliament decide law alone. The procedure used also depends upon which type of institutional act is being used. The strongest act is a regulation, an act or law which is directly applicable in its entirety. Then there are directives which bind members to certain goals which they must achieve, but they do this through their own laws and hence have room to manoeuvre in deciding upon them. A decision is an instrument which is focused at a particular person or group and is directly applicable. Institutions may also issue recommendations and opinions which are merely non-binding declarations. The Council votes in one of three ways; unanimity, simple majority, or qualified majority. In most cases, the Council votes on issues by qualified majority voting, meaning that there must be a minimum of 55% of member states agreeing (at least 15) who together represent at least 65% of the EU population. A 'blocking minority' can only be formed by at least 4 member states representing at least 35% of the EU population. ### Resolutions Council resolutions have no legal effect. Usually the Council's intention is to set out future work foreseen in a specific policy area or to invite action by the Commission. If a resolution covers a policy area which is not entirely within an area of EU competency, the resolution will be issued as a "resolution of the Council and the representatives of the governments of the member states". Examples are the Council Resolution of 26 September 1989 on the development of subcontracting in the Community and the Council Resolution of 26 November 2001 on consumer credit and indebtedness. ### Foreign affairs The legal instruments used by the Council for the Common Foreign and Security Policy are different from the legislative acts. Under the CFSP they consist of "common positions", "joint actions", and "common strategies". Common positions relate to defining a European foreign policy towards a particular third-country such as the promotion of human rights and democracy in Myanmar, a region such as the stabilisation efforts in the African Great Lakes, or a certain issue such as support for the International Criminal Court. A common position, once agreed, is binding on all EU states who must follow and defend the policy, which is regularly revised. A joint action refers to a co-ordinated action of the states to deploy resources to achieve an objective, for example for mine clearing or to combat the spread of small arms. Common strategies defined an objective and commits the EUs resources to that task for four years. ### Budgetary authority The legislative branch officially holds the Union's budgetary authority. The EU's budget (which is around 155 billion euro) is subject to a form of the ordinary legislative procedure with a single reading giving Parliament power over the entire budget (prior to 2009, its influence was limited to certain areas) on an equal footing with the Council. If there is a disagreement between them, it is taken to a conciliation committee as it is for legislative proposals. But if the joint conciliation text is not approved, the Parliament may adopt the budget definitively. In addition to the budget, the Council coordinates the economic policy of members. ## Organisation The Council's rules of procedure contain the provisions necessary for its organisation and functioning. ### Presidency The Presidency of the Council is not a single post, but is held by a member state's government. Every six months the presidency rotates among the states, in an order predefined by the Council's members, allowing each state to preside over the body. From 2007, every three member states co-operate for their combined eighteen months on a common agenda, although only one formally holds the presidency for the normal six-month period. For example, the President for the second half of 2007, Portugal, was the second in a trio of states alongside Germany and Slovenia with whom Portugal had been co-operating. The Council meets in various configurations (as outlined below) so its membership changes depending upon the issue. The person chairing the Council will always be the member from the state holding the Presidency. A delegate from the following Presidency also assists the presiding member and may take over work if requested. The exception however is the foreign affairs council, which has been chaired by the High Representative since the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty. The role of the Presidency is administrative and political. On the administrative side it is responsible for procedures and organising the work of the Council during its term. This includes summoning the Council for meetings along with directing the work of COREPER and other committees and working groups. The political element is the role of successfully dealing with issues and mediating in the Council. In particular this includes setting the agenda of the council, hence giving the Presidency substantial influence in the work of the Council during its term. The Presidency also plays a major role in representing the Council within the EU and representing the EU internationally, for example at the United Nations. ### Configurations Legally speaking, the Council is a single entity (this means that technically any Council configuration can adopt decisions that fall within the remit of any other Council configuration) but it is in practice divided into several different council configurations (or ‘(con)formations’). Article 16(6) of the Treaty on European Union provides: > The Council shall meet in different configurations, the list of which shall be adopted in accordance with Article 236 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. > > The General Affairs Council shall ensure consistency in the work of the different Council configurations. It shall prepare and ensure the follow-up to meetings of the European Council, in liaison with the President of the European Council and the Commission. > > The Foreign Affairs Council shall elaborate the Union's external action on the basis of strategic guidelines laid down by the European Council and ensure that the Union's action is consistent. Each council configuration deals with a different functional area, for example agriculture and fisheries. In this formation, the council is composed of ministers from each state government who are responsible for this area: the agriculture and fisheries ministers. The chair of this council is held by the member from the state holding the presidency (see section above). Similarly, the Economic and Financial Affairs Council is composed of national finance ministers, and they are still one per state and the chair is held by the member coming from the presiding country. The Councils meet irregularly throughout the year except for the three major configurations (top three below) which meet once a month. As of 2020, there are ten formations: General Affairs (GAC): General affairs co-ordinates the work of the Council, prepares for European Council meetings and deals with issues crossing various council formations. Foreign Affairs (FAC): Chaired by the High Representative, rather than the Presidency, it manages the CFSP, CSDP, trade and development co-operation. It sometimes meets in a defence configuration. Economic and Financial Affairs (Ecofin): Composed of economics and finance ministers of the member states. It includes budgetary and eurozone matters via an informal group composed only of eurozone member ministers. Agriculture and Fisheries (Agrifish): Composed of the agriculture and fisheries ministers of the member states. It considers matters concerning the Common Agricultural Policy, the Common Fisheries Policy, forestry, organic farming, food and feed safety, seeds, pesticides, and fisheries. Justice and Home Affairs (JHA): This configuration brings together Justice ministers and Interior Ministers of the Member States. Includes civil protection. Employment, Social Policy, Health and Consumer Affairs (EPSCO): Composed of employment, social protection, consumer protection, health and equal opportunities ministers. Competitiveness (COMPET): Created in June 2002 through the merging of three previous configurations (Internal Market, Industry and Research). Depending on the items on the agenda, this formation is composed of ministers responsible for areas such as European affairs, industry, tourism and scientific research. With the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty, the EU acquired competence in space matters, and space policy has been attributed to the Competitiveness Council. Transport, Telecommunications and Energy (TTE): Created in June 2002, through the merging of three policies under one configuration, and with a composition varying according to the specific items on its agenda. This formation meets approximately once every two months. Environment (ENV): Composed of environment ministers, who meet about four times a year. Education, Youth, Culture and Sport (EYC): Composed of education, culture, youth, communications and sport ministers, who meet around three or four times a year. Includes audiovisual issues. Complementing these, the Political and Security Committee (PSC) brings together ambassadors to monitor international situations and define policies within the CSDP, particularly in crises. The European Council is similar to a configuration of the Council and operates in a similar way, but is composed of the national leaders (heads of government or state) and has its own President, since 2019, Charles Michel. The body's purpose is to define the general "impetus" of the Union. The European Council deals with the major issues such as the appointment of the President of the European Commission who takes part in the body's meetings. Ecofin's Eurozone component, the Euro group, is also a formal group with its own President. Its European Council counterpart is the Euro summit formalized in 2011 and the TSCG. Following the entry into force of a framework agreement between the EU and ESA there is a Space Council configuration—a joint and concomitant meeting of the EU Council and of the ESA Council at ministerial level dealing with the implementation of the ESP adopted by both organisations. ### Administration The General Secretariat of the Council provides the continuous infrastructure of the Council, carrying out preparation for meetings, draft reports, translation, records, documents, agendas and assisting the presidency. The Secretary General of the Council is head of the Secretariat. The Secretariat is divided into seven directorates-general, each administered by a director-general. The Committee of Permanent Representatives (COREPER) is a body composed of representatives from the states (ambassadors, civil servants etc.) who meet each week to prepare the work and tasks of the Council. It monitors and co-ordinates work and deals with the Parliament on co-decision legislation. It is divided into two groups of the representatives (Coreper II) and their deputies (Coreper I). Agriculture is dealt with separately by the Special Committee on Agriculture (SCA). The numerous working groups submit their reports to the Council through Coreper or SCA. ## Governments represented in the Council The Treaty of Lisbon mandated a change in voting system from 1 November 2014 for most cases to double majority Qualified Majority Voting, replacing the voting weights system. Decisions made by the council have to be taken by 55% of member states representing at least 65% of the EU's population. Almost all members of the Council are members of a political party at national level, and most of these are members of a European-level political party. However the Council is composed to represent the Member States rather than political parties and the nature of coalition governments in a number of states means that party breakdown at different configuration of the Council vary depending on which domestic party was assigned the portfolio. However, the broad ideological alignment of the government in each state does influence the nature of the law the Council produces and the extent to which the link between domestic parties puts pressure on the members in the European Parliament to vote a certain way. ## Location By a decision of the European Council at Edinburgh in December 1992, the Council has its seat in Brussels but in April, June, and October, it holds its meetings in Luxembourg City. Between 1952 and 1967, the ECSC Council held its Luxembourg City meetings in the Cercle Municipal on Place d’Armes. Its secretariat moved on numerous occasions but between 1955 and 1967 it was housed in the Verlorenkost district of the city. In 1957, with the creation of two new Communities with their own Councils, discretion on location was given to the current Presidency. In practice this was to be in the Château of Val-Duchesse until the autumn of 1958, at which point it moved to 2 Rue Ravensteinstraat in Brussels. The 1965 agreement (finalised by the Edinburgh agreement and annexed to the treaties) on the location of the newly merged institutions, the Council was to be in Brussels but would meet in Luxembourg City during April, June, and October. The ECSC secretariat moved from Luxembourg City to the merged body Council secretariat in the Ravenstein building of Brussels. In 1971 the Council and its secretariat moved into the Charlemagne building, next to the Commission's Berlaymont, but the Council rapidly ran out of space and administrative branch of the Secretariat moved to a building at 76 Rue Joseph II/Jozef II-straat and during the 1980s the language divisions moved out into the Nerviens, Frère Orban, and Guimard buildings. In 1995, the Council moved into the Justus Lipsius building, across the road from Charlemagne. However, its staff was still increasing, so it continued to rent the Frère Orban building to house the Finnish and Swedish language divisions. Staff continued to increase and the Council rented, in addition to owning Justus Lipsius, the Kortenberg, Froissart, Espace Rolin, and Woluwe Heights buildings. Since acquiring the Lex building in 2008, the three aforementioned buildings are no longer in use by the Council services. When the Council is meeting in Luxembourg City, it meets in the Kirchberg Conference Centre, and its offices are based at the European Centre on the plateau du Kirchberg. The Council has also met occasionally in Strasbourg, in various other cities, and also outside the Union: for example in 1974 when it met in Tokyo and Washington, D. C. while trade and energy talks were taking place. Under the Council's present rules of procedures the Council can, in extraordinary circumstances, hold one of its meetings outside Brussels and Luxembourg. From 2017, both the Council of the European Union and the European Council adopted the purpose built Europa building as their official headquarters, although they continue to utilise the facilities afforded by the adjacent Justus Lipsius building. The focal point of the new building, the distinctive multi-storey "lantern" shaped structure in which the main meeting room is located, is utilised in both EU institutions' new official logos. ## See also - Comparisons with other institutions
62,763,475	Emily Hale	1,173,017,939	American teacher and muse of TS Eliot	[ "1891 births", "1969 deaths", "20th-century American women educators", "Milwaukee-Downer College faculty", "Miss Porter's School alumni", "Muses", "People from Boston", "People from East Orange, New Jersey", "Scripps College faculty", "Simmons University faculty", "Smith College people", "T. S. Eliot" ]	Emily Hale (27 October 1891 – 12 October 1969) was an American speech and drama teacher, who was the longtime muse and confidante of the poet T. S. Eliot. Exactly 1,131 letters from Eliot to Hale were deposited in Princeton University Library in 1956 and were described as one of the best-known sealed archives in the world for many years. Per Hale's instructions, the letters were opened on January 2, 2020. Hale had specified that the letters would be embargoed for fifty years after the latter of their deaths; the Princeton Library gave its staff a few more months to get them ready for the public to read. The day the Hale letters were opened, Harvard's Houghton Library issued an unexpected statement that Eliot had prepared in 1960, to be opened when Hale's archives were released. Princeton then released Hale's summary of their relationship. ## Early life and career Hale was born in East Orange, New Jersey, on 27 October 1891. Her father was the Reverend Edward Hale, an architect who became a Unitarian Minister and taught at Harvard Divinity School. Her mother Emily (née Milliken) had become a "permanent mental invalid" after the death of her infant son, While some early Eliot biographers wrote that Hale was an orphan who was raised by her aunt and uncle, Edith and John Carroll Perkins, she lived at home with her father in Chestnut Hill, outside of Boston, until he died when she was 26. The Perkinses later moved from Seattle to Boston, and Hale frequently traveled with them to Europe. The three of them spent many summers in Chipping Campden, England, in the 1930s, and hosted Eliot while they vacationed there. Hale graduated from Miss Porter's School, but never attended college. After her father died in 1918, she took a job at a dorm matron at Simmons University (then College), where she had helped organize the drama club as a volunteer in 1916. She later was promoted to speech instructior at Simmons. She went on to serve as a speech and drama teacher at Milwaukee-Downer College (1921–1929) (now part of Lawrence University), Scripps College (1932–1934), and Smith College (1936–1942), as well as the all-girls Concord Academy and Abbot Academy preparatory schools at the end of her teaching career. Hale was an active member of the Unitarian Church and also the League of Women Voters, and she was a volunteer at the Sophia Smith Collection. ## Relationship with Eliot Eliot recalled first falling in love with Hale in 1912 when he was a graduate student studying philosophy at Harvard, and Eliot declared his love for her shortly before leaving for Europe in 1914; Eliot later said that Hale did not reciprocate his feelings, but he continued to write her and to send her flowers for her theatrical performances after he left. However, in June 1915, Eliot married Vivienne Haigh-Wood, and his preserved correspondence with Hale did not materially resume until 1930. From 1930 until 1956, Eliot wrote over a thousand letters to Hale visiting her in California over the New Year's holidays in 1932–33 before deciding to seek a formal separation from his wife when he returned to England in 1933. However he told Hale he could not seek a divorce because of the strictures of his Anglican faith. Hale and Eliot spent the summers from 1935 to 1939 together in Campden, Gloucestershire, as the guests of her aunt and uncle, the Perkinses. In 1935, Hale and Eliot visited Burnt Norton, an abandoned manor house in Gloucestershire. (Eliot biographers had believed this visit occurred in 1934, but the Eliot-Hale correspondence revealed that the visit occurred in 1935.) In a memoir released by Princeton Library in mid-January 2020, Hale said that Eliot had told her that "Burnt Norton" was his love poem to her, an assertion backed up in the Eliot letters themselves. World War II intervened, and Hale and Eliot would not meet again until 1946, by which time Eliot was about to turn 58 and Hale, 55; however, after the death of Vivienne in 1947, Eliot arranged a meeting with Hale at which he told her he no longer could marry her. Eliot had told Hale that he would marry her if he could, so she was shocked and saddened when he changed his mind. After 1947, they continued to be friends, but their letters and visits were less frequent. Eliot's relationship with Hale was said by some biographers to provide Eliot with a model of a silent, ethereal woman and chaste love that could be indefinitely sustained. Hale's own feelings for Eliot are largely unknown, partly because Eliot arranged for nearly all of her letters to be burned after he married his much younger secretary Esmé Valerie Fletcher, in 1957. Eliot's last letter to Hale in the Princeton collection was written in 1957. ## Life after Eliot In 1957, after Eliot remarried, Hale was forced to retire from Abbot Academy because she had reached the school's mandatory retirement age. While some Eliot biographers wrote that Hale was hospitalized following a nervous breakdown, no evidence is cited. One of Hale's biographers, Sara Fitzgerald, said "Emily Hale is painted as someone who fell apart, who had a nervous breakdown after loving Eliot for so many years and seeing him marry another woman", but "I didn't necessarily find that to be the case. I felt she got over this blow and kept living". After her retirement, Hale acted in a number of well-received community theater productions, and kept in contact with her friends and past students. She also taught for a period at Oak Grove School in Vassalboro, Maine, and finally died in Concord, Massachusetts. Fitzgerald records that Hale wrote a final letter to Eliot in the early 1960s, in which she told him it was "'difficult' for her to consider her life to be important just because they had been connected," though the letter "ended on an upbeat note, hoping that they could still be friends." Eliot never responded, and he died soon after in 1965. ## Letter archive Hale was a friend of the Princeton University English professor, Willard Thorp, and his wife Margaret Farrand Thorp. From 1942, she explored with Thorp the idea of keeping Eliot's letters in the Princeton University Library for safekeeping, finally deciding to do this in July 1956. Hale specified that the letters should be kept closed for fifty full years after the latter of her or Eliot's death. Hale died after Eliot, on 12 October 1969 in Concord, and accordingly, the archive was opened to scholars only in January 2020, revealing 1,131 letters from Eliot to Hale dating from the period 1930 to 1957. The letters included information about the evolving relationship between Hale and Eliot, and in some cases contradicted established published sources. Initially, the letters could only be read in person at Princeton Library, and copies could not be made. Access to the letters became even more restricted following COVID-19-related shutdowns. On January 30, 2023, the Eliot estate made all the letters, and additional materials from the Eliot archive, available to the public for free, online at tseliot.com . The number of letters, by year, are as follows: Hale included a cover note with the letters saying, "The memory of the years when we were most together and so happy are mine always", and also, "I accepted conditions as they were offered under the unnatural code which surrounded us, so that perhaps more sophisticated persons than I will not be surprised to learn the truth about us". ### Posthumous statement In a surprise to scholars, Eliot's estate simultaneously issued a written statement by him to be opened on the release of Hale's letters. Eliot's statement said that he "never had any sexual relations with Emily Hale", and it appeared to reject the notion that Hale was his muse: "Emily Hale would have killed the poet in me; Vivienne nearly was the death of me, but she kept the poet alive". However, some commentators immediately contrasted Eliot's statement with some of the early releases of his letters which state, "You have made me perfectly happy: that is, happier than I have ever been in my life", and they speculated that Eliot's harsh statement might have been written at the instigation of his second wife, Valerie Fletcher Eliot. Others believe it may have been a reaction to his unhappiness with Hale's decision to archive his letters for future release. After an initial review of the letters, Eliot scholar Frances Dickey told The Washington Post that "he basically confesses his love for Emily Hale and tells her that she's the great love of his life", and "that he's been writing for her all of these years, and he even names the places in his poetry where he has paid tribute to her or honored her in some way". Eliot biographer Lyndall Gordon told PBS News that the contents of the letters far exceeded Dickey and Gordon's expectations. "Eliot was very emotional and very explicit about how much he loved her and how important she was to his work". Gordon also added, "Eliot lays it all bare. That's striking, in part, because for a long time, it was 'unfashionable' to think of Eliot as a confessional poet". He highlighted passages of works that Eliot told Hale she had inspired, including The Waste Land. ## See also - The Archivist, a fictional book based on the archived Eliot letters - List of sealed archives ## Literatur - Lyndall Gordon: The hyacinth girl : T. S. Eliot's hidden muse, London : Virago, 2022,
18,715,148	USS Henry R. Mallory	1,163,037,166	American transport for the United States Navy	[ "1916 ships", "Maritime incidents in February 1943", "Ocean liners", "Passenger ships of the United States", "Ships built in Newport News, Virginia", "Ships sunk by German submarines in World War II", "Shipwrecks in the Atlantic Ocean", "Transport ships of the United States Army", "Transports of the United States Navy", "Troop ships of the United States", "Troop ships of the War Shipping Administration", "World War I auxiliary ships of the United States", "World War I passenger ships of the United States" ]	USS Henry R. Mallory (ID-1280) was a transport for the United States Navy during World War I. She was also sometimes referred to as USS H. R. Mallory or as USS Mallory. Before her Navy service she was USAT Henry R. Mallory as a United States Army transport ship. From her 1916 launch, and after her World War I military service, she was known as SS Henry R. Mallory for the Mallory Lines. Pressed into service as a troopship in World War II by the War Shipping Administration, she was torpedoed by the in the North Atlantic Ocean and sank with the loss of 272 men—over half of those on board. ## World War I SS Henry R. Mallory was built by the Newport News Shipbuilding & Drydock Co. of Newport News, Virginia (yard no. 193), and delivered to the Mallory Steamship Line on 21 October 1916. Named for Mallory Lines president Henry R. Mallory, she operated on a New Orleans – New York route, carrying passengers and freight. ### U.S. Army service After the United States declared war on Germany in April 1917, the United States Army, needing transports to get its men and materiel to France, had a select committee of shipping executives pore over registries of American shipping. The committee selected Henry R. Mallory and thirteen other American-flagged ships that were sufficiently fast, could carry enough fuel in their bunkers for transatlantic crossings, and, most importantly, were in port or not far at sea. After Henry R. Mallory discharged her last load of passengers and cargo, she was officially handed over to the Army on 24 May, one of the first three ships acquired. Before any troop transportation could be undertaken, all of the ships were hastily refitted. Of the fourteen ships, ten, including Henry R. Mallory, were designated to carry human passengers; the other four were designated as animal ships. The ten ships designated to carry troops had all of their second- and third-class accommodations ripped out and replaced with berths for troops. Cooking and toilet facilities were greatly expanded to handle the large numbers of men aboard. Gun platforms were installed on each ship before docking at the Brooklyn Navy Yard to have the guns themselves installed. All the ships were manned by merchant officers and crews but carried two U.S. Navy officers, Navy gun crews, quartermasters, signalmen, and wireless operators. The senior Navy officer on board would take control if a ship came under attack. The American convoy carrying the first units of the American Expeditionary Forces were broken into four groups; Henry R. Mallory was in the third group with and , and escorts consisting of cruiser Charleston, armed collier Cyclops, and destroyers Allen, Preston, and McCall. Henry R. Mallory departed with her group on 14 June for Brest, France, steaming at a 13-knot (24 km/h) pace. A thwarted submarine attack on the first convoy group, and reports of heavy submarine activity off of Brest resulted in a change in the convoy's destination to Saint-Nazaire. After her return from France, Henry R. Mallory sailed again in the 5th convoy on 31 July, the 7th convoy on 8 September, and the 12th convoy on 26 November, all of which sailed from the New York embarkation point in Hoboken, New Jersey. In January 1918, Henry R. Mallory became the first transport to sail from the Newport News embarkation port, when—loaded with eight aero squadrons—she sailed on 17 January. Departing again from Hoboken on 14 March in the 24th convoy, Henry R. Mallory began her last journey under Army charter. After arriving in France on 26 March and landing her troops, Henry R. Mallory began her return to the United States with Army transport and Navy transport Mercury. At 11:45 on 4 April, a German submarine fired torpedoes at the group. Through evasive maneuvers, none of the ships were hit, and with timely gunfire targeting the sub, no more was seen of the threat. Arriving back in the United States on 13 April, Henry R. Mallory was handed over to the U.S. Navy. ### U.S. Navy transport duties After problems with crew discipline aboard Army transports and Finland when they were torpedoed, the U.S. Navy, led by the recommendations of Rear Admiral Albert Gleaves, insisted that all troop transports be manned entirely by Navy personnel. This was accomplished soon after so as to avoid the need for what Gleaves called "ignorant and unreliable men" who were "the sweepings of the docks". Accordingly, Henry R. Mallory was handed over to the Navy on 13 April 1918 and commissioned on 17 April. Other than the official change command of the vessel, little else change for Henry R. Mallory. She sailed in her first convoy under Navy command on 23 April, and continued carrying troops to France, making five additional trips before the Armistice in November 1918. In all, Henry R. Mallory carried 9,756 troops to France. With the fighting at an end, the task of bringing home American soldiers began almost immediately. Henry R. Mallory did her part by carrying home 14,514 healthy and wounded men in seven roundtrips. Henry R. Mallory returned from her last Navy voyage on 29 August 1919, and was returned to the Mallory Lines the following day. ## World War II In the early stages of World War II for the United States, the War Shipping Administration requisitioned Henry R. Mallory for use as a civilian-manned troopship in July 1942. Remaining under the operation of her owners, Agwilines Inc, she began operation on U.S. Army schedules in July 1942, when she sailed from New York to Belfast. On 6 July 1942, along with SS Cathcart, she rescued survivors of the British merchantmen SS Westmoreland, which had been torpedoed by German submarine U-566 220 nautical miles northward of Bermuda (unfortunately, HMS Sumar and USS Gannet (AM-41) had left Bermuda after receipt of the Westmoreland's distress signal on 2 June 1942, and, unaware of the rescue of Westmoreland's crew, fell prey to German submarine U-653 which sank USS Gannet at 0142 Hours on 8 June with the loss of sixteen lives). After her return to New York in August, she made way to Boston from whence she sailed to Saint John, Wabana, Newfoundland; Sydney, Nova Scotia; and Halifax, before returning to New York in October. After first sailing to Boston and Newport, Rhode Island, Henry R. Mallory departed New York as a part of Convoy SC-118 headed for Liverpool via Halifax on 24 January 1943. The crew on board Henry R. Mallory consisted of 9 officers, 68 crewmen, and 34 United States Navy Armed Guard (who manned the 11 guns on deck). Also on board were 383 passengers, consisting of 2 civilians, 136 from the U.S. Army, 72 from the U.S. Marine Corps, and 173 from the U.S. Navy. As the convoy, which consisted of 60 ships and 26 escorts, sailed near Iceland, a "wolfpack" of Kriegsmarine U-boats attacked the convoy repeatedly over a four-day period. Some 20 U-boats participated, ultimately sinking 12 Allied ships, including Henry R. Mallory; three U-boats were lost. It was at 06:59 on 7 February 1943 when, traveling in station 33 of the convoy, Henry R. Mallory was hit by one torpedo launched from around 600 nautical miles (1,100 km) south-southwest of Iceland. Hit in the number three hold on the starboard side, the ship began settling by the stern and listing to port, and sank at about 07:30. Of Henry R. Mallory's ten lifeboats, only three were successfully launched, holding 175 men. Many other men jumped overboard for rafts in the water. None of the other ships in the convoy were aware of the Mallory's predicament. American destroyer Schenck—searching for survivors from the convoy's sunken rescue ship, SS Toward, sunk three hours earlier, also by U-402—saw lights but was denied permission to investigate. Only when survivors were found by U.S. Coast Guard cutter some four hours later was the fate of Henry R. Mallory made clear. Bibb rescued 205 men, 3 of whom later died. Another Coast Guard cutter, , rescued a further 22, of whom 2 later died. Among the 272 dead were the ship's master, 48 crewmen, 15 armed guards, and 208 passengers.
584,419	Gentle on My Mind	1,168,186,994	1967 song written by John Hartford	[ "1967 singles", "1967 songs", "1968 singles", "1969 singles", "2014 singles", "Alison Krauss songs", "Andy Williams songs", "Aretha Franklin songs", "Burl Ives songs", "Capitol Records singles", "Comedy television theme songs", "Dean Martin songs", "Elvis Presley songs", "Glen Campbell songs", "Grammy Award for Best Ethnic or Traditional Folk Recording", "Grammy Hall of Fame Award recipients", "John Hartford songs", "Music television series theme songs", "Patti Page songs", "Republic Records singles", "Roberto Carlos (singer) songs", "Song recordings produced by Al De Lory", "Song recordings produced by Dann Huff", "The Band Perry songs" ]	"Gentle on My Mind" is a song that was written and originally recorded by John Hartford, and released on his second studio album, Earthwords & Music (1967). Hartford composed the song after watching Doctor Zhivago in 1966, as he was inspired by the film and his own personal experiences. The lyrics describe the reminiscences of lost love of a man as he travels through the country. The following year, Hartford released the song as a single on RCA Records. It then caught the attention of Glen Campbell, who recorded his cover version with a group of session musicians known as the Wrecking Crew. Campbell's cover of "Gentle on My Mind" peaked in the top 30 on Billboard's Hot Country Singles chart. In 1968, between Campbell's and Hartford's recordings, the song earned four Grammy Awards. "Gentle on My Mind" was later covered by several artists, including Dean Martin, Aretha Franklin, Frank Sinatra, Andy Williams and Elvis Presley. It was also translated into other languages. In 2014, a recording of the song by the Band Perry earned a Grammy Award for Best Country Duo/Group Performance. Taking into account all recorded versions of the song, it has become the second-most-played song on the radio in the United States according to BMI. ## Writing and original recording In 1966, John Hartford was living with his wife and son in a trailer in Nashville, Tennessee. One night, the couple saw the film Doctor Zhivago at a local theater. Inspired by the love story depicted in the film between Yuri Zhivago and Lara Antipova, Hartford returned home and composed "Gentle on my Mind" in between 20 and 30 minutes. The story of the song narrates the reminiscences of a drifter of his lost love, while moving through backroads and hobo encampments. Betty Hartford, who later divorced her husband, noted to him the similarity between herself and the song's female character. She questioned John Hartford about the man's negative feelings toward his marriage. Hartford said he likened her to Lara and attributed the man's feelings about being trapped in a relationship to his "artistic license". Hartford defined the finished song as a "word movie" and described his writing process as "thinking in pictures, like paintings using words and sound". In a 1980 interview, Hartford commented he was still unsure of the song's meaning and that its message will be interpreted differently by listeners. Twelve years later, Hartford again attributed his inspiration to start writing the song to Doctor Zhivago, and said the content was a result of his personal experience. Hartford said the song "just came real fast, a blaze, a blur". He described the composition as a banjo tune without a chorus, and with a variety of words he deemed "hard to sing" because it "violated the principles of songwriting". At the time, Hartford worked as a disc jockey on the radio station WSIX and for the publishing company Tompall & the Glaser Brothers. Hartford recorded a demo and delivered it to Chuck Glaser, who took the demo to Chet Atkins of RCA Records. According to Harford, after writing "Gentle on My Mind", he did not intend to record the song himself. Hartford sent the demos of "Gentle on My Mind" and a second song to sell them, but instead the label decided to offer Hartford a recording contract. Atkins then suggested to the songwriter to use "Hartford" instead of his surname "Harford" as an artist name. Hartford recorded "Gentle on my Mind" and its flipside "Washing Machine", both of which were produced by Felton Jarvis. The single was released in May 1967. RCA, however, decided not to promote Hartford's recording because they did not consider it to be a country song. Cashbox listed the single under their "Best Bets"; the magazine forecasted in a review that Hartford could get "heaps of spins" with his "poetic folk-country-flavored ballad". "Gentle on My Mind" peaked at number 60 on Billboard's Hot Country Songs. ## Glen Campbell's recording and success Hartford's recording of "Gentle on my Mind" attracted Glen Campbell's attention after he heard it on the radio and bought the single. He felt the song is "an essay on life" and was "knocked out" by the scenery it describes. At the time, Campbell worked as a studio musician with The Wrecking Crew; he rearranged the song and with the band, he recorded a demo at Capitol Studios. Campbell left the demo tape at the studio for producer Al De Lory, who made slight production arrangements that Capitol Records accepted as a master for the single. Campbell's cover of "Gentle on My Mind" was released with "Just Another Man" on the B-side in June 1967. Upon its release, Billboard predicted the single would reach the Billboard Hot 100 chart. It peaked at number 30 on the magazine's Hot Country Songs, and at number 62 on the Hot 100. The success of the song, which was originally intended for the country music market, helped Campbell cross over to the pop market. After Campbell's success with "By the Time I Get to Phoenix", "Gentle on My Mind" was re-released in 1968. The new release of the single sold more copies than the original release, peaking at number 44 on Billboard's Hot Country Singles, at number 39 on the Billboard Hot 100, and at number 8 on the Easy Listening chart. On the RPM charts in Canada, it peaked at number 20 on the country chart and at number 60 on the RPM 100. That year, "Gentle on My Mind" won the categories for Best Country & Western Song, Best Folk Performance for Hartford's recording; and Best Country & Western Solo Vocal Performance, Male as well as Best Country & Western Recording for Campbell's version at the 10th Annual Grammy Awards. By May 1968, an estimated 50 artists had recorded covers of "Gentle on my Mind", while Campbell's recording had sold 600,000 singles. The song was covered by acts including Frank Sinatra (1968), Patti Page (1968), Dean Martin (1969), Aretha Franklin, (1969) and Elvis Presley (1969). Page's version reached number 7 on Billboard's Easy Listening Chart and number 66 on the Hot 100. Franklin's version was released as the B-side to her single "I Can't See Myself Leaving You"; her version peaked at number 76 on the Billboard Hot 100 and at number 50 on the Billboard Hot Rhythm & Blues Singles chart. Dean Martin's version reached number 2 on the UK Singles chart, number 3 on the Irish Singles chart, and number 9 on Billboard's Easy Listening chart. Hartford's producer on the original recording of "Gentle on My Mind", Felton Jarvis, co-produced Presley's album From Elvis in Memphis (1969) with Chips Moman. The recording of Hartford's song was the last number of Presley's January 14, 1969, session. Following its second take, Presley experienced laryngitis and had to temporarily halt the recording. ### Personnel According to the AFM contract sheet. - Glen Campbell - lead vocals, guitar - James Burton - guitar - Douglas Dillard - banjo - Leon Russell - piano - Joe Osborn - bass guitar - Jim Gordon - drums, maracas ## Legacy Hartford said the success of "Gentle on My Mind" allowed him to become a full-time songwriter without working as a disc jockey. The song's success also caught the attention of Tom Smothers, who in 1968 invited Hartford to become a part of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour on CBS. The same year, Campbell performed "Gentle on My Mind" as the theme song of his own CBS show The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour. In 1970, Claude François covered the song in French under the title "Si Douce A Mon Souvenir". Fourteen years later, Brazilian singer Roberto Carlos covered the song in Portuguese as "Caminhoneiro" ("Trucker"). In 1985, Puerto Rican salsa singer Frankie Ruiz released a Spanish-language version entitled "El Camionero". Hartford donated the manuscript of "Gentle on My Mind" to the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in 1982. By 1984, the song had played on radio over four million times in the United States, and became the best-selling song of Broadcast Music, Inc.'s (BMI) catalog. In 1987, the estimated number of plays grew to 4.4 million and 400 cover versions had been recorded. At the time, Hartford refused the use of the song for commercials and parodies. In 1990, BMI listed Campbell's version of "Gentle on My Mind" as the fourth-most-played song in the history of radio in the US. It appeared at number 71 on Country America magazine's 1992 list of the Top 100 Country Songs of All Time, while BMI placed the version at number 16 on its 1999 list of Top 100 Songs of the Century. By 2001, with six million plays, the song became the second-most-played on the radio in the US, behind the Beatles' "Yesterday". In 2008, the 1967 recording of "Gentle on My Mind" by Glen Campbell on Capitol Records was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. In 2014, the Band Perry recorded a version of the song for the documentary Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me; the cover won the category for Best Country Duo/Group Performance at the 57th Annual Grammy Awards in 2015, and peaked at number 29 on Billboard's Country Airplay and at number 35 on the Hot Country Songs. In August 2017, following Campbell's death, sales of his hit singles increased by 6,000%. The digital downloads figure for "Gentle on My Mind" registered 3,000 and increased the track's total sales at the time to 251,000. ## Accolades ## Charts ### John Hartford ### Glen Campbell ### Other artists
8,322,947	Hope Solo	1,164,887,773	American soccer player (born 1981)	[ "1981 births", "2007 FIFA Women's World Cup players", "2011 FIFA Women's World Cup players", "2015 FIFA Women's World Cup players", "American memoirists", "American people of Italian descent", "American women memoirists", "American women's soccer players", "Association football commentators", "Atlanta Beat (WPS) players", "BBC sports presenters and reporters", "BK Häcken FF players", "Damallsvenskan players", "Division 1 Féminine players", "Expatriate women's footballers in France", "Expatriate women's footballers in Sweden", "FIFA Women's Century Club", "FIFA Women's World Cup-winning players", "Female models from Washington (state)", "Footballers at the 2008 Summer Olympics", "Footballers at the 2012 Summer Olympics", "Footballers at the 2016 Summer Olympics", "Living people", "MagicJack (WPS) players", "Medalists at the 2008 Summer Olympics", "Medalists at the 2012 Summer Olympics", "National Soccer Hall of Fame members", "National Women's Soccer League players", "OL Reign players", "Olympic gold medalists for the United States in soccer", "Olympic soccer players for the United States", "Olympique Lyonnais Féminin players", "Parade High School All-Americans (girls' soccer)", "People from Richland, Washington", "Philadelphia Charge players", "Saint Louis Athletica players", "Seattle Sounders Women players", "Soccer players from Washington (state)", "Sports commentators", "United States women's international soccer players", "Washington Huskies women's soccer players", "Women association football commentators", "Women sports commentators", "Women's Professional Soccer players", "Women's United Soccer Association players", "Women's association football goalkeepers" ]	Hope Amelia Stevens (née Solo; born July 30, 1981) is an American former football goalkeeper. She was a goalkeeper for the United States women's national soccer team from 2000 to 2016, and is a World Cup champion and two-time Olympic gold medalist. After playing at the collegiate level for the University of Washington, she played professionally for the Philadelphia Charge in the Women's United Soccer Association (WUSA). When the WUSA folded after her first season, she traveled to Europe to play for the top division leagues in Sweden and France. From 2009 to 2011, she played in the Women's Professional Soccer (WPS) for Saint Louis Athletica, Atlanta Beat and magicJack. After the WPS ceased operations in early 2012, she played for the Seattle Sounders in the W-League. She most recently played for Seattle Reign FC in the National Women's Soccer League, the top division of women's soccer in the United States. Solo is regarded as one of the top female goalkeepers of all time and currently holds the U.S. record for most career clean sheets. She was the starting goalkeeper for the majority of the 2007 FIFA Women's World Cup and helped lead the U.S. national team to the semifinals having given up only two goals in four games, including three consecutive shutouts. After a controversial move made by head coach Greg Ryan to bench Solo in favor of veteran goalkeeper Briana Scurry for the semifinal, in which the United States was defeated 4–0 by Brazil, Solo made headlines with post-game remarks that resulted in many teammates shunning her. She later rebounded to help the United States win gold medals at the 2008 and 2012 Summer Olympics. During the 2011 FIFA Women's World Cup, her exceptional skill was highlighted especially during a quarter-final match against Brazil, which the U.S. won on penalty kicks. Although the team lost to Japan in a match that ended in penalties, Solo received the Golden Glove award for best goalkeeper as well as the Bronze Ball award for her overall performance at the tournament. Following her performance at the 2011 World Cup, Solo participated in the television show Dancing with the Stars and posed for various magazines, most notably the "Body Issue" of ESPN The Magazine. After the 2012 London Olympics, where she received her second Olympic gold medal, she published her bestselling autobiography Solo: A Memoir of Hope. As the starting goalkeeper at the 2015 FIFA Women's World Cup, Solo helped the U.S. win the national team's third World Cup championship since 1991. The final against Japan was the most-watched televised soccer game ever in the United States. As of August 6, 2016, Solo holds several U.S. goalkeeper records including appearances (202), starts (190), wins (153), shutouts (102), wins in a season (26), consecutive minutes played (1,256), and longest undefeated streak (55 games). ## Early life Solo was born in Richland, Washington on July 30, 1981, to Judy Lynn (née Shaw) and Jeffrey Solo. Her father, an Italian-American Vietnam War veteran, who was in and out of her life as a child and teenager, taught her how to play soccer at a young age. When Solo was seven, her father picked her and her brother Marcus up to go to a baseball game in the nearby city of Yakima, but ended up driving over three hours west to Seattle, where they stayed for several days at a hotel. Solo described how it seemed like a vacation at first, but soon realized it was not. Police later found them at a downtown bank and arrested Jeffrey for alleged kidnapping. Although her parents had divorced when she was six and she lived with her mother, Solo maintained a close relationship with her father after reconnecting with him during her college years at the University of Washington. He continued to be a major influence in her life until his death of a heart attack in June 2007. As a forward at Richland High School, Solo scored 109 goals, leading her team to three consecutive league titles from 1996 to 1998 and a state championship during her senior year. She was twice named a Parade All American. Solo also played club soccer for the Three Rivers Soccer Club in the Tri-Cities. ### Washington Huskies, 1999–2002 After being heavily recruited by several colleges around the country, Solo attended the University of Washington from 1999 to 2002 where she majored in speech communications. With the Huskies, she switched permanently to goalkeeper under the lead of head coach Lesle Gallimore and goalkeeper coach and former national team player, Amy Griffin. Solo described the transition in her memoir, "In high school, I had been the forward who won games. It was a huge mental adjustment to learn that my job was to save games. To anticipate what was needed. Before, I would stand in goal, the ball would come toward me, and I'd use my athletic ability to make the save. But thanks to Amy's tutelage and my time with the national team, I was becoming a much better tactical goalkeeper. I learned how to read my opponents' runs toward goal, how to position my defenders, how to see the angles... The intellectual side also made goalkeeping so much more interesting. It wasn't just ninety minutes of waiting for my defense to make a mistake. It was ninety minutes of tactics and strategy. The personality traits that had been shaped by my childhood—resilience and toughness—were assets at the position." Solo became the top goalkeeper in Pac-10 history and finished her collegiate career as Washington's all-time leader in shutouts (18), saves (325) and goals against average (GAA) (1.02). She was a four-time All-Pac-10 selection and was named an NSCAA All-American as a sophomore, junior and senior. During her sophomore year, Solo was named Pac-10 Player of the Year becoming the first Washingtonian and first goalkeeper ever to receive the award. As a senior, she was the only goalkeeper nominated for the Hermann Trophy. ## Club career ### WUSA and European professional leagues, 2003–05 Following her college career, Solo was selected in the first round (fourth overall) of the 2003 WUSA Draft by the Philadelphia Charge. She spent most of her first professional season on the bench playing in eight games. Solo started the last three games of the season and earned her first professional shutout against the Atlanta Beat. She also shut out eventual league champions, the Washington Freedom led by top scorers, Mia Hamm and Abby Wambach. After the WUSA folded following the 2003 season just six days before the 2003 FIFA Women's World Cup, Solo moved to Göteborg, Sweden in February 2004 to play for Kopparbergs/Göteborg FC in the Swedish Premier Division, the top division of women's soccer in Sweden. For ten months, she played in two games a week, making 19 appearances in goal for Göteborg in 2004. In 2005, she played for Olympique Lyonnais in the French First Division. She made seven appearances for the French club. Solo said of her experience in Europe, "I played in Europe and it was a great experience, not just because of my teammates and the coaches we had, but from the fans and the city itself – I played in Gothenburg and I played in Lyon and soccer was everywhere. At that time in my life, it really jump-started my career and really helped me find myself as a person and player." ### The WPS years, 2009–11 #### Saint Louis Athletica On September 16, 2008, Solo was one of three national team players allocated to the Saint Louis Athletica in the WPS as part of the 2008 WPS Player Allocation, with the new league slated to begin play in April 2009. Solo let in six goals in the first four games as Athletica got off to a very slow 0–2–2 start in their first season. She conceded eight goals in her next 13 games and finished the season with eight shutouts, helping lead the Athletica from the bottom of the standings to finish second place and secure a playoff spot. After the 2009 season, Solo was named the WPS Goalkeeper of the Year. She also became the first goalkeeper to be named U.S. Soccer Female Athlete of the Year, the highest honor awarded to a soccer player in the United States. #### Atlanta Beat In May 2010, the Saint Louis Athletica folded and Solo signed with WPS expansion team, Atlanta Beat, along with her St. Louis teammates, Tina Ellertson and Eniola Aluko. As her previous jersey number was taken (1), she wore 78 for the Beat. Solo's comments on social networking website Twitter led to two separate controversies after she accused Boston Breakers supporters of offensive chanting and racist remarks toward a teammate, then questioned the integrity of match officials and the league itself following the Beat's 1–0 defeat to Washington Freedom. The second outburst resulted in a \$2,500 fine and one-game suspension. Solo played in 22 WPS matches in 2010 for both the Athletica and the Beat and was the league-leader in saves with 104. The two-time WPS All-Star also ranked among the top three in shutouts (6), wins (6), and goals against average (1.64). After the end of the 2010 season, Solo underwent surgery on her right shoulder on September 22. "These next two years are huge for the national team with the World Cup and Olympics on the horizon and I wanted to make sure that I would be giving my team and my country my best on the field," Solo said of the surgery. "I've been having some painful issues with the shoulder for a while and for a goalkeeper it's been difficult physically and mentally to play with this kind of an injury, so it was time to get it taken care of." #### magicJack Ahead of the 2011 Women's Professional Soccer season, Solo signed for magicJack, formerly the Washington Freedom under new ownership. Between her shoulder surgery recovery, national team commitments and preparation for the 2011 FIFA Women's World Cup, Solo missed a significant part of the season. She made four appearances for the club, tallying a total of 360 minutes. After the season ended, the club lost its franchise on October 25, 2011. The league later suspended operations in early 2012 because of legal and financial difficulties. ### Seattle Sounders Women, 2012 On February 14, 2012, it was announced that Solo had signed with the Seattle Sounders Women. Joining the club the same year were national teammates Alex Morgan, Megan Rapinoe, and Sydney Leroux. Sounders Women general manager, Amy Carnell, said of the signing, "Hope is undoubtedly the best women's keeper in the game today. Her signing represents the caliber player Sounders Women's fans can expect in 2012. As the landscape of women's soccer continues to evolve, we realize the unique opportunity before us." Because of national team commitments and preparation for the 2012 Summer Olympics, Solo made three appearances for the club, tallying a total of 261 minutes. Her goals against average was 0.344, she made five saves and had one shutout. With the addition of Solo and her national team teammates, the Sounders sold out nine of their ten home matches at Starfire Stadium (capacity: 4,500). The average attendance during league matches was four times higher than the second most attended team in the league. ### NWSL: a new era, 2013–2016 #### Seattle Reign FC On January 19, 2013, it was announced that Solo was one of three members from the United States national team, along with Megan Rapinoe and Amy Rodriguez, allocated to the Seattle Reign FC for the inaugural season of the National Women's Soccer League, as part of the NWSL Player Allocation. Two months later, it was reported that she was undergoing wrist surgery and would miss about half the season because of recovery. Joining news that Amy Rodriguez would be out for the season because of pregnancy and Megan Rapinoe would be returning mid-season after a six-month stint for Olympique Lyonnais, the Reign faced a tough first half of the season and went 0–9–1 in their first ten games. With the return of Solo, Rapinoe, and some additional lineup changes made during the early summer, the Reign turned their regular season record around and finished the season in seventh place with a 5–14–3 record. Solo started in all 14 matches in which she played with a 1.357 goals against average. She made 81 saves and tallied 1,260 minutes in goal. In October 2013 Solo was linked with a transfer to English club Manchester City. Despite the relatively high salary reportedly offered by Manchester, Reign FC coach Laura Harvey expected Solo to return to the NWSL for 2014, to safeguard her place in the national team. Solo returned to the Reign for the 2014 season. The team set a league record unbeaten streak of 16 games during the first part of the season. During the 16 game stretch, the Reign compiled a 13–0–3 record. The Reign finished first in the regular season clinching the NWSL Shield for the first time. After defeating the Washington Spirit 2–1 in the playoff semi-finals, the Reign were defeated 2–1 by FC Kansas City during the championship final. Following the regular season, Solo and Reign defenders Lauren Barnes and Stephanie Cox were named to the Second XI team. Solo finished the 2014 season with 65 saves in 20 games played and a .900 goals against average. Solo made eight appearances for Seattle during the 2016 season before joining the national team at the 2016 Rio Olympics. After US Soccer suspended Solo and terminated her national team contract in August 2016 for saying that the Sweden women's national football team "played like cowards," she was granted "personal leave" by the Reign for the remainder of the NWSL season. She finished the season with a 0.63 GAA and 81% save percentage, including five clean sheets. ## International career Solo played for U.S. junior national soccer teams before joining the senior U.S. national team in 2000. Her senior debut came in an 8–0 win over Iceland at Davidson, North Carolina, in April 2000. In 2004, Solo joined the national team at the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens as an alternate behind primary goalkeeper Briana Scurry and backup Kristin Luckenbill. Solo has been the team's first choice goalkeeper since 2005. She holds the national team record for longest undefeated streak as a goalkeeper with 55 games from March 7, 2002, to July 16, 2008. ### 2007 FIFA Women's World Cup Solo was the starting goalkeeper for the United States in the 2007 FIFA Women's World Cup, surrendering two goals in four games, including consecutive shutouts of Sweden, Nigeria and England. Before the semifinal match against Brazil, U.S. coach Greg Ryan benched Solo in favor of 36-year-old veteran keeper Briana Scurry, who had a strong history of performance against the Brazilians but had not played a complete game in three months. The U.S. lost to Brazil 4–0, ending a 51–game (regulation-time) undefeated streak. The team played much of the match with only 10 players after midfielder Shannon Boxx was disqualified after receiving two yellow cards in the first half. #### Post-2007 World Cup fallout Following the match, Solo criticized Ryan's decision: "It was the wrong decision, and I think anybody that knows anything about the game knows that. There's no doubt in my mind I would have made those saves. And the fact of the matter is it's not 2004 anymore. It's not 2004. And it's 2007, and I think you have to live in the present. And you can't live by big names. You can't live in the past. It doesn't matter what somebody did in an Olympic gold medal game in the Olympics three years ago. Now is what matters, and that's what I think." Many viewed her comments as critical of Scurry's performance, although Solo released an apologetic statement the following day stating that criticism was not her intent. On September 29, 2007, Ryan announced that Solo was no longer with the team and would not play in the third-place match against Norway the following day. Team captain Kristine Lilly stated that the decision regarding Solo was made by the team as a group. The U.S. defeated Norway 4–1. Solo was named to the national team roster for the post-World Cup tour but did not attend the workout ahead of the first game against Mexico. Although the players' contract with the federation stipulated that anyone on the World Cup roster had the right to play in the tour, she did not play in any of the three games against Mexico and was replaced by Briana Scurry for the first and third matches, and Nicole Barnhart for the second. The third match against Mexico, on October 20, 2007, marked the end of the team's 2007 season. The team regrouped in January 2008 to begin preparations for the 2008 Summer Olympics. Ryan left the team after his contract was not renewed in December 2007. ### 2008 Summer Olympics On June 23, 2008, Solo was announced as the starting goalkeeper for the U.S. team at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. In a reversal of roles from the 2004 Olympics, Briana Scurry did not make the team, although she was named an alternate. On August 21, the U.S. women's team won the gold medal by defeating Brazil 1–0 in extra time. After the team won gold, Solo appeared on the Today show. In a 2012 article, she revealed that she was drunk while on the show: "When we were done partying, we got out of our dresses, got back into our stadium coats and, at 7 a.m. with no sleep, went on the Today show drunk." ### 2011 FIFA Women's World Cup Despite missing much of the qualifying campaign with a shoulder injury, Solo was named to the U.S. roster for the 2011 FIFA Women's World Cup in Germany. After keeping clean sheets in group C wins over North Korea and Colombia, Solo conceded two goals in the 2–1 loss to Sweden, which consigned the Americans to second place in the group and a quarterfinal meeting with Brazil. The quarterfinal match between the U.S. and Brazil was sent into a penalty shootout after U.S. forward Abby Wambach tied the game at 2–2 at the end of extra time. Solo saved Brazil's third penalty kick, helping the U.S. secure a semifinal spot against France. After the quarterfinal victory, Solo commented on her teammates: "Even when we were a player down and a goal behind in extra time, you sensed that something was going to happen", and added that "[the] team kept fighting. You can't teach that. It's a feeling – and we play with that feeling." Solo became the twenty-seventh American woman and second goalkeeper to reach 100 caps with her start in the 3–1 semifinal win over France. Talking to the media after the match, Solo reflected upon the tournament so far, "It was a hard-fought road [...] It hasn't been easy, but this is where we expected to be. We came this far, we better go all the way." In the final, the U.S. team lost 3–1 in a penalty shootout to Japan, after twice taking the lead in an eventual 2–2 draw. Solo expressed admiration for the Japanese team and offered her congratulations. Solo won the Golden Glove award for best goalkeeper, and the Bronze Ball award for her overall performance. She was also featured in the "All-star" team of the tournament. ### 2012 Summer Olympics Preceding the Summer Olympics, Solo received a public warning from the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) after a June 15 urine test detected the banned substance canrenone. Solo claimed that she had been prescribed a premenstrual medication and was unaware that it contained banned substances. The USADA confirmed her claim and she was cleared with a public warning. The positive test did not require Solo to withdraw from any pre-Olympic matches. Trailing France in the opening match, Solo sent a free kick to Alex Morgan, who then scored to spark a 4–2 comeback victory. On August 9, Solo won her second Olympic gold medal with a 2–1 defeat of Japan in the final match. Solo made many saves, including an 82nd-minute save of a shot by Mana Iwabuchi that could have tied the match. Solo recorded three shutouts: two against Colombia and North Korea in the group stage and one against New Zealand in the quarterfinal. She conceded six goals over the course of the tournament, three of which were scored by Christine Sinclair in the semifinal match, a 4–3 extra-time win against Canada. Along with defenders Christie Rampone and Kelley O'Hara, Solo was one of three players on the team who played all 570 minutes during the team's six matches. ### 2013–2014 In March 2013, Solo underwent surgery to repair a persistent injury in her left wrist and did not play for approximately three months. She returned to the national team in June. The team finished 2013 undefeated in 16 games, with 13 wins. On June 14, 2014, Solo tied the U.S. record for career shutouts with 71 after the team defeated France 1–0 during a friendly match in Tampa, Florida. The record had been previously set by Briana Scurry. On September 13, she set a new record with her 72nd shutout in a friendly match against Mexico, an 8–0 win for the U.S. On January 21, 2015, Solo was suspended by the national team for 30 days following an undisclosed incident at a training camp. ### 2015 FIFA Women's World Cup In April 2015, Solo was named to the U.S. roster for the 2015 FIFA Women's World Cup in Canada by head coach Jill Ellis. Solo started and played all possible minutes (630) in all seven of the team's matches. The U.S. won the tournament, with record-breaking television viewership that topped 750 million television viewers. After surrendering a goal in the 27th minute of the team's first group-stage match against Australia, Solo made three game-saving saves. She had a 540-minute shutout streak, the second longest in tournament history, and allowed only three goals throughout the tournament. During the semi-final match against top-ranked Germany, she used stalling tactics to try to put the tournament's high scorer, Célia Šašić, off her rhythm at a penalty kick. Šašić missed the penalty kick, which kept the game scoreless. This marked the first time a German team, men's or women's, missed a penalty in a World Cup. She ended the tournament with 177 international caps and received the Golden Glove trophy as the best goalkeeper. ### 2016: 100th shutout On July 9, 2016, Solo earned her 100th international shutout, 150th career win and 197th cap in a friendly game against South Africa at Soldier Field in Chicago. This made Solo the first female goalkeeper to achieve 100 shutouts in international competition. ### 2016 Rio Olympics On the occasion of her 200th cap, Solo made "several fine saves" as the United States beat France 1–0 following their opening 2–0 win over New Zealand. In the final group fixture against Colombia, Solo made two errors and the game resulted in a 2–2 draw. During the matches, Solo had been jeered by the Brazilian crowds, who chanted "Zika" when she touched the ball in response to her pre-tournament social-media post with various anti-mosquito products in relation to 2015–16 Zika virus epidemic. Solo attracted more controversy in the United States' quarterfinal defeat by Sweden. During the penalty shootout, she caused an interruption of several minutes when changing her gloves before Sweden's final kick, in an apparent act of gamesmanship. Lisa Dahlkvist laughed at Solo's antics before converting the penalty to eliminate the United States. Following the match, Solo called her opponents "a bunch of cowards" in reference to their defensive tactics. The International Olympic Committee called Solo's comments "disappointing" but said that she was unlikely to face formal disciplinary action, adding "People are free to say those things. We wouldn't stop their right to express themselves, within boundaries, obviously." Swedish coach Pia Sundhage was more blunt in her assessment, saying: "I don't give a crap. I'm going to Rio, she's going home." She later said, "I think she was just stressed, and that she did not really mean it." Swedish players Lotta Schelin, Lisa Dahlkvist and Kosovare Asllani voiced their empathy for Solo, dismissing her comments as having been said during the heat of the moment. `On August 24, 2016, U.S. Soccer suspended Solo for six months and terminated her national team contract, her second such suspension. The governing body said that Solo's previous misconduct had influenced its decision. Solo reacted angrily, saying that her comments had been used as a pretext to force her out because of her prominent role in the national team's campaign for equal pay. Teammate Megan Rapinoe speculated that Solo's termination was "probably some legal strategy" on the part of U.S. Soccer. In announcing a legal challenge to U.S. Soccer's action, the players' lawyer Rich Nichols termed it "excessive, unprecedented, disproportionate, and a violation of Ms. Solo's First Amendment rights."` ## Honors and awards ### High school - Parade Magazine All-American: 1997, 1998 - Washington State Championship: 1998 ### College - NSCAA All-American: 2000, 2001, 2002 - Pac-10 Selection: 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002 ### Club - NWSL Shield: 2014 - WPS Goalkeeper of the Year: 2009 ### International United States - Olympic Gold Medal: 2008, 2012 - CONCACAF Women's Olympic Qualifying Tournament: 2008, 2012, 2016 - FIFA Women's World Cup Champion: 2015 Runner-up: 2011 - Algarve Cup: 2005, 2007, 2008, 2010, 2011, 2013, 2015 - SheBelieves Cup: 2016 - Four Nations Tournament: 2006, 2007, 2008 - CONCACAF Women's Championship: 2006, 2014 ### Individual - U.S. Soccer Female Athlete of the Year: 2009 - FIFA Women's World Cup Golden Glove: 2011, 2015 - FIFA Women's World Cup Bronze ball: 2011 - FIFA Women's World Cup All-Star Team: 2011, 2015 - CONCACAF Women's Championship Golden Glove: 2014 - CONCACAF Women's Goalkeeper of the Year: 2015 - SheBelieves Cup Golden Glove: 2016 - FIFPro: FIFA FIFPro World XI 2015 2016 - IFFHS World's Best Woman Goalkeeper: 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 - NWSL Second XI: 2014 - IFFHS World's Woman Team of the Decade 2011–2020 - IFFHS CONCACAF Woman Team of the Decade 2011–2020 ### Other - Do Something Award – Athlete: 2012 - Phoenix Mercury Woman of Inspiration: 2012 - Hall of Game She's Got Game Award: 2012 - Sports Spectacular Female Athlete of the Year: 2013 ## Personal life Solo is married to former American football player Jerramy Stevens. They have been together since mid-August 2012 when she returned from the Olympics. On November 12, 2012, Stevens was arrested on investigation of assault following an altercation that left Solo injured. The following day, Stevens was released after a judge determined that insufficient evidence existed to hold him. The couple were wed the next day. In December 2019, Solo announced that she and Stevens were expecting twins. Vittorio Genghis and Lozen Orianna Judith Stevens were born on March 4, 2020. In 2014, Solo was one of the victims of the iCloud leaks of celebrity photos, during which several nude pictures of her were leaked online. She expressed solidarity with the other women affected and criticized the perpetrators, "This act goes beyond the bounds of human decency". ### Arrests On June 21, 2014, Solo was arrested and charged with two misdemeanor counts of assault in the fourth degree, one against her half-sister and the other against her nephew. She was booked under her married name of Hope Amelia Stevens. After pleading not guilty, she was released the following day. Her trial was scheduled for November 4, 2014, but it was delayed until January 20, 2015. On December 30, 2014, the judge ordered more depositions from the defendants and delayed a decision on whether charges against Solo would be dropped until January 6, 2015. Following her arrest, Solo missed one game for the Reign and the NWSL allowed her to continue playing through the end of the 2014 season. There was some debate in the media about a perceived double standard after pro football players Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson had been suspended by the National Football League. Rice was shown in a video assaulting his wife in a hotel elevator and Peterson was indicted by a grand jury for child abuse. Senator Richard Blumenthal sent a sternly worded letter to U.S. Soccer president Sunil Gulati admonishing the organization for allowing Solo to remain on the World Cup roster and accusing them of inadequately addressing the charges of domestic violence. On January 13, 2015, the judge dismissed the charges against Solo based on a lack of cooperation from both alleged victims. Solo claimed that she had defended herself from an attack by her nephew. However, prosecutors filed an appeal with the Superior Court of Washington. In October 2015, the prosecution prevailed in the Superior Court and the charges were reinstated. In June 2016, the state appeals court denied Solo's petition to review the case. On May 24, 2018, the city of Kirkland dismissed all domestic violence charges against her. Attorney Melissa Osman, who represents the city, wrote in court documents that the circumstances of the case were "unlikely to recur," and prosecution witnesses did not wish to testify. On January 19, 2015, Solo's husband Jerramy Stevens was arrested in Manhattan Beach, California for suspicion of DUI while he had been driving the U.S. Soccer team van. Stevens refused a blood or breathalyzer test, so officers obtained a search warrant to draw a blood sample, which determined that his blood-alcohol concentration was at least 0.15%.As a result, Solo was suspended for 30 days by the team for showing poor judgment in entering the car and arguing with the police. In May, Stevens was sentenced to 30 days in jail and four years of probation. The judge also mandated a two-year outpatient alcohol program. On March 31, 2022, Solo was arrested for driving while intoxicated, resisting arrest and misdemeanor child abuse. Her two-year-old twins were in her car when she was arrested in a Walmart parking lot in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Solo pleaded guilty to driving while intoxicated, and charges for resisting arrest and child abuse were dismissed. ### Endorsements Solo has signed endorsement deals with Seiko, Simple Skincare, Nike, BlackBerry, Ubisoft, Electronic Arts and Gatorade. In July 2011, she signed a one-year endorsement deal with Bank of America. In September 2011, she starred in an EA Sports television commercial with professional basketball player Steve Nash, promoting FIFA 12. That same month, she costarred with national teammate Alex Morgan in a television commercial promoting ESPN's SportsCenter. In 2014, she was featured in a promotional piece for Western Union. Solo signed with LX Ventures, Inc. and Mobio as a "social media influencer" in March 2014. In June 2016, she partnered with Organically Raw to promote its Shanti Bar line of energy and protein bars. ### Philanthropy Solo is a representative of the Women's Sports Foundation, an organization founded by Billie Jean King that is dedicated to "advancing the lives of girls and women through sports and physical activity." She has donated her time and money to the Boys and Girls Club and has appeared at numerous charity events. In August 2011, she joined teammates Alex Morgan and Abby Wambach in a Bank of America charitable campaign at the Chicago Marathon, with \$5,000 donated to the Seattle Humane Society on her behalf. In 2012, Solo was one of 15 professional athletes including Shaun Phillips, Tim Lincecum, Ray Rice who participated in Popchips' Game Changers program. She appeared at several charity events and money was donated to a local charity that she had selected. ## In popular culture ### Television and film In 2011, Solo was a contestant on the 13th season of the Dancing with the Stars television series. Her partner was Maksim Chmerkovskiy and they were eliminated in the semifinal round, placing fourth overall in the competition. She has made appearances on The Late Show with David Letterman, Piers Morgan Tonight, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, Chelsea Lately, and Whitney. Solo was the focus of an ESPN E:60 episode in 2012. During her interview by Jeremy Schaap, she told of her experience at the 2007 World Cup as well as her childhood. In 2013, she was featured in the PBS documentary, Makers: Women Who Make America and ESPN documentary series, Nine for IX. The Nine for IX documentary Branded, in which Solo appeared, focused on the marketing of female professional athletes and the double standard that they often face with more value placed on beauty rather than on their athletic excellence. Branded received the highest viewership of all of the documentaries in the series. In 2016, Solo starred with teammates Megan Rapinoe and Crystal Dunn in a docu-series called Keeping Score broadcast by Fullscreen. The episodes followed the athletes as they prepared for the 2016 Rio Olympics and addressed issues such as equal pay and racism. The season's final episode showed her reaction after learning that she had been suspended from the national team. In February 2017, Solo signed to serve as host for the sports medical television series The Cutting Edge. The same month, she was featured on 60 Minutes Sports. In June 2017 Solo appeared alongside Eric Cantona in a whimsical Eurosport promo segment in which she was presented as the network's "Commissioner of Women's Football." Solo worked for the BBC as a pundit at the 2019 FIFA Women's World Cup. ### Magazines Solo has been featured on the covers of Fitness, Sports Illustrated, Newsweek, TV Guide, Seattle Metropolitan Magazine, and Vogue. In 2011, she appeared nude in The Body Issue of ESPN The Magazine. Of the experience, she said, "I'm an athlete—that's all I am. If a sex symbol is now a top female athlete, I think that's pretty amazing and it shows how far our country has come from the stick-thin models, from what you see in most magazines." ### Autobiography On August 14, 2012, after the London Olympics, Solo released her autobiography Solo: A Memoir of Hope co-authored with sports columnist and commentator Ann Killion and published by HarperCollins. In her book, she provided her accounts of incidents with former U.S. national coach Greg Ryan, and her Dancing with the Stars partner Maksim Chmerkovskiy. She recounted her integration into the U.S. team with established players such as Mia Hamm, Brandi Chastain and Julie Foudy. Solo also revealed details of her early life. The autobiography debuted at number three on The New York Times Best Seller list in the hardcover non-fiction category—the highest ever for a book about soccer. ### Video games Solo is featured along with her national teammates in the EA Sports FIFA video game series, starting with FIFA 16, the first time in which women players were included in the game. In September 2015, she was ranked by EA Sports as the \#8 women's player in the game. ### Tickertape parade and White House honor Following the United States' win at the 2015 FIFA Women's World Cup, Solo and her teammates became the first women's sports team to be honored with a tickertape parade in New York City. Each player received a key to the city from Mayor Bill de Blasio. In October of the same year, the team was honored by President Barack Obama at the White House. ## See also - List of FIFA Women's World Cup winning players - FIFA Women's World Cup awards - List of Olympic medalists in football - List of women's footballers with 100 or more caps - List of University of Washington alumni - List of sportswomen
30,986,077	Loser like Me (song)	1,137,358,005	2011 single by the cast of Glee	[ "2011 singles", "2011 songs", "Dance-pop songs", "Songs from television series", "Songs written by Adam Anders", "Songs written by Max Martin", "Songs written by Peer Åström", "Songs written by Savan Kotecha", "Songs written by Shellback (record producer)" ]	"Loser like Me" is an original song performed by the cast of American television series Glee, taken from their sixth soundtrack album, Glee: The Music, Volume 5. The song was written and produced by Adam Anders, Max Martin, and Peer Åström, and Shellback, with additional songwriting credit from Savan Kotecha. The song, with another track "Get It Right", were the first two original songs to be featured on the show. The song is their first official single, being sent to US radio on March 1, 2011. In order for the song to have radio appeal, Anders recruited Martin to produce "Loser like Me" while he was in the United States working on Britney Spears' Femme Fatale. Lea Michele and Cory Monteith front the song, with Michele providing lead vocals in the chorus and a verse, and Monteith having a verse. Other cast members provide vocals in the chorus and in a rap breakdown. Naya Rivera and Heather Morris have some spoken words and some solo work during the chorus. Musically, the song is a dance-pop song, and it features a "pop funk" guitar. The production drew comparisons to similar Max Martin productions released at the time, notably Pink's "Raise Your Glass" (2010). Lyrically, it follows in the footsteps of previous self-empowerment anthems released around the same time, with the incorporation of lines about revenge fantasies. Critics generally praised the song in Glee's first step at original music, including its production, lyrics, and the vocals of Lea Michele. However, common criticisms were that the song sounded like a cover of another song, and that it would have been better suited for other artists Martin usually works with, such as Pink or Avril Lavigne. The song debuted at number six on the US Billboard Hot 100 and became the cast's third top-ten hit to date. It reached number thirty-six on the US Adult Pop Songs chart, becoming their first song other than a Christmas song to appear on an airplay chart. Internationally, it reached the top thirty in at least five other markets. The song's performance was featured in the Glee episode "Original Song" which first aired on March 15, 2011, and included choreography and the group throwing confetti from slushie cups at the audience. The song was redone by Jenna Ushkowitz, Kevin McHale, Darren Criss and Chord Overstreet in the second part of Glee's two-part 100th episode, "New Directions", which aired on March 25, 2014. ## Background On February 23, 2011, it was announced that Glee, for the first time, would feature two original songs, entitled "Loser like Me" and "Get It Right" on their March 15, 2011 episode. The series' music producer, Adam Anders, called the song a "Gleek anthem," and it was "a very uptempo, kind-of-summery hit". It was also revealed that pop music producer, Max Martin, known for his work with Britney Spears, among other singers, would produce "Loser like Me". Tim Stack of Entertainment Weekly called this a "major pop music coup" by Glee. Anders also went on to comment, "The thing about Max is that he's a huge fan of pop culture and he just loved the idea of being part of something that's such a cultural phenomenon. So it was actually not hard to convince him at all. He was all about it." According to Anders, the Swedish-based Martin was in the United States at the time working on Spears' then-new record, and then was "exposed to exactly how enormous [Glee] is". According to the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers database, co-writers on the song include Anders, Peer Åström, Savan Kotecha, and Johan Schuster. "Loser like Me" and "Get It Right" both premiered on On Air with Ryan Seacrest on February 25, 2011, and were performed in the episode "Original Song", on March 15, 2011. The song was also released on iTunes in the United States on March 15, 2011. ### Radio impact "Loser like Me" became the first radio single for Glee, and was sent to radio on March 1, 2011 for mainstream and Hot AC stations. Pete Cosenza, senior vice president of promotion and adult formats for Columbia Records told Billboard, > We've promoted Glee music to radio for the past couple of years and week-by-week, programmers have embraced the show and its music more and more. (Adult radio) has created weekly, and, in some cases, daily, features, and played snippets of songs. Now, more have put "Loser like Me" into regular rotation. Glee is one of the biggest shows on television and it's a music show. What a win for us and radio. Barb Richards, director of music for WAJI said that the cast's introduction of new music prompted the station to finally add music from the cast. Richards referenced the 21.9 million downloads and 5.2 million albums sold since the series since its May 2009 premiere, but commented, "Still, I believe that people want to hear originals over remakes, so up until the 'Glee' cast's original music it didn't make sense for us to play each latest cover, other than to spotlight it the day of the show." However, Richards complimented the original "Loser like Me" saying its lyrics would "resonate with kids and parents" and said that she liked it when she first heard it and when she saw it on the show. She also commented that it "is good on its own, and having the Glee name on it gives it a leg up". Dave McKay, program director at WPST also echoed Richards' sentiments that the Glee sales were reason to add them to airplay, adding "Not many artists or songs enjoy the type of exposure that 'Glee' provides. Plus, the audience that watches the show is the audience we target, so the fit seems perfect [...] since 'Glee' music sells, there is definitely an appetite for it." Responding to the song being an original as opposed to their traditional covers, McKay said, "If 'Loser Like Me' were a bad song, then it wouldn't matter whether it was original or a cover: we wouldn't be playing it. That the song is good, and that it has the 'Glee' reach, makes it an easy song to play." Keith Kennedy, program director at WKDD said the single made him ponder why they haven't played Glee songs prior to "Loser Like Me". Kennedy said, "How many times have you heard radio programmers claim that they use sales numbers to shape their stations' playlists? Look at iTunes every Wednesday: Glee often dominates the top 10." Kennedy's station, WKDD, holds a "Glee O'clock" segment daily and he said "While some of the remakes have leaned toward show tunes, several probably should have received more airplay." ## Composition "Loser like Me" is a song that features "pop-funk chicken-scratch guitars," and according to Jody Rosen of Rolling Stone, a hopped-up beat. The song is fronted by Lea Michele singing lead on the chorus and a verse, with Cory Monteith providing an additional verse. Other Glee cast members back the two up the chorus and a rap breakdown. It bears resemblance to then-recent Max Martin-produced singles, particularly "Raise Your Glass", which contains a similar guitar-intro. Robert Copsey of Digital Spy even called "Loser Like Me" a sequel to "Raise Your Glass". After the guitar riffs, Michele sings about becoming a future superstar, "Yeah, you may think that I'm a zero/ But hey, everyone you wanna be/ Probably started off like me". Jason Lipshutz of Billboard said "Loser Like Me" is "a sunny pop track that finds Lea Michele and Cory Monteith railing against conformity and celebrating their individuality in their verses". Other cast member lyrics include the lyric "You may think I'm a freak show", responded to by Naya Rivera with the spoken "I don't care". The song features self-empowerment lyrics which revolve around revenge fantasies, such as in Monteith's lines - "I could be a superstar / I'll see you when you wash my car". According to Melinda Newman of HitFix the song is about "being a loser now, but turning in to a winner now who never, ever looks back". Aly Semigran of MTV News said the lyrics of the "peppy pop ditty" keep "in tune with the themes of the show". ## Critical reception Jody Rosen of Rolling Stone gave the song four out of five stars, and called it "predictably fizzy" and "fiendishly catchy". Rosen also said that the "lyric, belted out with bright-sided earnestness by Lea Michele and Cory Monteith, distills the show's theme: the mystical power of a good tune and a well-choreographed jazz hands routine to turn geeks into gods". Robert Copsey of Digital Spy wrote, "Max Martin and Shellback chuck the Pinks, Keshas and Katy Perrys into the kitchen sink and add a generous coat of gloss and shimmer (and Auto-Tune) to create what is ultimately an audacious, unabashed and, crucially, authentic pop stomper that remains true to what Glee is all about". Melinda Newman of HitFix liked the song, but said that it could have had "more of an edge". Newman also said, "For any kid who’s ever been bullied or adult who remembers being bullied, it's a bulls-eye." Newman wrote that Michele, who opens the song, had a "classic voice" but it had no "grit" to it, and recommended that Pink cover it. Becky Bain of Idolator said that the song could have been a track for Pink or Avril Lavigne, two common artists who work with Martin. Bain said the song fit in with "Raise Your Glass", and better yet, Kesha's "We R Who We R". Christopher Rosen of Movieline said the song had "total home run potential", and that it "sounds like a blend of Pink, Katy Perry, Avril Lavigne, early Mandy Moore, and Kidz Bop. And that’s a good thing!" On the point that the song sounds like a cover itself, Rosen asked, "who wants to listen to an original song on a television show that relies on covers unless it sounds like a cover itself?" Upon first listen, Kirsten Coachman of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer said that she was "semi-horrified" at the song, but since it was a Max Martin-produced track she "gave it another chance", and commented: "It’s definitely a Max Martin song. It has a good beat and cheesy, yet catchy lyrics." However, Coachman said that the song should have been sung by Mark Salling (Puck) and Jenna Ushkowitz (Tina) rather than Monteith and Michele. Coachman liked the fact that this song and "Get It Right" fit in with the episode, and wrote, "I think both songs are pretty good anthems, and hopefully they do speak to the audience. She stated, however, that she "probably won’t be singing along to them in my car anytime soon". In an album review giving Glee: The Music, Vol. 5 a total of two out of five stars, Andrew Leahey of Allmusic said that the new Glee songs "aren’t good enough to make much of a difference". Brett Berk of Vanity Fair gave the song four stars for its lyrics, but said that the tune "sucked". ## Chart performance On the week ending March 26, 2011, "Loser like Me" debuted at number six on the US Billboard Hot 100 selling 210,000 downloads in its first week. The debut was the cast's largest sales frame since their cover of Katy Perry's "Teenage Dream", which sold 214,000 downloads. The song became their third and last top-ten US hit, following "Teenage Dream", which debuted at number eight, and their first cover, "Don't Stop Believin', which debuted at number four. For the week ending April 9, 2011, the song debuted on the US Adult Pop Songs chart at number thirty-seven. "Loser like Me" became the first entry on the Adult Pop chart, and became their first song to appear on an airplay chart since a string of Christmas songs from Glee: The Music, The Christmas Album charted on the Adult Contemporary Songs chart in 2009 and 2010. "Loser like Me" remains the fourth best-selling recording in the history of the show, having sold 617,000 copies in the United States. Outside the United States, the song appeared on several other charts worldwide, debuting at number nine on the Canadian Hot 100, as well as appearing at number fifteen on the Australian Singles Chart, number twenty-five on the Irish Singles Chart, and number twenty-seven on the UK Singles Chart. ## Glee performance "Original Song" first aired on March 15, 2011, and is the sixteenth episode of the second season of the television series. The episode's plot revolves around McKinley High's glee club, New Directions, decides to prepare original songs for the Regionals competition. In order to do better in the competition, due to Rachel Berry (Lea Michele)'s assistance the group decided to sing original songs. "Loser Like Me" falls in line after Rachel performs her solo ballad "Get It Right". In the performance the Glee club girls donned light-blue dresses tied with black ribbons, black leggings, and black boots. The guys wore black dress shirts and slacks with black ties. During the performance, the group performs sectional and group choreography. Midway, it is received by a standing ovation led by Kurt (Chris Colfer). The performance ends with the club throwing slushie cups filled with confetti at the audience, alluding to the numerous slushie cups taken in the face by them earlier in the show. Bobby Hankinson of Houston Chronicle said "It's fun and summery and it's all capped off with a confetti slushee attack to the crowd. Loved it." Erica Futterman of Rolling Stone wrote, "It's a true anthem, and it ends triumphantly, with the New Directions tossing confetti-filled Slushie cups into the crowd—and then going on to win regionals." Brett Berk of Vanity Fair noted that "the lovable dorks sing about being the lovable dorks we fell in love with (even if we often no longer recognize them as such)". ## Charts ## Certifications ## See also - List of Billboard Hot 100 top 10 singles in 2011
37,281,080	Pulveroboletus ravenelii	1,067,420,325	Species of fungus	[ "Edible fungi", "Fungi described in 1853", "Fungi of Asia", "Fungi of Australia", "Fungi of Central America", "Fungi of Colombia", "Fungi of North America", "Fungi of South America", "Fungi used in traditional Chinese medicine", "Pulveroboletus", "Taxa named by Miles Joseph Berkeley" ]	Pulveroboletus ravenelii, commonly known as Ravenel's bolete or the powdery sulfur bolete, is a species of bolete fungus in the family Boletaceae. Described as new to science in 1853, the widely distributed species is known from Asia, Australia, North America, Central America, and South America. Mycorrhizal with oak, the fungus fruits on the ground singly, scattered, or in groups in woods. Fruit bodies (mushrooms) have convex to flat, yellowish to brownish-red caps up to 10 cm (4 in) in diameter. On the cap underside, the pore surface is bright yellow before turning dingy yellow to grayish brown with age; it stains greenish blue then grayish brown after injury. A cottony and powdery partial veil remains as a ring on the stipe. The mushrooms are edible, and have been used in traditional Chinese medicine and for mushroom dyeing. ## Taxonomy The species was first described as Boletus ravenelii by Miles Joseph Berkeley and Moses Ashley Curtis in 1853. Specimens were sent to them by American botanist Henry William Ravenel, who collected them in South Carolina. They considered the bolete "a most splendid species closely allied to B. hemichrysus, and, like that, remarkable for the pulverulent veil." The specific epithet honors Ravenel. William Alphonso Murrill transferred the fungus to the genus Pulveroboletus in 1909, giving it the name by which it is known today. The mushroom is commonly known as "Ravenel's bolete" or the "powdery sulfur bolete". ## Description The cap is rounded to convex before flattening with age, and attains a diameter of 1–10 cm (0.4–3.9 in). Its margin is curved inward when young, and usually has hanging remnants of the partial veil. The surface is dry and initially coated with fine particles, while later it develops fine hairs or small scales that are pressed down flat on the surface; in maturity the surface usually develops fine cracks or wrinkles. It is bright yellow, later turning to orange-red to brownish red. The flesh is white to pale yellow, and, when cut, will slowly stain pale blue, then dingy yellow to pale brown. Its flesh has been described variously as indistinct, or bitter tasting with an odor of hickory leaves. The pore surface is bright yellow before turning dingy yellow to grayish brown with age. It stains greenish blue then grayish brown after being bruised or injured. The pores, which number about 1–3 per millimeter, are angular to almost circular. The tubes comprising the pore surface are 5–8 cm (2.0–3.1 in) deep. The yellow stem measures 4.5–14.5 cm (1.8–5.7 in) long by 0.6–1.6 cm (0.2–0.6 in) thick, and is roughly equal in width throughout or somewhat thicker near the base. It is solid (i.e., not hollow), and, above the level of the base, the surface is covered with minute hairs pressed flat against the surface. The partial veil, also bright yellow, is cottony and powdery, and remains as a ring on the upper portion of the stem, although in some specimens it merges gradually with the stipe surface and becomes inconspicuous. There is white mycelium at the stipe base. Pulveroboletus ravenelii produces an olive-grey to olive-brown spore print. Spores are elliptical to oval, smooth, and measure 8–10 by 4–5 μm. The hyphal tissue in the hymenophore is inamyloid and bilateral, meaning it diverges downward from the flesh toward the edge of the hymenophore, away from a central strand. The tubes have scattered cystidia on the walls (pleurocystidia) and abundant cystidia on the edges (cheilocystidia). The hyphae in the cap cuticle are arranged as an ixotrichodermium–long and typically multi-celled, with erect hyphae embedded in a gelatinous matrix. Clamp connections are absent from the hyphae. ## Habitat and distribution The fruit bodies of Pulveroboletus ravenelii grow on the ground singly, scattered, or in groups in woods under conifers. Preferred mycorrhizal plant hosts include pine, hemlock, and rhododendron. Fruiting occurs from July to October. In North America, it is distributed from eastern Canada extending south to the Gulf of Mexico, and west to Texas, Michigan, and California. The bolete was reported from a Mexican beech (Fagus mexicana) forest in Hidalgo, Mexico in 2010. It has also been recorded from Costa Rica and Colombia. In Asia, it has been found in Indonesia and China. It has also been recorded from northeast Australia. ## Uses Pulveroboletus ravenelii mushrooms are edible. They have been used in traditional Chinese medicine to treat lumbago, numbed limbs, and as an antihemorrhagic. Bioactive compounds that have been identified from the fruit bodies include pulveravin A, pulveravin B, vulpinic acid, and pulverolide. Mushrooms are also used in mushroom dyeing to produce the colors yellow, gold, greenish yellow, orange, or olive, depending on the mordant used. ## See also - List of North American boletes

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