title: Writing

text: Another featural script is SignWriting, the most popular writing system for many sign languages, where the shapes and movements of the hands and face are represented iconically. Featural scripts are also common in fictional or invented systems, such as J.R.R. Tolkien's Tengwar.


title: Writing

text: A stone slab with 3,000-year-old writing, known as the Cascajal Block, was discovered in the Mexican state of Veracruz and is an example of the oldest script in the Western Hemisphere, preceding the oldest Zapotec writing by approximately 500 years. It is thought to be Olmec.


title: Writing

text: Of several pre-Columbian scripts in Mesoamerica, the one that appears to have been best developed, and the only one to be deciphered, is the Maya script. The earliest inscription identified as Maya dates to the 3rd century BC. Maya writing used logograms complemented by a set of syllabic glyphs, somewhat similar in function to modern Japanese writing.


title: Writing

text: In 2001, archaeologists discovered that there was a civilization in Central Asia that used writing c. 2000 BC. An excavation near Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, revealed an inscription on a piece of stone that was used as a stamp seal.


title: Writing

text: The earliest surviving examples of writing in China—inscriptions on so-called "oracle bones", tortoise plastrons and ox scapulae used for divination—date from around 1200 BC in the late Shang dynasty. A small number of bronze inscriptions from the same period have also survived.


title: Writing

text: In 2003, archaeologists reported discoveries of isolated tortoise-shell carvings dating back to the 7th millennium BC, but whether or not these symbols are related to the characters of the later oracle-bone script is disputed.


title: Writing

text: The earliest known hieroglyphs date back to the second half of the 4th millennium BC, such as the clay labels of a Predynastic ruler called "Scorpion I" (Naqada IIIA period, c. 32nd century BC) recovered at Abydos (modern Umm el-Qa'ab) in 1998 or the Narmer Palette, dating to c. 3100 BC, and several recent discoveries that may be slightly older, though these glyphs were based on a much older artistic rather than written tradition. The hieroglyphic script was logographic with phonetic adjuncts that included an effective alphabet. The world's oldest deciphered sentence was found on a seal impression found in the tomb of Seth-Peribsen at Umm el-Qa'ab, which dates from the Second Dynasty (28th or 27th century BC). There are around 800 hieroglyphs dating back to the Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom and New Kingdom Eras. By the Greco-Roman period, there are more than 5,000.


title: Writing

text: Writing was very important in maintaining the Egyptian empire, and literacy was concentrated among an educated elite of scribes. Only people from certain backgrounds were allowed to train to become scribes, in the service of temple, pharaonic, and military authorities. The hieroglyph system was always difficult to learn, but in later centuries was purposely made even more so, as this preserved the scribes' status.


title: Writing

text: The world's oldest known alphabet appears to have been developed by Canaanite turquoise miners in the Sinai desert around the mid-19th century BC. Around 30 crude inscriptions have been found at a mountainous Egyptian mining site known as Serabit el-Khadem. This site was also home to a temple of Hathor, the "Mistress of turquoise". A later, two line inscription has also been found at Wadi el-Hol in Central Egypt. Based on hieroglyphic prototypes, but also including entirely new symbols, each sign apparently stood for a consonant rather than a word: the basis of an alphabetic system. It was not until the 12th to 9th centuries, however, that the alphabet took hold and became widely used.


title: Writing

text: Proto-Elamite is the oldest known writing system from Iran. In use only for a brief time (c. 3200–2900 BC), clay tablets with Proto-Elamite writing have been found at different sites across Iran. The Proto-Elamite script is thought to have developed from early cuneiform (proto-cuneiform). The Proto-Elamite script consists of more than 1,000 signs and is thought to be partly logographic.


title: Writing

text: Linear Elamite is a writing system attested in a few monumental inscriptions in Iran. It was used for a very brief period during the last quarter of the 3rd millennium BC. It is often claimed that Linear Elamite is a syllabic writing system derived from Proto-Elamite, although this cannot be proven since Linear-Elamite has not been deciphered. Several scholars have attempted to decipher the script, most notably and .


title: Writing

text: The Elamite cuneiform script was used from about 2500 to 331 BC, and was adapted from the Akkadian cuneiform. The Elamite cuneiform script consisted of about 130 symbols, far fewer than most other cuneiform scripts.


title: Writing

text: Cretan hieroglyphs are found on artifacts of Crete (early-to-mid-2nd millennium BC, MM I to MM III, overlapping with Linear A from MM IIA at the earliest). Linear B, the writing system of the Mycenaean Greeks, has been deciphered while Linear A has yet to be deciphered. The sequence and the geographical spread of the three overlapping, but distinct writing systems can be summarized as follows (beginning date refers to first attestations, the assumed origins of all scripts lie further back in the past): Cretan hieroglyphs were used in Crete from c. 1625 to 1500 BC; Linear A was used in the Aegean Islands (Kea, Kythera, Melos, Thera), and the Greek mainland (Laconia) from c. 18th century to 1450 BC; and Linear B was used in Crete (Knossos), and mainland (Pylos, Mycenae, Thebes, Tiryns) from c. 1375 to 1200 BC.


title: Writing

text: Indus script refers to short strings of symbols associated with the Indus Valley civilization (which spanned modern-day Pakistan and North India) used between 2600 and 1900 BC. In spite of many attempts at decipherments and claims, it is as yet undeciphered. The term 'Indus script' is mainly applied to that used in the mature Harappan phase, which perhaps evolved from a few signs found in early Harappa after 3500 BC, and was followed by the mature Harappan script. The script is written from right to left, and sometimes follows a boustrophedonic style. Since the number of principal signs is about 400–600, midway between typical logographic and syllabic scripts, many scholars accept the script to be logo-syllabic (typically syllabic scripts have about 50–100 signs whereas logographic scripts have a very large number of principal signs). Several scholars maintain that structural analysis indicates that an agglutinative language underlies the script.


title: Writing

text: While research into the development of writing during the late Stone Age is ongoing, the current consensus is that it first evolved from economic necessity in the ancient Near East. Writing most likely began as a consequence of political expansion in ancient cultures, which needed reliable means for transmitting information, maintaining financial accounts, keeping historical records, and similar activities. Around the 4th millennium BC, the complexity of trade and administration outgrew the power of memory, and writing became a more dependable method of recording and presenting transactions in a permanent form.


title: Writing

text: The invention of the first writing systems is roughly contemporary with the beginning of the Bronze Age of the late 4th millennium BC. The Sumerian archaic cuneiform script and the Egyptian hieroglyphs are generally considered the earliest writing systems, both emerging out of their ancestral proto-literate symbol systems from 3400 to 3300 BC with earliest coherent texts from about 2600 BC. It is generally agreed that Sumerian writing was an independent invention; however, it is debated whether Egyptian writing was developed completely independently of Sumerian, or was a case of cultural diffusion.


title: Writing

text: Archaeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat determined the link between previously uncategorized clay "tokens", the oldest of which have been found in the Zagros region of Iran, and the first known writing, Mesopotamian cuneiform. In approximately 8000 BC, the Mesopotamians began using clay tokens to count their agricultural and manufactured goods. Later they began placing these tokens inside large, hollow clay containers (bulla, or globular envelopes) which were then sealed. The quantity of tokens in each container came to be expressed by impressing, on the container's surface, one picture for each instance of the token inside. They next dispensed with the tokens, relying solely on symbols for the tokens, drawn on clay surfaces. To avoid making a picture for each instance of the same object (for example: 100 pictures of a hat to represent 100 hats), they 'counted' the objects by using various small marks. In this way the Sumerians added "a system for enumerating objects to their incipient system of symbols".


title: Writing

text: The original Mesopotamian writing system was derived around 3200 BC from this method of keeping accounts. By the end of the 4th millennium BC, the Mesopotamians were using a triangular-shaped stylus pressed into soft clay to record numbers. This system was gradually augmented with using a sharp stylus to indicate what was being counted by means of pictographs. Round-stylus and sharp-stylus writing was gradually replaced by writing using a wedge-shaped stylus (hence the term cuneiform), at first only for logograms, but by the 29th century BC also for phonetic elements. Around 2700 BC, cuneiform began to represent syllables of spoken Sumerian. About that time, Mesopotamian cuneiform became a general purpose writing system for logograms, syllables, and numbers. This script was adapted to another Mesopotamian language, the East Semitic Akkadian (Assyrian and Babylonian) around 2600 BC, and then to others such as Elamite, Hattian, Hurrian and Hittite. Scripts similar in appearance to this writing system include those for Ugaritic and Old Persian. With the adoption of Aramaic as the 'lingua franca' of the Neo-Assyrian Empire (911–609 BC), Old Aramaic was also adapted to Mesopotamian cuneiform. The last cuneiform scripts in Akkadian discovered thus far date from the 1st century AD.


title: Writing

text: The Proto-Sinaitic script, in which Proto-Canaanite is believed to have been first written, is attested as far back as the 19th century BC. The Phoenician writing system was adapted from the Proto-Canaanite script sometime before the 14th century BC, which in turn borrowed principles of representing phonetic information from Egyptian hieroglyphs. This writing system was an odd sort of syllabary in which only consonants are represented. This script was adapted by the Greeks, who adapted certain consonantal signs to represent their vowels. The Cumae alphabet, a variant of the early Greek alphabet, gave rise to the Etruscan alphabet and its own descendants, such as the Latin alphabet and Runes. Other descendants from the Greek alphabet include Cyrillic, used to write Bulgarian, Russian and Serbian, among others. The Phoenician system was also adapted into the Aramaic script, from which the Hebrew and the Arabic scripts are descended.


title: Writing

text: The Tifinagh script (Berber languages) is descended from the Libyco-Berber script, which is assumed to be of Phoenician origin.


title: Writing

text: Multiple programs are in place to aid both children and adults in improving their literacy skills. For example, the emergence of the writing center and community-wide literacy councils aim to help students and community members sharpen their writing skills. These resources, and many more, span across different age groups in order to offer each individual a better understanding of their language and how to express themselves via writing in order to perhaps improve their socioeconomic status. As William J. Farrell puts it: · “Did you ever notice that, when people become serious about communication, they want it in writing?”


title: Writing

text: Other parts of the world have seen an increase in writing abilities as a result of programs such as the World Literacy Foundation and International Literacy Foundation, as well as a general push for increased global communication.


title: Hail Mary

text: The Hail Mary () is a traditional Christian prayer addressing Mary, the mother of Jesus. The prayer is based on two biblical passages featured in the Gospel of Luke: the Angel Gabriel's visit to Mary (the Annunciation) and Mary's subsequent visit to Elisabeth, the mother of John the Baptist (the Visitation). The Hail Mary is a prayer of praise for and of petition to Mary, regarded as the Theotokos (Mother of God). Since the 16th century, the version of the prayer used in the Catholic Church closes with an appeal for her intercession. The prayer takes different forms in various traditions and has often been set to music.


title: Hail Mary

text: In the Latin Church, the Hail Mary forms the basis of other prayers such as the Angelus and the Rosary. In the psalmody of the Oriental Orthodox Churches a daily Theotokion is devoted to ascribing praise to the Mother of God. The Eastern Orthodox Churches have apart from the "Theotokion" a quite similar prayer to the Hail Mary (without explicit request for the intercession of Mary), both in Greek and in translations, for frequent private prayer. The Eastern Catholic Churches follow their respective traditions or adopt the Latin Church version, which is also used by many other Western groups historically associated with the Catholic Church, such as Lutherans, Anglicans, Independent Catholics, and Old Catholics.


title: Hail Mary

text: The prayer incorporates two greetings to Mary recorded in the Gospel of Luke: "Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee", and "Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb". In mid-13th-century Western Europe, the prayer consisted only of these words with the single addition of the name "Mary" after the word "Hail", as is evident from Thomas Aquinas's commentary on the prayer.


title: Hail Mary

text: The first of the two passages from the Gospel of Luke is the greeting of the Angel Gabriel to Mary, originally written in Koine Greek. The opening word of greeting, (), here translated "hail", literally has the meaning "rejoice" or "be glad". This was the normal greeting in the language in which the Gospel of Luke is written and continues to be used in the same sense in Modern Greek. Accordingly, both "hail" and "rejoice" are valid English translations of the word ("hail" reflecting the Latin translation, and "rejoice" reflecting the original Greek).


title: Hail Mary

text: The word (), here translated as "full of grace", admits of various translations. Grammatically, the word is the feminine perfect passive participle of the verb (), which means "to show, or bestow with, grace" and here, in the passive voice, "to have grace shown, or bestowed upon, one".


title: Hail Mary

text: The text also appears in the account of the annunciation contained in chapter 9 of the apocryphal Infancy Gospel of Matthew.


title: Hail Mary

text: The second part of the prayer is taken from Elizabeth's greeting to Mary as recorded in Luke 1:42: "Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb." Taken together, these two passages are the two times Mary is greeted in chapter 1 of the Gospel of Luke.


title: Hail Mary

text: After considering the use of similar words in Syriac, Greek and Latin in the 6th century, Herbert Thurston, writing in the "Catholic Encyclopedia" concludes that "there is little or no trace of the Hail Mary as an accepted devotional formula before about 1050" – though a later pious tale attributed to Ildephonsus of Toledo (fl. 7th century) the use of the first part, namely the angel's greeting to Mary, without that of Elizabeth, as a prayer. All the evidence suggests that it took its rise from certain versicles and responsories occurring in the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which just at that time was coming into favour among the monastic orders.


title: Hail Mary

text: Thomas Aquinas spoke of the name "Mary" as the only word added at his time to the Biblical text, to indicate the person who was "full of grace." But at about the same time the name "Jesus" was also added, to specify who was meant by the phrase "the fruit of thy womb".


title: Hail Mary

text: The Western version of the prayer is thus not derived from the Greek version: even the earliest Western forms have no trace of the Greek version's phrases: "Mother of God and Virgin" and "for thou hast given birth to the Saviour of our souls."


title: Hail Mary

text: To the greeting and praise of Mary of which the prayer thus consisted, a petition "Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen." was added later. The petition first appeared in print in 1495 in Girolamo Savonarola's . The "Hail Mary" prayer in Savonarola's exposition reads: "Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen."


title: Hail Mary

text: The petition was commonly added around the time of the Council of Trent. The Dutch Jesuit Petrus Canisius is credited with adding in 1555 in his Catechism the sentence


title: Hail Mary

text: Eleven years later, the sentence was included in the Catechism of the Council of Trent of 1566. The catechism says that to the first part of the Hail Mary, by which "we render to God the highest praise and return Him most gracious thanks, because He has bestowed all His heavenly gifts on the most holy Virgin ... the Church of God has wisely added prayers and an invocation addressed to the most holy Mother of God. ...We should earnestly implore her help and assistance; for that she possesses exalted merits with God, and that she is most desirous to assist us by her prayers, no one can doubt without impiety and wickedness." Soon after, in 1568 Pope Pius V included the full form as now known in his revision of the Roman Breviary.


title: Hail Mary

text: The current Latin version is thus as follows, with accents added to indicate how the prayer is said in the current ecclesiastical pronunciation of Latin, as well as macrons to indicate the Classical vowel lengths:


title: Hail Mary

text: Because recitation of the Angelus, a prayer within which the Hail Mary is recited three times, is usually accompanied by the ringing of the Angelus bell, words from the Ave Maria were often inscribed on bells.


title: Hail Mary

text: The Hail Mary prayer of the Eastern Orthodox Church and Byzantine Rite Catholic Churches is similar to the first part of the Latin Church form, with the addition of a very brief opening phrase and a short concluding phrase. It is well known and often used, though not quite as frequently as in the Western Church. It appears in several canons of prayer. It is typically sung thrice at the end of Vespers during an All-Night Vigil, and occurs many times in the course of daily prayer.


title: Hail Mary

text: To the Biblical texts this adds the opening invocation "Theotokos Virgin", the name "Mary", and the concluding phrase "because it was the Saviour of our souls that thou borest".


title: Hail Mary

text: The first is the older, and remains in use by the Old Believers as well as those who follow the Ruthenian recension (among them the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church and the Ruthenian Catholic Church). The second, corresponding more closely to the Greek, appeared in 1656 under the liturgical reforms of Patriarch Nikon of Moscow, and is in use by the Russian Orthodox Church, the Serbian Orthodox Church, the Bulgarian Orthodox Church and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.


title: Hail Mary

text: The Hail Mary is the last prayer in Appendix V of the Roman Missal, the last of seven prayers under the heading "Thanksgiving After Mass". There it appears with "with you" instead of the traditional "with thee", "are you" instead of the traditional "art thou" and "your womb" in place of the traditional "thy womb":


title: Hail Mary

text: The Hail Mary is the central part of the Angelus, a devotion generally recited thrice daily by many Catholics, as well as broad & high church Anglicans, and Lutherans who usually omit the second half.


title: Hail Mary

text: The Hail Mary is an essential element of the Rosary, a prayer method in use especially among Roman Rite (Western) Catholics. The Eastern Catholic Churches say a similar version.


title: Hail Mary

text: The Rosary consists traditionally of three sets of five Mysteries, each Mystery being meditated on while reciting a decade (a set of ten) of Ave Maria. The 150 Ave Maria of the Rosary thus echo the 150 psalms. These Mysteries concern events of Jesus' life during his childhood (Joyful Mysteries), Passion (Sorrowful Mysteries), and from his Resurrection onwards (Glorious Mysteries). Another set, the Luminous Mysteries, is of comparatively recent origin, having been proposed by Pope John Paul II in 2002. Each decade of Ave Maria is preceded by the Our Father (Pater Noster or "The Lord's Prayer") and followed by the Glory Be (Gloria Patri) (Doxology). The repetition of the fixed-language prayers assists recitation from the heart rather than the head. Pope Paul V said that "the Rosary is a treasure of graces ... even for those souls who pray without meditating, the simple act of taking the beads in hand to pray is already a remembrance of God – of the supernatural".


title: Hail Mary

text: Martin Luther believed that Mary should be held in highest reverence, advocating the use of the first half of the Hail Mary (that is, "Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.") as a sign of reverence for and devotion to the Virgin. The 1522 (Prayer Book) retained the Hail Mary. The second part of the prayer used in Catholicism today ("Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death") was not in use in Germany at the time.


title: Hail Mary

text: Some Anglicans also employ the Hail Mary in devotional practice. Anglo-Catholic Anglicans use the prayer in much the same way as Roman Catholics, including use of the Rosary and the recitation of the Angelus. Many Anglican churches contain artistic depictions of the Virgin Mary, but only a minority use Marian devotional prayers such as the Hail Mary. That manifestation of veneration of Mary, decried by some Protestants as Mariolatry, was largely removed from Anglican churches during the English Reformation but was reintroduced to some extent during the Oxford Movement of the mid-1800s.


title: Hail Mary

text: The Hail Mary ( in Latin) has been set to music numerous times. The title "Ave Maria" has been given also to musical compositions that are not settings of the prayer.


title: Hail Mary

text: One of the most famous is the version by Franz Schubert (1825), composed as (Ellen's Third Song), D839, part 6 of his Opus 52, a setting of seven songs from Walter Scott's popular epic poem "The Lady of the Lake", translated into German by Adam Storck. Although it opens with the greeting "Ave Maria" ("Hail Mary"), the text was not that of the traditional prayer, but nowadays it is commonly sung with words of the prayer. Its music was used in the final segment of Disney's "Fantasia".


title: Hail Mary

text: In Gounod's version, he superimposed melody and the words to the first prelude from Bach's "The Well-Tempered Clavier", omitting only the words "Mater Dei" (Mother of God).


title: Hail Mary

text: Anton Bruckner wrote three different settings, the best known being a motet for seven voices. Antonín Dvořák's version was composed in 1877. Another setting of Ave Maria was written by Giuseppe Verdi as part for his 1887 opera "Otello". Russian composer César Cui, who was raised Roman Catholic, set the text at least three times: as the "Ave Maria", op. 34, for one or two women's voices with piano or harmonium (1886), and as part of two of his operas: (premiered 1894) and "Mateo Falcone" (1907).


title: Hail Mary

text: Settings also exist by Mozart, Liszt, Byrd, Elgar, Saint-Saëns, Rossini, Brahms, Stravinsky, Mascagni, Lauridsen, David Conte and Perosi as well as numerous versions by less well-known composers, such as J. B. Tresch, Margit Sztaray, Mme. Tarbé des Sablons, Einojuhani Rautavaara and Ninel Samokhvalova.


title: Hail Mary

text: In the Renaissance, this text was also set by numerous composers, including Josquin des Prez, Orlando di Lasso, Tomás Luis de Victoria, and Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. Before the Council of Trent there were actually different versions of the text, so the earlier composers in the period sometimes set versions of the text different from the ones shown above. Josquin des Prez, for example, himself set more than one version of the Ave Maria. Here is the text of his motet "Ave Maria ... Virgo serena", which begins with the first six words above and continues with a poem in rhymed couplets.


title: Hail Mary

text: The much-anthologized "Ave Maria" by Jacques Arcadelt is actually a 19th-century arrangement by Pierre-Louis Dietsch, loosely based on Arcadelt's three part madrigal .


title: Hail Mary

text: In the 20th century, Franz Biebl composed Ave Maria (Angelus Domini), actually a setting of the Angelus prayer, in which the Ave Maria is repeated three times, but its second part only once as the climax.


title: Hail Mary

text: In Slavonic, the text was also a popular subject for setting to music by Eastern European composers. These include Rachmaninov, Stravinsky, Bortniansky, Vavilov (his version often misattributed to Caccini), Mikhail Shukh, Lyudmyla Hodzyumakha and others.


title: Hail Mary

text: A famous setting for the Orthodox version of the prayer in Church Slavonic (Bogoroditsye Djevo) was composed by Sergei Rachmaninoff in his "All-Night Vigil".


title: Hail Mary

text: Since Protestant Christianity generally avoids any special veneration of Mary, musical settings of the prayer are sometimes sung to other texts that preserve the word boundaries and syllable stresses.


title: Fexofenadine

text: Fexofenadine, sold under the brand name Allegra among others, is an antihistamine pharmaceutical drug used in the treatment of allergy symptoms, such as hay fever and urticaria.


title: Fexofenadine

text: Therapeutically, fexofenadine is a selective peripheral H blocker. It is classified as a second-generation antihistamine because it is less able to pass the blood–brain barrier and cause sedation, compared to first-generation antihistamines.


title: Fexofenadine

text: It was patented in 1979 and came into medical use in 1996. It is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines. Fexofenadine has been manufactured in generic form since 2011. In 2020, it was the 255th most commonly prescribed medication in the United States, with more than 1million prescriptions.


title: Fexofenadine

text: Fexofenadine is used for relief from physical symptoms associated with seasonal allergic rhinitis and for treatment of chronic urticaria. It does not cure, but rather prevents the aggravation of allergic rhinitis and chronic idiopathic urticaria, and reduces the severity of the symptoms associated with those conditions, providing relief from repeated sneezing, runny nose, itchy eyes or skin, and general body fatigue. In a 2018 review, fexofenadine, along with levocetirizine, desloratadine, and cetirizine, was cited to be a safe to use for individuals with inherited long QT syndrome.


title: Fexofenadine

text: For the treatment of allergic rhinitis, fexofenadine is similarly effective to cetirizine, but is associated with less drowsiness than cetirizine. Fexofenadine was also shown to inhibit histamine-induced wheal and flare to a significantly greater degree than loratadine or desloratadine, but was slightly less effective than levocetirizine.


title: Fexofenadine

text: Fexofenadine at doses above 120 mg a day does not appear to provide additional efficacy in the treatment of allergic rhinitis.


title: Fexofenadine

text: The most common side effects include headache, back and muscle pain, miosis or pinpoint pupils, nausea, drowsiness, and menstrual cramps. Anxiety and insomnia have also been rarely reported. The most common side effects demonstrated during clinical trials were cough, upper respiratory tract infection, fever, and otitis media for children ages 6 to 11 and fatigue for children ages 6 months to 5 years. Temporarily erectile dysfunction has also been reported.


title: Fexofenadine

text: The safety profile of fexofenadine is quite favorable, as no cardiovascular or sedative effects have been shown to occur even when taking 10 times the recommended dose. Research on humans ranges from a single 800-mg dose, to a twice-daily, 690-mg dose for a month, with no clinically significant adverse effects, when compared to a placebo. No deaths occurred in testing on mice, at 5000 mg/kg body weight, which is 110 times the maximum recommended dose for an adult human. If overdose were to occur, supportive measures are recommended. Theoretically, an overdose could present as dizziness, dry mouth, and/or drowsiness, consistent with an exaggeration of the usual side effects. Hemodialysis does not appear to be an effective means of removing fexofenadine from the blood.


title: Fexofenadine

text: Fexofenadine is a selective peripheral H receptor antagonist. Blockage prevents the activation of the H receptors by histamine, preventing the symptoms associated with allergies from occurring. Fexofenadine does not readily cross the blood–brain barrier, so is less likely to cause drowsiness in comparison to other antihistamines that readily cross that barrier (i.e., first-generation antihistamines such as diphenhydramine). In general, fexofenadine takes about an hour to take effect, though this may be affected by the choice of dosage form and the presence of certain foods.


title: Fexofenadine

text: Fexofenadine also exhibits no anticholinergic, antidopaminergic, alpha 1-adrenergic, or beta-adrenergic receptor-blocking effects.


title: Fexofenadine

text: Taking erythromycin or ketoconazole while taking fexofenadine does increase the plasma levels of fexofenadine, but this increase does not influence the QT interval. The reason for this effect is likely due to transport-related effects, specifically involving p-glycoprotein (p-gp). Both erythromycin and ketoconazole are inhibitors of p-gp, a transporter protein involved in preventing the intestinal absorption of fexofenadine. When p-gp is inhibited, fexofenadine may be better absorbed by the body, increasing its plasma concentration by more than intended.


title: Fexofenadine

text: Fexofenadine is not to be taken with apple, orange, or grapefruit juice because they could decrease absorption of the drug. Therefore, it should be taken with water. Grapefruit juice can significantly reduce the plasma concentration of fexofenadine.


title: Fexofenadine

text: Antacids containing aluminum or magnesium should not be taken within 15 minutes of fexofenadine, as they reduce its absorption by almost 50%. This is not thought to be due to a change in pH (in fact, absorption can actually "increase" under increasingly alkaline pH), but rather due to the formation of metal complexes with charged/polar moieties on fexofenadine. As suggested by Shehnaza "et al" (2014), various sites of the molecule are thought to be responsible for this interaction, including the piperidine nitrogen, the carboxylic acid (-COOH) group, and both hydroxyl (-OH) groups.


title: Fexofenadine

text: The older antihistaminic agent terfenadine was found to metabolize into the related carboxylic acid, fexofenadine. Fexofenadine was found to retain all of the biological activity of its parent, while giving fewer adverse reactions in patients, so terfenadine was replaced in the market by its metabolite. Fexofenadine was originally synthesized in 1993 by Massachusetts-based biotechnology company Sepracor, which then sold the development rights to Hoechst Marion Roussel (now part of Sanofi-Aventis), and was later approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1996. Albany Molecular Research Inc. (AMRI) holds the patents to the intermediates and production of fexofenadine HCl, along with Roussel. Since that time, it has achieved blockbuster drug status with global sales of US$1.87B in 2004 (with $1.49B coming from the United States). AMRI received royalty payments from Aventis that enabled the growth of AMRI.


title: Fexofenadine

text: In January 2011, the FDA approved over-the-counter sales of fexofenadine in the United States, and Sanofi Aventis' version became available in March 2011.


title: Fexofenadine

text: Fexofenadine is marketed under many brand names worldwide as of January 2017, including: Agimfast, Alafree, Alanil, Alercas, Alerfedine, Alerix, Alertam, Alexia, Allegix, Allegra, Allegratab, Allemax, Allerfast, Allerfen, Allerfexo, Allergo, Allergyna, Allerphast, Allevia, Alrin, Alterfast, Aller-Fex, Altifex, Altiva, Aspen, Axodin, Axofen, BiXin, Bosnum, Dinafex, Elwigra, Ewofex, Fastel, Fastofen, Fastway, Fe Min, Feksine, Fenadex, Fenadin, Fenafex, Fenax, Fenofex, Fentradol, Fesler, Fexadyne, Fexal, Fexalar, Fexallegra, Fexaway, Fexet, Fexgen, Fexidine, Fexigra, Fexine, Fexo, Fexodane, Fexodine, Fexodis, Fexofast, Fexofen, Fexofenaderm, Fexofenadin, Fexofenadina, Fexofenadine, Fexofénadine, Fexofep, Fexofin, Fexogen, Fexomin, Fexon, Fexona, Fexonadinea, Fexoquit, Fexoral, Fexoril, Fexostad, Fexotine, Fexovid, Fixal, Fixit, Fixodin, Flexofen, Foxin, Fynadin, Glodas, Hasalfast, Histafree, Imexofen, Kofixir, Lai Duo Fei, Mayfex, Min Jie, Nefoxef, Neofex, Nolargy, Nosedex, Odafen, Oregra, Radifex, Raltiva, Rapido, Rhinogan, Ridrinal, Rinofen, Rinolast, Ritch, Rui Fei, Sailexi, Tefodine, Telfadin, Telfast, Telfastin, Telfexo, Tellerge, Terfemax, Ternafast, Tocimat, Tofexo, Torfast, Treathay, Vifas, Vifasesh, X-Dine, Xergic, and Zefeksal.


title: Fexofenadine

text: As of January 2017, it is marketed as a combination drug with pseudoephedrine under brand names including: Alerfedine D, Allegra-D, Allergyna-D, Altiva-D, Dellegra, Fexo Plus, Fexofed, Fixal Plus, Ridrinal D, Rinolast D, and Telfast D.


title: Fexofenadine

text: As of January 2017, it is marketed as a combination drug with montelukast under brand names including Fexokast, Histakind-M, Monten-FX, Montolife-FX, Montair-FX and Novamont-FX.


title: FREMM multipurpose frigate

text: The FREMM (French: "Frégate Européenne Multi-Mission"; Italian: "Fregata Europea Multi-Missione"), which stands for "European multi-purpose frigate", is a Franco-Italian family of multi-purpose frigates designed by Naval Group and Fincantieri. In France, this surface combatant is known as the "Aquitaine" class" (17 units planned, of which 9 were later cancelled), while in Italy it is known as the "Bergamini" class" (10 units planned). The lead ship of the class, , was commissioned in November 2012 by the French Navy. Italy has ordered six general purpose and four anti-submarine variants. France, on the other hand, has ordered six anti-submarine variants and two air-defense ones.


title: FREMM multipurpose frigate

text: The FREMM has also been exported to various countries. Notably, the United States Navy selected a FREMM variant for their new of 20 frigates, to be built by Fincantieri, starting with a $795 million contract for the lead ship.


title: FREMM multipurpose frigate

text: Three original variants of the FREMM were proposed; an anti-submarine variant (ASW) and a general-purpose variant (GP) and a land-attack variant (AVT) to replace the existing classes of frigates within the French and Italian navies. A total of 27 FREMM were to be constructed (17 for France and 10 for Italy) with additional aims to seek exports. However, budget cuts and changing requirements saw this number drop significantly for France, while the order for Italy remained unchanged. The land-attack variant (AVT) was subsequently cancelled.


title: FREMM multipurpose frigate

text: A third anti-air warfare variant of FREMM was proposed by DCNS in response to French requirements for a new air-defence frigate, the new variant became known as FREDA (""FREgates de Défense Aériennes"", "Air defence frigate"). This new French requirement was due to the third and fourth s being cancelled after the first two cost €1.35B each, but this decision left French Navy still in-need of replacements for its ageing air-defence frigates.


title: FREMM multipurpose frigate

text: As of 2009, the FREDA design features a more powerful version of the Héraklès passive electronically scanned array radar and 32 cells of SYLVER A50 vertical launch system in place of the 16 cells of A43 and 16 cells of A70. The SYLVER A50 would allow it to fire the -range Aster 30 missile. While at one point it was determined that the towed array sonar would not be fitted, this has subsequently been retained on the FREDA design.


title: FREMM multipurpose frigate

text: At Euronaval 2012 DCNS showed a new concept called FREMM-ER for the FREDA requirement, again based on the FREMM, but specifically mentioning the ballistic missile defence mission as well as anti-air. FREMM-ER has a modified superstructure replacing Héraklès with the new Thales Sea Fire 500 radar, whose four fixed plates resemble those of the US Navy's AN/SPY-1. However, unlike the Héraklès and the SPY-1 (both using passive electronically scanned array technology), the Sea Fire 500 has active electronically scanned array antennas.


title: FREMM multipurpose frigate

text: Planning assumptions for the Italian Navy are ten FREMM-IT (four ASW variants and six GP variants) at a cost of €5.9 billion. FREMM-IT will replace the and frigates in service with the Italian Navy.


title: FREMM multipurpose frigate

text: In the 2013 Italian budget, the Italian government laid out the necessary financing for two more GP variants (FREMM-IT 7 & 8) and the contract was awarded in September 2013. On 15 April 2015, the Italian Parliament confirmed the deal between OCCAR and (Fincantieri and Finmeccanica, since 2017 Leonardo) to begin building units 9 and 10, for 764 million Euros.


title: FREMM multipurpose frigate

text: As of 16 April 2015, the Italian government has approved funding for all ten FREMM-IT to be delivered to the Italian Navy (four ASW variants and six GP variants). FREMM-IT 9 & 10 will have undisclosed enhanced capabilities. All ten Italian FREMM-ITs have extended AAW capabilities, with SAAM-ESD CMS, Aster 30 and Aster 15 missiles for extended area defence. SAAM-ESD CMS use Leonardo MFRA, a 3D active radar (AESA), an evolved version of the Leonardo EMPAR PESA radar (previously embarked on Horizon-class destroyers and the ). Since the seventh FREMM-IT, there will be updates, such as new conformal IFF antenna and much more stealth response. Since the ninth FREMM-IT, SCLAR-H was replaced with Leonardo ODLS-20. In 2017 the Italian FREMM refit started with the installation on each of two SITEP MS-424 acoustic guns.


title: FREMM multipurpose frigate

text: In 2020 it was reported that Italy would sell its last two FREMM-class frigates in the current production line ("Spartaco Schergat" and "Emilio Bianchi") to Egypt. "Spartaco Schergat" was in the final stage of her sea trials while "Emilio Bianchi" would follow within one year. The deal reportedly also involved other military equipment and was worth 1.2 billion Euros. It was reported that Italy would then order two additional FREMM frigates to replace those transferred to Egypt with the anticipated delivery of the replacements by 2024.


title: FREMM multipurpose frigate

text: Original plans were for 17 FREMM to replace the nine avisos and nine anti-submarine frigates of the and es. In November 2005 France announced a contract of €3.5 billion for development and the first eight hulls, with options for nine more costing €2.95 billion split over two tranches (totaling 17).


title: FREMM multipurpose frigate

text: Following the cancellation of the third and fourth of the Horizon-class frigates in 2005 on budget grounds, requirements for an air-defence derivative of the FREMM called FREDA were placed – with DCNS coming up with several proposals. Expectations were that the last two ships of the 17 FREMM planned would be built to FREDA specifications; however, by 2008 the plan was revised down to just 11 FREMM (9 ASW variants and 2 FREDA variants) at a cost of €8.75 billion (FY13, ~US$12 billion). The 11 ships would cost €670 million (~US$760m) each in FY2014, or €860m (~US$980m) including development costs.


title: FREMM multipurpose frigate

text: The 2013 White Paper on Defence and National Security committed France to 15 front-line frigates, which was initially interpreted as 2 Horizons, 5 s and a reduction in the FREMM fleet down to 8 ships. The 2014–2019 defence plan restated a target of 11 frigates; of which six ASW FREMM variants would be delivered to replace the "Georges Leygues"-class frigates by 2019, followed by two anti-air variants to replace the ageing "Cassard"-class frigates and a decision was to have been taken in 2016 on what version the remaining three would be. In 2014, the French Navy's Chief of Staff, Admiral Bernard Rogel, confirmed that 11 FREMM frigates had been ordered but in 2015 the order was cut to 8 in order to allow for the introduction of five FTI mid-Size frigates from 2024. The FTI will replace the "La Fayette" class in "first-rank" roles, with three of the "La Fayette"s also being fitted with active sonar and other improvements so as to extend their service life into the early 2030s.


title: FREMM multipurpose frigate

text: On 16 April 2021 the French Navy received "Alsace", the first of the two air defence FREMM frigates ordered. The primary role of the naval vessel is planned to be conducting the anti-aircraft defense of critical units such as the and Mistral class landing helicopter docks. Besides being equipped with Aster 15 and Aster 30 surface-to-air missiles, the ship holds Exocet MM 40 anti-ship missiles and the MU 90 torpedo system.


title: FREMM multipurpose frigate

text: On 10 July 2017, it was reported that the United States Congress was interested in foreign designs such as the Fincantieri FREMM for the US Navy's FFG(X) Program. According to Representative Rob Wittman, chairman of the United States House Armed Services Subcommittee on Seapower and Projection Forces, the US Congress was comfortable with models such as Fincantieri's partnership with Lockheed Martin to build the version of the littoral combat ship (LCS). If the Italian FREMM design is selected, the Marinette Marine shipyard in Wisconsin, part of the Fincantieri group, would build the guided-missile frigates. Marinette Marine is best known for the US Navy "Freedom"-class LCS. On 16 February 2018, Fincantieri Marine was one of five companies awarded a $15 million contract for conceptual design of FFG(X), which the Navy would evaluate over 16 months ahead of a final request for proposal in 2019 and contract award in 2020.


title: FREMM multipurpose frigate

text: On 30 June 2017, it was announced that Leonardo and BAE Systems will collaborate to provide the US military forces with a wide range of upgraded munitions for advanced, large-calibre weapon systems such as the Leonardo Vulcano and Strales/DART guided munitions.


title: FREMM multipurpose frigate

text: From late May to early June 2018, the Italian Navy deployed "Alpino" on a good will visit to the United States along the Eastern seaboard, making port calls in Norfolk, Baltimore, New York City, and Boston. She was visited by several US Navy officials who toured her as a potential FFG(X) candidate. Among the visitors was the Italian Ambassador to the United States, Armando Varrichio.


title: FREMM multipurpose frigate

text: On 30 April 2020, the US Navy announced that Fincantieri had been awarded a $795 million contract for the first FFG(X), to be built at Fincantieri Marinette Marine in Marinette, Wisconsin. The contract includes options for an additional nine ships, which, if all options were exercised, would value the contract at $5.5 billion. On 7 October 2020, US Secretary of the Navy Kenneth Braithwaite announced that first FFG(X) frigate would be named .


title: FREMM multipurpose frigate

text: Egypt ordered two Italian FREMM frigates in 2020 and one French FREMM frigate in 2015. The initial Italian sale might be followed by the subsequent acquisition of two additional FREMM frigates by Egypt.


title: FREMM multipurpose frigate

text: On 16 February 2015, the Egyptian Navy ordered one FREMM vessel to enter service before the opening of the New Suez Canal, as part of a larger deal (including 24 Dassault Rafale aircraft and a supply of missiles) worth US$5.9 billion (€5.2 billion). In order to keep to Egypt's deadlines, France offered to send "Normandie", originally intended for the French Navy. The SYLVER A70 VLS and NETTUNO-4100 jamming equipment were removed due to export limitations for such sensitive equipment. The crew will be around 126 sailors compared to 108 in the French Navy. The SATCOM antenna for the French Syracuse satellites was also taken down; however, Egypt will use its own military telecommunications satellite, supplied by Airbus Defence and Space and Thales Alenia Space, in conjunction with its naval vessels. From March 2015, DCNS trained the Egyptian crew in the technology of the ship and DCNS and its partners accompanied the crew for a period of 15 months. On 23 June 2015, French naval shipbuilder DCNS transferred the FREMM frigate "Tahya Misr" (ex-"Normandie") to the Egyptian Navy. A ceremony took place to transfer "Normandie", renamed "Tahya Misr" ("Long Live Egypt") to Egypt, in the presence of General Sedki Sobhy, the Egyptian Minister of Defense, Jean-Yves Le Drian, the French Minister of Defense, Admiral Osama Rabie, Egyptian Navy Commander in Chief, Admiral Bernard Rogel, the French Chief of Navy and Hervé Guillou, Chairman & CEO of DCNS. In April 2021, the second FREMM "Bergamini"-class frigate, ENS "Bernees", joined the Egyptian Navy. The first one joined on 31 December 2020.


title: FREMM multipurpose frigate

text: On 24 October 2007, it was announced that the Royal Moroccan Navy had ordered one FREMM to replace its . The contract was signed on 18 April 2008 and construction of the Moroccan FREMM began in the summer 2008 with delivery expected in 2012 or 2013; "Mohammed VI" was launched in September 2011 and handed over on 30 January 2014. The Moroccan ship is similar to the French anti-submarine version, without SYLVER A70 tubes for SCALP Naval, and cost €470m.


title: FREMM multipurpose frigate

text: On 10 June 2021, Indonesia signed a contract with Fincantieri for the order of six FREMM frigates and two "Maestrale"-class frigates and other logistical support. There may be collaboration between PT-PAL Shipyard on Java and Fincantieri.


title: FREMM multipurpose frigate

text: In April 2013, the French government showcased the FREMM class in Halifax, Nova Scotia, with the hope of selling to the Royal Canadian Navy for the Single Class Surface Combatant Project.


title: FREMM multipurpose frigate

text: In September 2017, a variant of the FREMM was offered directly to the Ministry of Defence, in an attempt to protect intellectual property. This direct bid included delivery of the first ship in 2019 if accepted within the year and a fixed price of $30 billion for all 15 ships, versus the $62 billion estimated for the government's prime-contractor ship building plan. In December 2017 the offer was rejected by the Public Services and Procurement Canada, citing the unsolicited nature of the bid as undermining the fair and competitive nature of the procurement". In October 2018, the Type 26 design was chosen by Canada as the winner of the program. On 8 February 2019, a contact was signed by Canada to build Type 26 vessels.


title: FREMM multipurpose frigate

text: In April 2016, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull confirmed that the Italian FREMM class was one of three frigates shortlisted for the Royal Australian Navy's replacement. In September 2016, Fincantieri signed a contract to participate in the Competitive Evaluation Process, conducted by the Department of Defence for nine Future Frigates for the Royal Australian Navy. In June 2018, the contract was awarded to BAE Systems to produce nine s.


title: FREMM multipurpose frigate

text: In January 2019, the Italian government made an offer of two "Bergamini"-class frigates to the Brazilian Navy. The frigates "Spartaco Schergat" and "Emilio Bianchi" under construction for the Italian Navy, would be transferred to Brazil for €1.5 billion (R$6.37 billion).


title: FREMM multipurpose frigate

text: On 22 January 2009 the Hellenic Navy announced an order for six FREMM to replace an equal number of s. After the Greek government-debt crisis this was cut down to between two and four ships equipped with SCALP Naval, with France alleged to have offered them to Greece at no cost for the first five years. Germany objected to this deal in October 2011 and no deal has been signed. In February 2013 though and during the formal visit of the President of France, François Hollande, in Athens, according to press reports an agreement which includes the long-term leasing of two FREMM frigates ("Normandie" and "Provence" according to initial reports) to the Hellenic Navy has been reached. On 12 January 2018 the Greek daily newspaper "Kathimerini" reported that the Greek government was set to enter talks with France regarding the procurement of two FREMM frigates, with an option for an additional two. Contacts between Greece and France were to begin initially at a military level, starting in February 2018. In April 2018, Greek deputy Minister for National Defence Fotis Kouvelis stated that an agreement between France and Greece was reached for a five-year lease of two FREMM frigates, which could have been handed over as early as August 2018. After a few days, on 25 April 2018 the Greek minister of Defense Panos Kammenos denied any information regarding the purchase of two frigates from France. Eventually, Greece abandoned all plans for the purchase of FREMMs in 2019 and pursued with the smaller FDI Belharra multi-purpose frigates, offered by Naval Group.


title: PayPal Mafia

text: The "PayPal Mafia" is a group of former PayPal employees and founders who have since founded and/or developed additional technology companies such as Tesla, Inc., LinkedIn, Palantir Technologies, SpaceX, Affirm, Slide, Kiva, YouTube, Yelp, and Yammer. Most of the members attended Stanford University or University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign at some point in their studies.


title: PayPal Mafia

text: Originally, PayPal was a money-transfer service offered by a company called Confinity which was acquired by X.com in 1999. Later, X.com was renamed PayPal and purchased by eBay in 2002. The original PayPal employees had difficulty adjusting to eBay's more traditional corporate culture and within four years all but 12 of the first 50 employees had left. They remained connected as social and business acquaintances, and a number of them worked together to form new companies and venture firms in subsequent years. This group of PayPal alumni became so prolific that the term PayPal Mafia was coined. The term gained even wider exposure when a 2007 article in "Fortune" magazine used the phrase in its headline and featured a photo of former PayPal employees in gangster attire.


title: PayPal Mafia

text: The PayPal Mafia is sometimes credited with inspiring the re-emergence of consumer-focused Internet companies after the dot-com bust of 2001. The PayPal Mafia phenomenon has been compared to the founding of Intel in the late 1960s by engineers who had earlier founded Fairchild Semiconductor after leaving Shockley Semiconductor. They are discussed in journalist Sarah Lacy's book "Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good." According to Lacy, the selection process and technical learning at PayPal played a role, but the main factor behind their future success was the confidence they gained there. Their success has been attributed to their youth; the physical, cultural, and economic infrastructure of Silicon Valley; and the diversity of their skill-sets. PayPal's founders encouraged tight social bonds among its employees, and many of them continued to trust and support one another after leaving PayPal. An intensely competitive environment and a shared struggle to keep the company solvent despite many setbacks also contributed to a strong and lasting camaraderie among former employees.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: Marc Paul Alain Dutroux (; born 6 November 1956) is a Belgian convicted serial killer, serial rapist, and child molester. Initially convicted for the abduction and rape of five young girls in 1989, Dutroux was released on parole after just three years' imprisonment. He was arrested again in 1996 on suspicion of having abducted, tortured, and sexually abused six girls aged between 8 and 19, four of whom were killed. His widely publicized trial ended with his conviction on all charges in 2004; he was subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: Dutroux's accomplices included his wife, Michelle Martin, Michel Lelièvre, Michel Nihoul, and Bernard Weinstein. Martin was convicted and sentenced to thirty years in prison, while Lelièvre was sentenced to twenty-five years. Nihoul, "a Brussels businessman, pub-owner and familiar face at sex parties," was initially tried as an accomplice to the kidnappings but was acquitted due to insufficient evidence; he was instead convicted of involvement in a gang that participated in human and drug trafficking, and was sentenced to five years in prison. Weinstein was never tried, as he was murdered by Dutroux.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: The lenient result of Dutroux's first prosecution, as well as a number of shortcomings on the part of the police in investigating his murders, caused widespread discontent in Belgium with the country's criminal justice system, resulting in the complete reorganisation of Belgium's law enforcement agencies. In the White March held on 20 October 1996, 300,000 Belgian citizens protested the mishandling of the case.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: Marc Dutroux was born in Ixelles, Brussels, on 6 November 1956 to Victor Dutroux and Jeanine Lauwens. He is the eldest of five children. Dutroux spent part of his early childhood in Burundi, then part of the Belgian Congo, where his father worked as a teacher. After Burundi gained independence in mid-1962, Dutroux's family moved back to Belgium and settled in the village of Obaix in Hainaut Province. Dutroux later reported to have been abused by both of his parents.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: In 1972, Dutroux's parents separated and his father left the family home. Shortly after graduating from school, Dutroux left home himself and made his living as an electrician. Several years later, in 1976, Dutroux married Françoise Dubois, with whom he had two children. The marriage was marred by Dutroux's abusive behavior towards his family; the couple would divorce in 1983, with Françoise keeping custody of the children.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: During the late 1970s, Dutroux found new employment as a scrap dealer and supplemented his income by stealing car parts. From 1979 onward he would be convicted for a variety of petty offenses including assault, drug dealing, and trading stolen vehicles. Meanwhile, Dutroux regularly visited ice skating rinks in Charleroi, Forest, and Montignies-sur-Sambre, where he would deliberately trip or bump into young female skaters in order to touch them. In October 1980, Dutroux visited a Charleroi skating rink and got into a physical altercation with another patron, Armand de Beyn, after repeatedly colliding with De Beyn's girlfriend. A court case ended with De Beyn being convicted of assault and battery against Dutroux, although Dutroux was banned from the Charleroi skating rink.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: One of his mistresses was Michelle Martin, whom he later married and with whom he had three more children.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: On 14 December 1985, Dutroux abducted Axelle D. During her testimony, she told the police that Dutroux's accomplice Peteghem had told her that "he was part of a gang" led by two gang leaders, "an Italian and a crazy stupid one." Jean van Peteghem admitted to having taken part in the abduction. He said he had abducted Axelle D. with Marc Dutroux and Michelle Martin. He had lived with Dutroux after being discharged from the military and having his marriage fail. Peteghem told police that his and Dutroux's first victims were two girls from Morlanwelz. These two victims were never located by police. On 7 June 1985 the first proven abduction by the two took place, the abduction of eleven-year-old Sylvie D. On 17 October 1985 the pair abducted Maria V., 19, from Peronnes-lez-Binche. Maria V. also identified a third man who took part in her abduction and appeared to be in his fifties. This man was never found by police. On 17 January 1986 Catherine B., aged 18, was abducted from Obaix in Hainaut Province. Dutroux had one or two accomplices in her abduction who were never found by police. Peteghem was stationed as army personnel in Germany during that time and could not have assisted Dutroux. On 18 December 1985, Dutroux abducted Élisabeth G., 15, in Pont-à-Celles. Peteghem told police that Dutroux filmed Élisabeth naked and took pictures of her. At the beginning of February 1987, Martin, Dutroux and Peteghem were arrested. This had to a large extent been the fault of Peteghem, who had given out a lot of information about himself in conversations with the girls, which had been enough for police to identify him. The three were eventually convicted on 26 April 1989. Dutroux received 13 years. Peteghem received 6 years and Martin received 5 years. Dutroux received a harsher sentence because he had also committed several robberies with Peteghem. Dutroux was thus additionally convicted for the brutal robbery of a 58-year-old woman. The robbery was also committed with accomplices. One of the accomplices in this robbery was also never found by police.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: The early release of Dutroux was granted by Melchior Wathelet, who was at that time the Belgian minister of justice; Dutroux's release was ordered against the advice of both the public prosecutor and the psychiatrist who had examined him in prison, who stated that Dutroux remained dangerous.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: While in jail, Dutroux managed to convince a health professional that he was disabled due to mental illnesses. That way, he was able to collect public assistance consisting of $1,200 a month from the Belgium government. He also convinced the professionals that he needed sedatives for sleeping problems. Dutroux later went on to use them to sedate his victims. He owned seven small houses, most of them vacant, and used three of them for the torture of the girls he kidnapped. Although he owned several houses, his state assistance stipend was not reduced. In his residence in Marcinelle, he constructed a concealed dungeon in the basement. Dutroux has been described by psychiatrists who examined him for trial as a psychopath.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: On 24 June 1995, eight-year-old classmates Julie Lejeune and Mélissa Russo were kidnapped after going for a walk in Grâce-Hollogne, probably by Dutroux, and brought to his house in Marcinelle. Dutroux kept them imprisoned in the dungeon he had created, repeatedly sexually abused them and produced pornographic videos of the abuse. Two months later, in the early hours of 23 August in Ostend, Dutroux and accomplice Michel Lelièvre kidnapped An Marchal and Eefje Lambrecks, two teenage girls from Hasselt who were on their way back to their holiday home in Westende following a night out in Blankenberge. With Lejeune and Russo already in the dungeon, Lambrecks and Marchal were kept in chains in a bedroom. In September, according to Martin, Lambrecks and Marchal were drugged and brought to Jumet, where Dutroux and accomplice Bernard Weinstein killed them by burying them alive.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: Around the time of Lambrecks's and Marchal's deaths, Weinstein and a man named Philippe Divers stole a van and hid it in a hangar; after it was found there by the hangar's owner, it was taken away by the police. Dutroux and Weinstein suspected that Divers and his friend Pierre Rochow had betrayed them, and on the night of 4 November, wishing to interrogate them about the van, Dutroux and Weinstein lured Divers and Rochow into Weinstein's home in Jumet and drugged and sequestered them, before leaving to go to Rochow's house to search for clues about the van. There they found Rochow's girlfriend, Bénédicte Jadot, whom they took with them back to Jumet and questioned, before leaving again to pick up another person. While they were away, Jadot escaped and alerted a neighbour, who called the police. With Weinstein wanted by police, Dutroux decided to kill him to prevent his capture. He kidnapped Weinstein and held him in the dungeon at his house in Marcinelle between 13 and 20 November. During this time, he let Lejeune and Russo roam freely around the house. After feeding him food laced with Rohypnol, Dutroux placed hose clamps around Weinstein's testicles until Weinstein told him where his money was hidden. Dutroux then buried Weinstein alive on his (Dutroux's) property in Sars-la-Buissière. On 6 December 1995, Dutroux, having been recognised by Rochow, was arrested for vehicle theft.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: According to Dutroux and Martin, Lejeune and Russo were still alive in the house at the time of Dutroux's arrest in December 1995, and Dutroux had ordered Martin to leave new food and water for the girls in the dungeon each time they ran out. Martin neglected to feed them, later claiming she was too afraid to go into the dungeon. Lejeune and Russo eventually starved to death. Dutroux initially stated that they were still alive when he returned home following his release from prison on 20 March 1996; according to him, Lejeune died that day, and Russo followed suit four days later despite his efforts to save her; during his trial, he said they were already dead when he returned from prison. An expert asserted that they would not have been able to survive the entire time Dutroux was in prison on the total amount of food and water they were said to have been given. Dutroux buried Lejeune and Russo's bodies in the garden of the house he owned in Sars-la-Buissière, near to that of Weinstein.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: On the morning of 28 May 1996, Dutroux and Lelièvre kidnapped 12-year-old Sabine Dardenne, who was cycling to school in Tournai. In a book originally published under the title "J'avais 12 ans, j'ai pris mon vélo et je suis partie à l'école" (and published in the United Kingdom under the title "I Choose to Live"), Dardenne described her time in captivity in Dutroux's Marcinelle home, where she spent most of the time imprisoned in the dungeon and was starved and repeatedly raped by Dutroux. On 9 August 1996, Dutroux and Lelièvre kidnapped 14-year-old Laëtitia Delhez as she was walking home from her local swimming pool in Bertrix. An eyewitness observed Dutroux's van, described it and was able to identify part of the license plate. On 13 August 1996, Dutroux, Martin and Lelièvre were arrested. An initial search of Dutroux's houses proved inconclusive, but two days later, Dutroux and Lelièvre both made confessions. That same day, Dutroux led the police to the basement dungeon inside which Dardenne and Delhez were imprisoned; the girls were subsequently rescued. On 17 August 1996, Dutroux led police to his house in Sars-la-Buissière and, with his help, they were able to locate and exhume the bodies of Lejeune, Russo and Weinstein. On 3 September, the remains of Marchal and Lambrecks were located and exhumed in Jumet. Hundreds of commercial adult pornographic videos, along with a large number of home-made sex films that Dutroux had made with Martin, were recovered from his properties.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: In 1995, Dutroux's mother wrote a letter to the authorities stating that she knew that Dutroux had kidnapped two girls and was keeping them at his house.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: After Lejeune and Russo were kidnapped in June 1995, it took police 14 months to arrest Dutroux, although he had been a prime suspect from the start, having committed similar crimes before. During the search for Lejeune and Russo, police visited Dutroux's house, where Lejeune and Russo were held, twice, on 13 and 19 December 1995. However, no attempts were made to free them, even though the locksmith who accompanied police officer René Michaux said that he had heard the screams of children coming from inside the house. The locksmith reportedly said, "I'm not leaving before we turn the place upside down. The screams are clearly coming from inside the house," to which Michaux replied, "Who is the police officer here? You or me?"


title: Marc Dutroux

text: Marc Dutroux was arrested on 6 December 1995 on car theft charges and subsequently jailed for four months. During those three months, Lejeune and Russo, undiscovered by police, died of starvation and dehydration in their dungeon cell, as the wife of Dutroux did not feed them, despite being aware that they required her care to remain alive.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: During the search of the houses of Dutroux, about a hundred video tapes were found. They were never looked at. Some of them showed Dutroux constructing the dungeon in which Lejeune and Russo were held. Had police looked at them, they might have found the dungeon containing Lejeune and Russo. The video tapes had been in the possession of the police since December 1995. They had been passed on to the prosecutors in the case, but not to the judges. Furthermore, some of the video tapes were returned to Dutroux by police officer René Michaux without ever being looked at.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: Michel Bourlet, who was appointed lead investigator, said that some of the video tapes had disappeared and that he wanted to have them all recovered and reviewed.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: The videos were reportedly stolen after they were returned to Dutroux. In 1999 some of the tapes were finally reviewed. One of them showed Dutroux raping a young woman in Slovakia. The videos could have made it possible to identify other victims and also to determine the severity of the torture that the victims had to endure during their ordeal.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: Later during the trial, the lawyer of one of the victims, Laetitia Delhez, also expressed disappointment that the videos were not reviewed, because they could have proved that Dutroux was not acting alone.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: On 23 April 1998, Dutroux was allowed to view his case files. He was accompanied by two police officers. When one officer went on a break, Dutroux overpowered the other officer and was able to escape. He was captured a few hours later. The Minister of Justice, Stefaan De Clerck, the Minister of the Interior, Johan Vande Lanotte, and the police chief resigned as a result. In 2000, Dutroux received a five-year sentence for threatening a police officer during his escape. In 2002, he received another five-year sentence for unrelated crimes.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: Thousands of hairs were found in the cellar dungeon where Lejeune and Russo were held. However, those were not tested for DNA until 2001.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: An inquiry began into the handling of the investigation by officer De Baets. This inquiry monopolised resources; during the inquiry, it was not possible for De Baets to pass on information to the Parliamentary inquiry into the handling of the case; crucial time was lost.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: There were accusations that language difficulties obscured the investigation. The testimony of Régina Louf was in Dutch; however, it was reviewed several times by the new investigators, who were primarily French-speaking; they had difficulties in understanding her, resulting in the meaning of her testimony being altered to make her sound less credible.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: Several sources had said that Michel Nihoul and Marc Dutroux were planning a prostitution and human trafficking operation between Slovakia, the Czech Republic and western Europe. Several other pieces of evidence pointed to connections to Slovakia and the Czech Republic. This included a video tape of Dutroux raping a child in Slovakia that police failed to review after it was seized. The car theft and smuggling operation that Dutroux was involved in pointed to those two Eastern European countries. At the time of his arrest, Dutroux was in possession of 2,000 SKK in cash. Six Belgian investigators visited the Czech Republic and Slovakia in August 1996. It was not seen to be possible for them to prove that Dutroux had committed any crimes while there, and they returned to Belgium without any substantial evidence.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: Many Belgians came to believe that Dutroux was part of a paedophile network which included high-ranking members of the Belgian establishment and that the other people involved were never prosecuted.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: In October 1996, judge Jean-Marc Connerotte was removed from the investigation, ostensibly due to concerns of his impartiality after he attended a fund-raising dinner for the victims' families. Press reports claimed that, prior to his removal, Connerotte was on the verge of publicly disclosing the names of high level government officials who had been recognized on video-tapes. Connerotte had said that the businessman Michel Nihoul was the brains behind the child kidnapping operation. Investigators also believed that Dutroux and Nihoul were planning on a long-distance prostitution trafficking network involving cars and the import of girls from Slovakia.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: The investigating police said in 1996, that Dutroux was part of a child-prostitution ring, that may also have been responsible for several other disappearances still unsolved. They also said that the gang around Dutroux offered $5000 per girl they received. Their criminal activities also involved car theft and smuggling. The car in which Lejeune and Russo were kidnapped was never found. The general prosecutor, Anne Thilly, decided to have the car theft and smuggling be investigated by different police authorities in different parts of the country. In this way it was nearly impossible to investigate the connection between the car theft, kidnapping and human trafficking. According to blogger Elizabeth Vos, writing in Consortium News, Dutroux also said that Nihoul had proposed to traffic girls from Eastern countries.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: Michel Lelièvre, the accomplice of Marc Dutroux, said that the two girls, Lejeune and Russo, were kidnapped as an order by a third party. However, while under arrest, Lelièvre stopped cooperating with the authorities. He told police that he had been threatened and could not risk saying any more.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: The father of Mélissa Russo, Gino Russo, said during the White March that the removal of judge Connerotte was like ""spitting on the grave of Julie and Mélissa"." Russo subsequently said that after Connerotte was removed there was no progress in the investigation.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: Dutroux owned ten houses. He was in total worth 6 million Belgian francs (US$130,000). While he had all of this wealth in property he also received public assistance of $1,200 a month. It is not clear how Dutroux was able to acquire the ten properties. Documents released by WikiLeaks show that large sums of money in different currencies arrived in Michelle Martin's bank account, linked in time to the disappearances of the abducted girls. According to Elizabeth Vos, the money was also transferred in foreign currencies from Morocco and Saudi Arabia. Both the transfers and the value of the six properties that Dutroux owned suggested to investigators that he was financed by a larger pedophile and prostitution ring. The Flemish newspaper "Nieuwsblad" reported that he had committed health-insurance fund fraud, theft, insurance fraud and investments on the stock market and that these had contributed to his wealth.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: Other outlets suggested that he was able to acquire his wealth through criminal activity such as drug-trafficking and mugging. Additional sources said that he made a lot of money with car theft and pimping.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: Paul Marchal, the father of the murdered An Marchal, accused the police and the judicial system of a cover-up in 2001. He was angry that still in 2001 the trial had not started even though Dutroux had been under arrest for several years. Marchal said: ""It feels like they don't want to find the truth. It is not a good feeling and not only I think this"."


title: Marc Dutroux

text: Carine Russo and her husband Gino Russo were not permitted to identify their daughter and look at her body. They were told by authorities that Dutroux had identified her and that that was enough. The autopsy of Mélissa showed that she had been raped repeatedly over a prolonged period of time. No DNA evidence was taken from the body to conclusively make sure that only Dutroux had raped her. Dutroux always denied raping Mélissa and Julie.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: Eventually several families of victims boycotted the official trial, stating that it was a circus and there had been no progress in the case since the removal of judge Connerotte.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: There were countless hairs found in the dungeon where the two girls were held. Judge Langlois refused to have them tested for DNA evidence even though the leading police investigator, Michel Bourlet, had begged him to have them analyzed in order to know whether more people beside Dutroux were involved. The general prosecutor of the case, Anne Thily, said that she did not believe there was anyone else involved and thus did not have the samples analyzed. Thily told investigative journalist Olenka Frenkiel, "In any case the hairs have all now been analysed—all 5,000. And the results of this analysis? Nothing. No evidence of any relevance in the Dutroux affair. Which proves, of course, that Langlois was right all along." According to Frenkiel, this was not true. Sources central to the investigation confirmed that, as of 2002, the hairs had still not been analysed. Frenkiel accused senior prosecutor Thily of lying brazenly. Frenkiel continued to question Thily and asked her how she would want to prove that Dutroux raped the girls, as he was denying it and there was no DNA evidence. Thily then replied that there were DNA tests, but that the results came back inconclusive as the bodies were too decomposed at the time the samples were taken. Dutroux's lawyer, Xavier Magnee, said during the trial proceedings "I speak not only as a lawyer, but also as a citizen and father. He was not the only devil. Out of the 6000 hair samples that were found in the basement cellar where some of the victims were held, 25 "unknown" DNA profiles were discovered. There were people in that cellar that are not now accused." The prosecution never attempted to match those DNA profiles to people implicated in the case.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: Magnee also asserted that the prosecutors did not follow up on evidence pointing to a cult called "Abrasax", which allegedly performed human sacrifices. In a wooden house owned by Bernard Weinstein, a letter was found from the occult sect "Abrasax", in which a gift for Dominique Kindermans, the high priestress, was mentioned, consisting of 17 girls between the age of 2 and 20 for anal, oral and vaginal sex. It was signed by priest "Anubis". This priest was later identified as Francis De Smedt. Later investigations showed that four policemen in Charleroi were also members of the sect; one was even the treasurer. The headquarters of Institut Abrasax in Rue Emile Vandervelde 223 Forchies La Marche was raided in 1996 by 150 officers. Video of the raid showed police taking away bags of papers, video cassettes and a refrigerator. They also took away black magic ritual implements and human skulls.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: Several police officers who had worked on the case were subsequently removed from the case in 1997. They were reportedly removed because they had manipulated evidence surrounding the testimony of Régina Louf. The involved officers always denied that accusation. This included officer Rudi Hoskens, who believed that the testimony of witness X1, Régina Louf, was true because her testimony matched an unsolved murder case that she could have had no knowledge of, had she not witnessed it. What she described was the murder of then 15-year-old Christine van Hees. She said that the girl was tortured to death by the group and that Nihoul took part in the torture. She said Dutroux watched. Christine van Hees's body was found in 1984. The officer leading the investigation, De Baets, stated that they followed up on all testimonies the X witnesses had given, in order to determine whether what they said was possible or not, and that they came to the conclusion that it was possible that the things had occurred as the witnesses described them. As this took up a lot of resources and time of the police force, an inquiry was initiated into the handling of the case, which then again took up as many resources as the investigation of De Baets itself. It was said that:"The suspicion grew that De Baets and others formed part of a sect bent on destabilising the kingdom." De Baets and large parts of his team were removed from the investigation and sent home on indefinite leave. Not only was De Baets dropped from the investigation, but he was also charged in 1997 with concealing the fact that Louf had wrongly identified the photograph of one of the victims. However, on the videotapes of her interrogation, it is visible that it was very hard for her to stand looking at the photographs and that her right answer had been in the files all along. In 1999, De Baets was exonerated from the charges. Additionally, two journalists from "Le Soir", who were judged to have defamed him and four colleagues, were ordered to pay the gendarmes 2.2 million Belgian francs ($55,000), plus costs. Even though De Baets had been exonerated, he and his colleagues remained on leave.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: An officer searched Dutroux's house while Lejeune and Russo were likely still alive on 13 and 19 December 1995. Although the locksmith who inspected the house with him suggested they should search the whole house to find out where children's screams were coming from, Michaux left after not having searched the house thoroughly. Not only did Michaux fail to rescue Lejeune and Russo, he also failed to ever look at video tapes that were confiscated from Dutroux's house. Those video tapes showed him constructing the dungeon, which would have led them to the place where Lejeune and Russo had been kept. Some of the videos also included tapes of Dutroux raping women. Many of the tapes were returned to Dutroux without ever being looked at by law enforcement.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: Even though Michaux committed grave failures in his duty as a police officer in what was one of the most important criminal cases in the history of Belgium, he was never removed or put on leave like other officers had been. According to Vos, he was subsequently promoted to the position of police commissioner.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: At least seven members of law enforcement were arrested on suspicion of having ties to Marc Dutroux. One of them was Georges Zico, a police detective believed to be an associate of Dutroux. According to prosecutor Michel Bourlet, Zico was charged with truck theft, document forgery and insurance fraud.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: The judge presiding over the Dutroux case, Judge Jean-Claude Van Espen, had a close relationship with Michel Nihoul. A journalist revealed that, while he was a lawyer, Van Espen had represented the wife of Nihoul. Van Espen's sister was the godmother of Nihoul's child. However, even though his close friend Michel Nihoul was involved in the case, Van Espen never resigned. He was also not removed from the case for a very long time, even though judge Conerotte had been removed simply for attending a fundraising dinner. Van Espen was furthermore the judge presiding over the murder case of Christine van Hees from 1984. He only resigned from the Dutroux case in 1998, when Nihoul was accused of being involved in the murder and Van Espen's close ties to Nihoul were revealed.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: Connerotte testified in the Dutroux case on 4 March 2004. He broke down in the witness box stating that there had been high-level murder plots to stop his investigation into the child-sex mafia. He stated that he had to drive in bullet-proof cars and had armed guards around him at all times because shadowy figures from the crime world were threatening him. The police had informed him that murder contracts had been taken out against the prosecutors in the case. He alleged that organised crime methods were used to discredit his work and make sure that the investigation would end in a judicial failure.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: Connerotte criticised authorities for not rescuing Lejeune and Russo, even though Dutroux had been a prime suspect for one year before they were found dead. Connerotte also said that he had received files describing a child-sex network. It described seizure of children and foreign trafficking. The sum of 150,000 francs was mentioned as the price for a girl. Connerotte also said that he was doubtful of the official explanation on how Lejeune and Russo died. It was said that they starved to death in the dungeon. An adult can last about three days without water and maximum 60 days without food. If they received nothing to drink and eat they should have been dead very soon after Dutroux was imprisoned. However, Michelle Martin insisted that they were still alive when he returned. Connerotte had even written to King Albert II of Belgium in 1996, stating that his investigations into crime networks were being blocked because suspects "received serious protection". The judge said that the "dysfunctional judiciary" was breaking down as mafia groups took secret control of the "key institutions of the country".


title: Marc Dutroux

text: A letter from Connerotte addressed to King Albert II in 1996 stated: ""This institution seems to acquire its authority and supremacy over sectors of the justice system by relying on a complex and secret modus operandi, that of the appropriation of certain key circuits of our institutions created and regulated by the Law. It is a matter essentially of political, financial, police, and media circuits. This mafia-style criminal phenomenon is evidently not peculiar to Belgium, but it involves particular manifestations that are well suited to this small country. We can imagine the obstacles that a judiciary inquiry will meet when investigating such facts: numerous taboos, problems of mentality, and a lack of cultural reference on the issue in order to be able to become aware of or deal with such criminal phenomena, taking advantage in Belgium of official reticence in terms of their acknowledgement, which favours or supports their occultation. The function of a criminal system of this sort is obviously to serve its fundamental purpose, the pursuance of particularly profitable illicit activities, such as money-laundering, and to protect the 'legitimacy' of its activities and the impunity of its agents. This indispensable function corresponds to the motive of criminal protection that assures the permanency of the incriminated system by means of the infiltration of the certain circuits of our institutions, especially the police force, a veritable 'knot' which my whole investigation has come up against.""


title: Marc Dutroux

text: Marc Verwilghen, the chairman of the parliamentary inquiry into the handling of the Dutroux case, reported attempts in a book he published in 1999 to stifle their investigation into how the case had been handled. Verwilghen eventually published a book that claimed that the commission's findings had been muzzled by political and judicial leaders to prevent the revelation of details that would have implicated the complicity of additional perpetrators. Verwilghen claimed that senior political and legal figures refused to cooperate with the inquiry. He said magistrates and police were officially told to refuse to answer certain questions, in what he described as 'a characteristic smothering operation'. Verwilghen blamed Langlois for refusing to hand over evidence of official protection for Dutroux. He said that if they had received that information, their report would have been without doubt more precise and detailed. Verwilghen added that for him, the Dutroux affair was a question of organised crime.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: The Belgian Senator Anne-Marie Lizin commented on the case saying: ""Stupidity (by the police) can't be the only explanation. It's a question of stupidity, incompetence and corruption. Dutroux must be a friend of somebody important. Or else he was being protected because he was known to be a police informant"." Lizin said Dutroux was not a true pedophile, as he has been portrayed. He had a record of dealing in stolen cars, selling arms to hoodlums and trafficking in prostitution. ""When he discovered that men paid a lot more for little girls for prostitution, he started kidnapping them,"" she said. When Dutroux finally was arrested, police found in his house video films of him raping little girls. They said he did this so he could sell the films to pedophiles"."


title: Marc Dutroux

text: In 2009 WikiLeaks published the Dutroux Dossier. Belgian authorities tried to have the dossier taken down. The prosecutor general of Liege, Cedric Visart de Bocarme, said ""There is some true, some false, some very disparate information here, involving some people who have done nothing wrong, who have simply been mentioned in an investigation and are thus exposed to public contempt, whereas all this material should have remained classified.""


title: Marc Dutroux

text: A 17-month investigation by a parliamentary commission into the Dutroux affair produced a report in February 1998, which concluded that while Dutroux did not have accomplices in high positions in the police and justice systems, as he continued to claim, he profited from corruption, sloppiness and incompetence.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: In October 1996, more than 300,000 Belgians marched through the streets of Brussels after judge Jean-Marc Connerotte was removed from the case. He was removed for attending a fundraising dinner for the families of the victims, which the court system claimed damaged his impartiality. They demanded an investigation and reform of the police and justice system. The protest was called the "White March". Connerotte was beloved by the public because the only two surviving victims were rescued on his initiative, which made him a national hero. Protesters were wearing signs that said "Stop the cover-up".


title: Marc Dutroux

text: To protest the prospect of a conditional release of Dutroux, a "Black March" was organised on the 23rd anniversary of the "White March". The calls to take part in the march were made after it was made public that a court had approved the request of Michel Lelièvre for conditional release, who was an accomplice of Dutroux and had received a 25-year sentence.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: "The Guardian" reported in 2004 that "the entire credibility of the current reformist government of Guy Verhofstadt and Belgium's very reputation as a normal civilised country is on the line."


title: Marc Dutroux

text: The crimes of Marc Dutroux were covered in multiple nonfiction documentaries, one of the earliest being a British public-access TV documentary titled "Witness: The Lost Children" (Channel 4, 1999, directed by Helen Hill), which was narrated by Stephen Rashbrook and featured interviews with multiple family members of the victims, as well as with Claude Thirault, a next-door neighbour of Dutroux's who had later become a police informant after raising personal suspicions about Dutroux's activities, which had included watching small children from the street, and also being caught digging up under water tanks in an old basement, creating a space where Thirault claimed that Dutroux had planned to use for hiding children in. An episode of "Crimes That Shook the World" titled "Monster of Belgium" (Season 2, Episode 9, April 2009) was aired later on by Discovery Channel, bringing North American attention to the Belgium case.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: The assassination of André Cools took place in 1991. The revelations in the Cools case coincided with the revelations in the Dutroux case and in total made the Belgian public lose trust in their government. Van der Biest was eventually convicted but had already been investigated five years prior as the one who ordered the contract hit on Cools. Due to failures in the investigation he was not charged. It was found that several Belgian politicians had been bribed with large sums of money by an Italian helicopter manufacturer, Agusta, in exchange for military contracts. This included Belgian secretary general of NATO, Willy Claes. There were allegations that both the assassination of Cools and the case surrounding Dutroux showed that organised crime had spread in Belgium and that the institutions were not efficient in combatting the spread or corruption and organised crime.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: Dutroux's trial began on 1 March 2004, some seven and a half years after his initial arrest. It was a trial by jury and up to 450 people were called upon to testify. The trial took place in Arlon, the capital of the Belgian province of Luxembourg, where the investigations had started. Dutroux was tried for the murders of An Marchal, Eefje Lambrecks and Bernard Weinstein. Dutroux was also charged with a host of other crimes: auto theft, abduction, attempted murder and attempted abduction, molestation, and three unrelated rapes of women from Slovakia.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: Martin was tried as an accomplice, as were Lelièvre and . To protect the accused, they were made to sit in a glass cage during the trial. In the first week of the trial, photos of Dutroux's face were not allowed to be printed in Belgian newspapers for privacy reasons; this ban remained in force until 9 March.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: In a rare move, the jury at the assizes trial publicly protested the presiding judge Stéphane Goux's handling of the debates and the victims' testimonies. On 14 June 2004, after three months of trial, the jury went into seclusion to reach their verdicts on Dutroux and the three other accused. Verdicts were returned on 17 June 2004 after three days of deliberation. Dutroux, Martin and Lelièvre were found guilty on all charges; the jury were unable to reach a verdict on Nihoul's role.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: Dutroux claimed that he was a low dog in a powerful pedophile network. He further claimed that Michel Nihoul was the organizer of their abductions." While admitting some abductions, he denied being a murderer, although he had earlier confessed to killing Weinstein. He said that he did torture and abuse all of the girls but denied killing any of them until the very end. Dutroux further denied the kidnapping, raping and murdering Julie Lejeune and Mélissa Russo. He, however, admitted to incarcerating them at one of his houses. In the case of Lejeune and Russo, Dutroux also claimed that he had "protected them from a powerful and sinister child sex ring." His testimony that he never raped Lejeune and Russo was somewhat supported by examinations by psychiatrists in 1996, which stated that Dutroux did not fit the pedophile profile. He was not attracted to children, but he might have chosen to abduct younger victims because they were easier to manipulate and control.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: Dutroux admitted to abduction and rape of the other girls. He also admitted to burying his accomplice, Bernard Weinstein, alive for ""letting the girls die."" Dutroux further said that two unidentified policemen had taken part with him in the kidnapping of An Marchal and Eefje Lambrecks. He boasted about having built the dungeon in which Marchal and Lambrecks were held for a while. He said: ""I wanted to create a hiding place to spare them from being sent to a prostitution ring."" Dutroux admitted to raping Lambrecks. He said that Weinstein had raped Marchal. He also admitted to drugging both of them. Dutroux also admitted that he kidnapped Sabine Dardenne and raped her. He admitted to kidnapping and raping Laetitia Delhez but not handing them over to Nihoul "to spare them the fate of An and Eefje." Dutroux's lawyer, Xavier Magnee, repeatedly said that the prosecution never followed up on evidence of a network surrounding Dutroux.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: Martin testified that Dutroux and Weinstein kidnapped Lejeune and Russo. She also said that Dutroux had told her that he had murdered Weinstein. Martin further said that Dutroux and Weinstein had killed Marchal and Lambrecks. She further testified that Lejeune and Russo starved to death in their basement in 1996 while Dutroux was in jail. She claims that she was too scared to descend to the basement.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: Martin said that Dutroux had already decided to abduct girls in 1985. He had said that it was easier to abduct and rape girls than having to start affairs with them. This way he would also have more resources and time to spend on her. So she had to help him with the abductions.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: The X files were testimonies of people who claimed to have been victims of Dutroux. They had been created after judge Jean-Marc Connerotte had made a public appeal for victims to come forward. In total at least ten victims subsequently contacted the police. All of the witnesses were given the code name "X number". One of the witnesses' names, namely X1, was revealed to be Régina Louf. X1 said that from the age of 11/12 onwards a family friend named Tony Van den Bogaert took her to sex parties with the approval of her family. Several witnesses and family members of Louf confirmed that she had a sexual relationship with Van den Bogaert starting from at least age 12. However, Van den Bogaert has never been interrogated, charged or convicted for sexual abuse. She claimed that other minors were present at the sex parties and that those were secretly filmed for blackmail purposes. She said: ""It was highly organised. Big business. Blackmail. There was a lot of money involved."" During her testimony she described some regular clients including judges, a prominent politician and one banker. She gave the police names, addresses and detailed description of two murders that matched unsolved cases of the two murders of teenage girls. Louf said that the parties did not only include sex but also sadism, torture and murder. She claimed that one of the organisers of the parties was a man she knew as Mich (Jean Michel Nihoul). Louf described him as a cruel man, who sadistically tortured girls.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: Louf said that Dutroux was at that time a young man who brought drugs to the parties for the girls to numb themselves and took care of them in other ways. As a reward he was also allowed to use them for his pleasure. The crimes that Louf described took place about ten years prior to the arrest of Dutroux. Louf's full name was leaked to the press. She was subsequently made out to look like a fantasist and liar. The new presiding judges declared that she was not a credible witness and that her testimony and the testimony of the other X witnesses would not be used during the trial.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: One of the other X witnesses, whose real name was not revealed, but who's now working for the police, said that they had witnessed and experienced similar abuse. They also recounted instances where children were chased through the woods with Dobermans.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: Witness X3 testified that one of the people present at the gatherings that involved sex orgies with minors, torture and murder was Willy Claes, secretary general of the NATO. Claes resigned after he was found guilty of corruption in a tendering process for a large defence contract connected to Agusta helicopters, a large military-helicopter producer from Italy.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: The testimony of X2 implicated that Etienne Davignon, Maurice Lippens, Paul Vanden Boeynants, Benoît de Bonvoisin and Prince Alexandre of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha were named as having been present at orgies involving underaged persons.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: A book was published in November 1999 titled: "The X-Files: What Belgium Was Not Supposed to Know About the Dutroux Affair". It was written by two journalists from the Flemish Belgian newspaper "De Morgen", Annemie Bulte and Douglas De Coninck and another journalist from the French Belgian newspaper "Journal du Mardi", Marie-Jeanne Van Heeswyck. It claimed that the X witnesses were much more believable than stated by the media. But it also stated that there had been substantial efforts by the magistrates and senior police officials to demolish the testimony of the X-witnesses. The father of a police officer that was murdered while investigating a car smuggling ring, Judge Guy Poncelet, said that the book was brilliant and convincing. He said he believed that crucial evidence had been downplayed by the authorities.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: The death penalty was abolished in Belgium in 1996. The last execution for common-law crimes was in 1918. However, the majority of Belgians, at the time of the trial, would have had no problem with Dutroux receiving the death penalty. On 22 June 2004, Dutroux received the maximum sentence of life imprisonment, while Martin received 30 years and Lelièvre 25 years. The jury was asked to go back into seclusion to decide whether or not Nihoul was an accomplice.


title: Marc Dutroux

text: Although Nihoul was acquitted of kidnapping and conspiracy charges, he was convicted on drug-related charges and was sentenced to five years' imprisonment. Nihoul was released in spring 2006. He resided in Zeebrugge until his death on 23 October 2019.