title: Public limited company

text: A company can increase its authorised share capital by passing an ordinary resolution (unless its articles of association require a special or extraordinary resolution). A copy of the resolution – and notice of the increase on Form 123 – must reach Companies House within 15 days of being passed. No fee is payable to Companies House.


title: Public limited company

text: A company can decrease its authorised share capital by passing an ordinary resolution to cancel shares which have not been taken or agreed to be taken by any person. Notice of the cancellation, on Form 122, must reach Companies House within one month. No fee is payable to Companies House.


title: Public limited company

text: A company may have as many different types of shares as it wishes, all with different conditions attached to them. Generally share types are divided into the following categories:


title: Public limited company

text: Bearer shares are no longer possible, as they were abolished in the UK by the Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Act 2015. Any existing bearer shares had to be converted to registered shares before February 2016, or face cancellation.


title: Public limited company

text: A PLC has access to capital markets and can offer its shares for sale to the public through a recognised stock exchange. It can also issue advertisements offering any of its securities for sale to the public. In contrast, a private company may not offer to the public any shares in itself.


title: Public limited company

text: The key difference with the paper process is that there is no Form 12 and requirement for a statutory declaration. This significantly speeds the process and Companies House's record for an Electronic Company formation is 23 minutes.


title: Public limited company

text: Because the electronic process requires compatible software that works with Companies House eFiling service, companies are usually formed through a Company Formation Agent.


title: Public limited company

text: Every company must deliver an annual return to Companies House at least once every twelve months. It has 28 days from the date to which the return is made up to do this. Failure to file a return is a criminal offence, for which the officers of the company may be fined.


title: Public limited company

text: There is an annual document-processing fee of £40 if filed by paper (or £13 for users of the Electronic Filing or WebFilings services), which must be sent to Companies House with the annual return.


title: Public limited company

text: Both a private company limited by shares and an unlimited company with a share capital may re-register as a plc, but a company without a share capital cannot do so.


title: Public limited company

text: A private company must pass a special resolution that it be so re-registered and deliver a copy of the resolution together with an application form to the Registrar. The resolution must also:


title: Public limited company

text: If it does not already have sufficient share capital, the company must issue £50,000 in shares a minimum of 25% part paid.


title: Pedro Infante

text: Pedro Infante Cruz (; 18 November 1917 – 15 April 1957) was a Mexican ranchera music singer and actor, whose career spanned the golden age of Mexican cinema. His popularity spread across Latin America.


title: Pedro Infante

text: Infante was born in Mazatlán, Sinaloa, and raised in nearby Guamúchil. He died on 15 April 1957 in Mérida, Yucatán, while en route to Mexico City when his plane crashed due to engine failure.


title: Pedro Infante

text: From 1939 until his death, Infante acted in over 60 films (30 of them with his brother Ángel) and recorded over 350 songs. For his performance in the movie "Tizoc", he was posthumously awarded the Silver Bear for Best Actor at the 7th Berlin International Film Festival.


title: Pedro Infante

text: Pedro Infante was born 18 November 1917, the son of Delfino Infante García (24 December 1880 – 17 March 1955), who played the double bass in a band, and Maria del Refugio Cruz Aranda. He was the third of fifteen children, of whom nine survived. Although the Infante Cruz family stayed for some time at Mazatlán, in early 1919 they moved to Guamúchil. In 1920 they moved to El Rosario, Sinaloa. As a teen, Infante showed talent and affection for music, and even made his own guitar in a carpenter shop, played in the Luis Ibarra Orchestra led by his father, and formed his own band called "La Rabia" (The Anger) in 1933. He managed to learn strings, wind, and percussion instruments in a short time, having received music lessons from Carlos R. Hubbard.


title: Pedro Infante

text: In addition, he won a charro suit in an amateur contest at the Colonial Theater, singing "Vereda Tropical". In 1937 he became part of the Orquesta Estrella de Culiacán (Culiacán Star Orchestra), as a singer as well as violinist and drummer, for a year and a half.


title: Pedro Infante

text: His wife, María Luisa León, who died of cardiac arrest on 27 October 1978, was somewhat well-off, economically. According to her memoir "Pedro Infante en la intimidad conmigo" (1961) ("Pedro Infante in intimacy with me"), she convinced him of the need to move to Mexico City to find better career opportunities in radio. In 1938, at the age of 21, he auditioned for a position at the radio station XEB with Julián Morán accompanying him on piano. Ernesto Belloc who was the station's artistic director at the time, advised him that he had better continue his career as a carpenter as Infante had been nervous during the audition. The following week they allowed him to audition again, this time being hired to sing three times a week on the air.


title: Pedro Infante

text: In Mexico City, he sang the songs of composers including Alberto Cervantes, José Alfredo Jiménez, Cuco Sánchez, Tomás Méndez, Rubén Fuentes, (some of the most renowned composers from the golden age of Mexican Cinema) Salvador Flores Rivera (Chava Flores) (better known for his humorous songs), René Touzet and others. His first musical recording "El Soldado Raso" ("The Private") was made on 19 November 1943, for the Peerless Records Company. Infante first appeared as an extra in the movie "En un Burro Tres Baturros" ("Three Men from Aragon on a Donkey"), or the more correct and succinct transliteration, "Three "Baturros" on a Burro". His career as an actor in leading roles started with "La Feria de Las Flores" ("The Fair of Flowers"), literally translated as "The Flower Carnival," in 1943.


title: Pedro Infante

text: In that same year, a friend and neighbor of Infante's wife, Carmen Barajas Sandoval, offered to introduce them to Jorge Negrete, a singer whom he admired. Barajas, who knew people in the business as she was the aunt of the child actress Angélica María, worked then at the Sindicato de Trabajadores de la Producción Cinematográfica, S.T.P.C. ("Union of Cinema Production Workers"). She succeeded in convincing Negrete to recommend Infante to the producer Ismael Rodríguez, and others. As a result, he was invited to appear in different pictures, such as "Vuelve el Ametralladora" ("The Machine Gun Returns").


title: Pedro Infante

text: While married to María Luisa León, Infante met the dancer Lupita Torrentera Bablot (b. 2 November 1931), with whom he had three children: Graciela Margarita (26 September 1947 – 20 January 1949, poliomyelitis), Pedro Infante Jr. (31 March 1950 – 1 April 2009, suicide), and Guadalupe Infante Torrentera (b. 3 October 1951). Irma Infante (b. 27 March 1955) was born from his marriage to young actress Irma Dorantes.


title: Pedro Infante

text: Waltzes, cha-cha-chas, rancheras and boleros placed him among the most popular singers of the mariachi and ranchera music. Some of his most popular songs include: "Amorcito Corazón" (approximately "My Little Love, Sweetheart"), "Te Quiero Así" ("I Love You Like This"), "La Que Se Fue" ("She Who Left"),


title: Pedro Infante

text: "Corazón" ("Heart"), "El Durazno" ("The Peach"), "Dulce Patria" ("Sweet Fatherland"), "Maldita Sea Mi Suerte" ("Cursed Be My Luck"), "Así Es La vida" ("Life Is Like This"), "Mañana Rosalía" ("Tomorrow Rosalía"), "Mi Cariñito" ("My Little Darling"), "Dicen Que Soy Mujeriego" ("They Say I Am A Womanizer"), "Carta a Eufemia" ("Letter to Eufemia"), "Nocturnal", "Cien Años" ("Hundred Years"), "Flor Sin Retoño" ("Flower Without Sprout"), "Pénjamo", and "¿Qué Te Ha Dado Esa Mujer?" ("What Has That Woman Given You?"). He sang "Mi Cariñito" to his frequent on screen grandmother, Sara Garcia, so many times in so many of their movies together, that it was played at her funeral.


title: Pedro Infante

text: The world-famous song "Bésame Mucho" ("Kiss Me a Lot", or more loosely translated to get its elusive Spanish meaning closer to its English meaning, "Give Me a Lot of Kisses"), from the composer Consuelo Velázquez, was the only melody that he recorded in English and he interpreted it in the movie "A Toda Máquina" (ATM) ("At Full Speed"), with Luis Aguilar.


title: Pedro Infante

text: Infante's hobby was aviation, logging 2,989 flight hours, under the pseudonym Captain Cruz, which then led to his death on the morning of 15 April 1957. Infante had survived two prior plane crashes, the first one occurred in 1947, and another in 1949 in which he had received an injury to his forehead that left him with a metal plate. According to Wilbert Alonzo-Cabrera, his biographer, the actor was co-piloting a Consolidated B-24D, which had been converted from heavy bomber to freighter in San Diego, California. On the day of the crash, he was on his way to Mexico City from Mérida, Yucatán to challenge the ruling that annulled his marriage with Irma Dorantes. The air traffic controller, Carmen León, was the last person to hear Infante's voice. The plane crashed five minutes after taking off from Mérida, Yucatán, in southeast Mexico. An engine failed on takeoff, causing the plane to spiral to the ground, killing two on the ground as well as all three on the plane, Infante, pilot Víctor Manuel Vidal Lorca and Marcial Bautista. A 19 year old woman named Ruth Russell Chan, who was on the ground at the time of the crash, also died.


title: Pedro Infante

text: Infante's death was announced by radio personality Húmberto Sánchez-Rodríguez, of radio station XEMH of Mérida, after one of the firefighters discovered a bracelet engraved with the name "Pedro Infante", plus the winged insignia that symbolized his aviator license. This was around 8:15 am; at 11:12 am, Manuel Bernal, of Mexico City radio station XEW, gave the news saying: "this Monday, 15 April 1957, Pedro, our beloved Pedro...this has been confirmed, has died in a tragic accident in Mérida, Yucatán". His remains were later identified by the gold bracelet he wore. Additional identification was done during the autopsy by Benjamín Góngora, from the metal plate in Infante's forehead that he received after his injuries in the 1949 crash.


title: Pedro Infante

text: Two days later he was laid to rest at the Panteón Jardín cemetery amid 300,000 people who had come for the gathered to the closed casket funeral after tribute at the Jorge Negrete Theater. Rodolfo Echeverría, who was Secretary-General of the National Actors Association at that time, delivered Infante's eulogy. Infante died intestate.


title: Pedro Infante

text: In 1983, the radio state KWKW, located in Los Angeles, CA, who was at the time broadcasting a Pedro Infante hour that aired songs as well as readings of fan letters, organized a campaign to change one of Boyle Heights street names to Pedro Infante Street. Later it was decided Euclid Heights would become Pedro Infante Street, and the unveiling of the street sign was in August 1983.


title: Pedro Infante

text: Infante was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on August 1, 1993. His star is located at 7083 Hollywood Boulevard.


title: Pedro Infante

text: On April 2, 2001, Infante was inducted into the International Latin Music Hall of Fame in an awards ceremony that also included Xavier Cugat and Ruben Blades. The event was held at the Hostos Center For The Arts And Culture, located in the Bronx, New York City, NY.


title: Pedro Infante

text: According to producer Jorge Madrid y Campos, who was also his legal representative, Pedro Infante's fame has increased greatly since his death. Infante attracts a great number of fans of every age to his shrine in the Panteón Jardín of Mexico City, as well as the one at 54th and 87th streets in the historic center of Mérida. Singers of ranchera and mariachi have paid posthumous musical homage to him. Denise Chávez, said in her book "Loving Pedro Infante": "If you're a [Mexican], and don't know who he is, you should be tied to a hot stove with a yucca rope and beaten with sharp dry corn husks as you stand in a vat of soggy fideos. If your racial and cultural background or ethnicity is other, then it's about time you learned about the most famous of Mexican singers and actors."


title: Pedro Infante

text: In 2017, for what would have been Infante's 100th birthday, his life and career was celebrated with a Google Doodle that featured a slideshow with six graphics depicting Infante wearing traditional Mariachi garb, as a singer, a boxer as well as others. Infante was also briefly depicted in the 2017 animated Disney movie "Coco", along with Jorge Negrete.


title: Pedro Infante

text: Some fans have speculated that his death was faked. These rumors were fueled by, among other factors, the fact that Infante's body was burned beyond recognition in the airplane crash, and by the appearance, in the 1980s, of a man named Antonio Pedro, who was thought to have resemblance to Infante. Antonio Pedro even went to the Maria Laria television talk show in the U.S.A., to claim he was Infante.


title: Luchino Visconti

text: Luchino Visconti di Modrone, Count of Lonate Pozzolo (; 2 November 1906 – 17 March 1976) was an Italian filmmaker, stage director, and screenwriter. A major figure of Italian art and culture in the mid-20th century, Visconti was one of the fathers of cinematic neorealism, but later moved towards luxurious, sweeping epics dealing with themes of beauty, decadence, death, and European history, especially the decay of the nobility and the bourgeoisie. He was the recipient of many accolades, including the Palme d'Or and the Golden Lion, and many of his works are regarded as highly-influential to future generations of filmmakers.


title: Luchino Visconti

text: Born to a Milanese noble family, Visconti explored artistic proclivities from an early age, working as an assistant director to Jean Renoir. His 1943 directorial debut, "Ossessione," was condemned by the Fascist regime for its unvarnished depictions of working-class characters resorting to criminality, but is today renowned as a pioneering work of Italian cinema. His best-known films include "Senso" (1954) and "The Leopard" (1963),"" both historical melodramas based on Italian literary classics, the gritty drama "Rocco and His Brothers" (1960), and his "German Trilogy" – "The Damned" (1969), "Death in Venice" (1971) and "Ludwig" (1973). He was also an accomplished stage director of plays and opera, both in Italy and abroad.


title: Luchino Visconti

text: Luchino Visconti was born into a prominent noble family in Milan, one of seven children of Giuseppe Visconti di Modrone, Duke of Grazzano Visconti and Count of Lonate Pozzolo, and his wife Carla ("née" Erba, heiress to Erba Pharmaceuticals). He was formally known as Count "don" Luchino Visconti di Modrone, and his family is a branch of the Visconti of Milan where they ruled from 1277 to 1447, initially as lords, then as dukes.


title: Luchino Visconti

text: He grew up in the Milanese family seat, the "Palazzo Visconti di Modrone" in Via Cerva, as well as on the family estate, "Grazzano Visconti Castle" near Vigolzone. He was baptized and raised in the Roman Catholic church. After his parents separated in the early 1920s, his mother moved with her younger children, including him, to her own house in Milan, as well as to her summer residence, Villa Erba in Cernobbio on Lake Como. The father, as chamberlain of King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy, also owned a villa in Rome that Luchino later inherited and lived in for decades.


title: Luchino Visconti

text: In his early years, he was exposed to art, music and theatre: The "Palazzo Visconti di Modrone" in Milan, where he grew up, had its own small private theater and the children participated in its performances. The family also had their own box in the La Scala opera house. Luchino studied cello with the Italian cellist and composer Lorenzo de Paolis (1890–1965) and met the composer Giacomo Puccini, the conductor Arturo Toscanini and the writer Gabriele D'Annunzio. Visconti found literature by reading Proust's "In Search of Lost Time", later a lifelong film project that he never realized. Before he started his film career, he was passionate about training racehorses in his own stable. An engagement concluded in 1935 with Princess Irma of Windisch-Graetz raised concerns with her father, Prince Hugo, whereupon Visconti broke it off.


title: Luchino Visconti

text: During World War II, Visconti joined the Italian Communist Party, which he considered to be the only effective opponent of Italian Fascism. While in his early years he had been impressed by such aesthetic aspects of the solemn parades of the National Fascist Party as marching in columns in boots and uniform, he had now come to hate the Mussolini regime. He accused the bourgeoisie of treason to tyranny, and following the Badoglio Proclamation, began working with the Italian resistance. He supported the communists' partisan fight at risk of death; his villa in Rome became a meeting place for oppositional artists.


title: Luchino Visconti

text: After the king's flight in autumn 1943 and the intervention of the Germans, he went into hiding in the mountains, at Settefrati, under the nom de guerre "Alfredo Guidi". Visconti helped English and American prisoners of war hide after they had escaped, and also gave shelter to partisans in his house in Rome, with the help of actress María Denis.


title: Luchino Visconti

text: After the German occupation of Rome in April 1944, Visconti was arrested and detained by the anti-partisan Pietro Koch and sentenced to execution by firing squad. He was only saved from death by Denis' last-minute intervention. After the war, Visconti testified against Koch, who was himself convicted and executed.


title: Luchino Visconti

text: He began his film-making career as a set dresser on Jean Renoir's "Partie de campagne" (1936) through the intercession of their common friend Coco Chanel. After a short tour of the United States, where he visited Hollywood, he returned to Italy to be Renoir's assistant again, this time for "Tosca" (1941), a production that was interrupted and later completed by German director Karl Koch.


title: Luchino Visconti

text: Together with Roberto Rossellini, Visconti joined the "salotto" of Vittorio Mussolini (the son of Benito, who was then the national arbitrator for cinema and other arts). Here he presumably also met Federico Fellini. With Gianni Puccini, Antonio Pietrangeli and Giuseppe De Santis, he wrote the screenplay for his first film as director: "Ossessione" ("Obsession", 1943), one of the first neorealist movies and an unofficial adaptation of the novel "The Postman Always Rings Twice".


title: Luchino Visconti

text: In 1948, he wrote and directed "La terra trema" ("The Earth Trembles"), based on the novel "I Malavoglia" by Giovanni Verga.


title: Luchino Visconti

text: Visconti continued working throughout the 1950s, but he veered away from the neorealist path with his 1954 film, "Senso", shot in colour. Based on the novella by Camillo Boito, it is set in Austrian-occupied Venice in 1866. In this film, Visconti combines realism and romanticism as a way to break away from neorealism. However, as one biographer notes, "Visconti without neorealism is like Lang without expressionism and Eisenstein without formalism". He describes the film as the "most Viscontian" of all Visconti's films. Visconti returned to neorealism once more with "Rocco e i suoi fratelli" ("Rocco and His Brothers", 1960), the story of Southern Italians who migrate to Milan hoping to find financial stability. In 1961, he was a member of the jury at the 2nd Moscow International Film Festival.


title: Luchino Visconti

text: Throughout the 1960s, Visconti's films became more personal. "Il Gattopardo" ("The Leopard", 1963) is based on Lampedusa's novel of the same name about the decline of the Sicilian aristocracy at the time of the Risorgimento, where the change of times becomes visible in two of the main characters: Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina (Burt Lancaster) appears patriarchal but humane, while Don Calogero Sedara (Paolo Stoppa), a shrewd entrepreneur and social climber from the village, appears submissive, but foxy and brutal at the same time, a mafia-like type of the future. The tension arises from the marriage of their relatives of the next generation, combined with the fall of the old Bourbon rule and the rise of a united Italy. This film was distributed in America and Britain by Twentieth-Century Fox, which deleted important scenes. Visconti repudiated the Twentieth-Century Fox version.


title: Luchino Visconti

text: It was not until "The Damned" (1969) that Visconti received a nomination for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. The film, one of Visconti's better-known works, concerns a German industrialist's family which begins to disintegrate during the Nazi consolidation of power in the 1930s. The film opened to widespread critical acclaim, but also faced controversy from ratings boards for its sexual content, including depictions of homosexuality, pedophilia, rape, and incest. In the United States, the film was given an X rating. The avant-garde filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder praised it as his favorite movie. Its decadence and lavish beauty are characteristic of Visconti's aesthetic − very visible also in the movie "Death in Venice" (1971) that processed the daring novella "Death in Venice" published in 1912 by Thomas Mann.


title: Luchino Visconti

text: Visconti's final film was "The Innocent" (1976), in which he returns to his recurring interest in infidelity and betrayal.


title: Luchino Visconti

text: Visconti was also a celebrated theatre and opera director. During the years 1946 to 1960 he directed many performances of the Rina Morelli-Paolo Stoppa Company with actor Vittorio Gassman as well as many celebrated productions of operas.


title: Luchino Visconti

text: Visconti's love of opera is evident in the 1954 "Senso", where the beginning of the film shows scenes from the fourth act of "Il trovatore", which were filmed at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice. Beginning when he directed a production at Milan's Teatro alla Scala of "La vestale" in December 1954, his career included a famous revival of "La traviata" at La Scala in 1955 with Maria Callas and an equally famous "Anna Bolena" (also at La Scala) in 1957 with Callas. A significant 1958 Royal Opera House (London) production of Verdi's five-act Italian version of "Don Carlos" (with Jon Vickers) followed, along with a "Macbeth" in Spoleto in 1958 and a famous black-and-white "Il trovatore" with scenery and costumes by Filippo Sanjust at the Royal Opera House in 1964. In 1966 Visconti's luscious "Falstaff" for the Vienna State Opera conducted by Leonard Bernstein was critically acclaimed. On the other hand, his austere 1969 "Simon Boccanegra" with the singers clothed in geometrical costumes provoked controversy.


title: Luchino Visconti

text: In the aftermath of World War II he became one of the founding fathers of the Italian neorealistic film movement that focused on challenging economic and conditions, and how it affected the psyche of the underclass. Visconti himself came from nobility, highly educated and never in financial lack. His films thusly reflected that tension. In fact Visconti said he felt he came from a world long ago, that of the previous (19th) century.


title: Luchino Visconti

text: In the film "The Leopard", he addressed the decline of an old social order and the rise of “modern times”. He did not see his opulent flashbacks as an escape into imaginary, lost worlds, but saw them as the deciphering of signs. He wanted to put his finger on the signs of profound historical changes that will only become visible later. He searched world literature for relevant works to show the discrepancies between generations and their world views, as a task of realism in art. When he was accused of decadence, he recalled Thomas Mann and his way of creating art.


title: Luchino Visconti

text: In later years, Visconti made no secret of his homosexuality, though he remained a devout Catholic throughout his life. "I am a Catholic," he commented in 1971. "I was born a Catholic, I was baptized a Catholic. I cannot change what I am, I cannot easily become a Protestant. My ideas may be unorthodox, but I am still a Catholic." While his first 3-years-relationship from 1936, with the photographer


title: Luchino Visconti

text: Horst P. Horst, remained discreet because of the circumstances of the time, he later showed up openly in the company of his lovers, among them the director and producer Franco Zeffirelli and the actor Udo Kier. His last lover was the Austrian actor Helmut Berger, who played Martin in Visconti's film "The Damned". Berger also appeared in Visconti's "Ludwig" in 1973 and "Conversation Piece" in 1974, along with Burt Lancaster. Zeffirelli also worked as part of the crew in production design, as assistant director, and other roles in a number of Visconti's films, operas, and theatrical productions. According to Visconti's autobiography, he and Umberto II of Italy had a romantic relationship during their youth in the 1920s.


title: Luchino Visconti

text: Visconti was hostile to the Protests of 1968 and didn't even try to follow the movement and adopt the airs of a youth, like Alberto Moravia or Pier Paolo Pasolini did. In his view the protesters sought change for the sake of destruction without building something new. Disgusted, he looked at the young people in their enthusiasm, outbursts of anger, parties and tumults, their abstract speeches, their confused juggling with Mao, Marx and Che Guevara. They saw him as a symbol of reaction, a member of the mandarin caste. The emerging radical-left terrorism in Italy frightened him and made him fear the rise of a new fascism.


title: Luchino Visconti

text: Visconti smoked 120 cigarettes a day. He suffered a heavy stroke in 1972, but continued to smoke heavily. He died in Rome of another stroke at the age of sixty-nine on 17 March 1976. There is a museum dedicated to the director's work in Ischia where he had his summer residence "La Colombaia".


title: Dead Presidents

text: Dead Presidents is a 1995 American crime film co-written, produced and directed by the Hughes Brothers. The film chronicles the life of Anthony Curtis (Larenz Tate), focusing on his teenage years as a high school graduate and his experiences during the Vietnam War as a Recon Marine. As he returns to his hometown in The Bronx, Curtis finds himself struggling to support himself and his family, eventually turning to a life of crime.


title: Dead Presidents

text: "Dead Presidents" is based partly on the real-life experiences of Haywood T. Kirkland (aka Ari S. Merretazon), whose true story was detailed in the book "Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans " by Wallace Terry. Certain characters from the film are based on real acquaintances of Kirkland, who served time in prison after committing robbery in facepaint. The film also is loosely based on several incidents involving the Black Liberation Army, notably the Brink's armored truck robbery.


title: Dead Presidents

text: In the North East section of the Bronx, New York during the spring of 1969, Anthony Curtis is about to graduate from high school, and decides to enlist in the U.S. Marine Corps rather than go to college. He is sent to Vietnam, leaving behind his middle-class family, his girlfriend Juanita, and small-time crook Kirby, who is like a second father. Anthony's close friend, Skip, later joins Curtis' Recon squad after deciding not to go to Hunter College and his other friend Jose, is drafted into the U.S. Army. Once in Vietnam, Curtis and his squad lose several fellow Marines during combat, and commit several atrocities of their own, such as executing enemy prisoners and beheading corpses for war trophies.


title: Dead Presidents

text: When Anthony returns to the Bronx in 1973, he finds returning to "normal" life impossible. He finds Skip now an Agent Orange victim and heroin addict, Jose is an amputee with a prosthetic hand and pyromaniac who now works as a postman at the James A. Farley Building, and Cleon, a religious but homicidal individual that was his squad’s Staff Sergeant, who is now a devoted minister in Mount Vernon, New York.


title: Dead Presidents

text: After being laid off from his job at a butcher shop, Anthony finds himself unable to support Juanita (who had an affair with a pimp while he was on duty) or his daughter. After an argument with Juanita, Anthony meets his girlfriend's sister, Delilah, who is now a member of the "Nat Turner Cadre", a revolutionary communist militant group. Anthony, Kirby, Skip, Jose, Delilah, and Cleon devise a plan to rob an armored car making a stop at the Noble Street Federal Reserve Bank of the Bronx.


title: Dead Presidents

text: The next day, the group strategically position themselves around the street, armed with weapons and disguised with face paint, ready to ambush the truck. The plan goes awry when Cleon is approached by a black NYPD officer (who was also a former Marine) who unknowingly stumbles upon the robbery, leading to Kirby being shot in the arm and Skip killing the officer when Cleon freezes up (a role reversal to what happens to Skip and Cleon earlier). At the same time, Anthony and Jose are spotted by the driver, causing a large shootout with the security guards.


title: Dead Presidents

text: Jose (a demolition expert in the army) plants an explosive device on the escaping truck to blow off the door, but instead it destroys the whole vehicle. Delilah saves Anthony's life by killing one of the guards. A second guard appears and gets into a shootout with Delilah; he shoots her multiple times killing her. As the group collects what cash they can from the burning wreckage, they flee and split up to escape the police. Jose gets cornered in an alley by an approaching police car. When Jose shoots the driver, he is hit by the car and killed as the police car crashes into a wall, crushing Jose.


title: Dead Presidents

text: Not long after the heist, Kirby hears that Cleon has been giving out $100 bills and has bought himself a new Cadillac that he can barely afford. Anthony drives over to Cleon's church to speak to him, only to find him being led out the front door in handcuffs by two detectives. Cleon gives up the other robbers as part of a plea bargain due to his remorse in the death of the earlier officer. NYPD officers storm Skip's apartment only to find that he has died of a heroin overdose. As Kirby and Anthony prepare to flee to Mexico, police raid the bar. Kirby tries to distract the officers to allow Anthony to flee, but it is to no avail, as multiple officers corner Anthony and arrest him.


title: Dead Presidents

text: Anthony is convicted by a judge. His lawyer asks the court to show mercy, as Anthony served his country faithfully in the Marines and earned a Silver Star. However, the judge was a Marine in World War II, and proclaims that Anthony has forgotten the values that the Marines have taught him and that the Vietnam War wasn't even a real war to begin with and had no purpose, before sentencing him to fifteen years to life. Anthony, furious at his sentence in spite of his years of service, throws a chair at the judge before being escorted away. The film ends with Anthony looking out the window of his prison bus.


title: Dead Presidents

text: The film depicts the struggle of returning war veterans of color who are neglected by the US government and the mistreatment of Vietnam veterans. Many Black and Latino veterans of the Vietnam War were denied benefits, compensation, and recognition for their efforts in serving their country.


title: Dead Presidents

text: Principal photography commenced on October 31, 1994. The production filmed through the remainder of the year and into early February across a variety of locations, including location shoots Brooklyn and Mount Vernon, New York. Sound stages in Queens and Los Angeles served as interior locations. All Vietnam scenes were shot in Florida, with former celery farm Lee Ranch serving as the outdoor sets.


title: Dead Presidents

text: "Dead Presidents" received mixed reviews from critics. Film review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reports that 49% of critics gave the film a positive rating, based on 35 reviews with an average score of 5.8/10.


title: Dead Presidents

text: Todd McCarthy of "Variety" gave the film a positive review stating, "In all respects an extremely ambitious follow-up to their crackling debut, "Menace II Society", the Hughes Brothers' mordant "Dead Presidents" may eventually box itself into a narrative dead end, but its muscular engagement of weighty themes and explosive situations makes it a powerful drama." Kenneth Turan of the "Los Angeles Times" called the film "both expected and surprising, familiar and yet somehow different. Made with fluid skill and a passion for storytelling, its tale of how the Vietnam War and American society affect a black Marine remains accessible while confounding expectations."


title: Dead Presidents

text: Caryn James of "The New York Times" felt the film "takes on much more than it can handle." Comparing the film with the Hughes Brother's previous film James said, "The Hugheses obviously knew the world and generation of "Menace II Society" better than the past of "Dead Presidents", but that is only part of the problem. In "Menace" they trusted the audience more, immersing them in a violent world the film explained without condoning."


title: Dead Presidents

text: Roger Ebert of the "Chicago Sun-Times" gave the film a mixed 2.5 star review, and explained that the directing duo "have a sure sense of the camera, of actors, of the life within a scene. But they are not as sure when it comes to story and meaning, and here is a film that feels incomplete, as if its last step is into thin air. Scene by scene you feel its skill, but you leave the theater wondering about the meaning of it all." The early scenes were the best, according to Ebert, and the film "goes off the rails" in the final act.


title: Rose Wilder Lane

text: Rose Wilder Lane (December 5, 1886 – October 30, 1968) was an American journalist, travel writer, novelist, political theorist and daughter of American writer Laura Ingalls Wilder. Along with two other female writers, Ayn Rand and Isabel Paterson, Lane is noted as one of the most influential advocates of the American libertarian movement.


title: Rose Wilder Lane

text: Lane was the first child of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Almanzo Wilder and the only child of her parents to survive into adulthood. Her early years were a difficult time for her parents because of successive crop failures, illnesses and chronic economic hardships. During her childhood, the family moved several times, living with relatives in Minnesota and then Florida and briefly returning to De Smet, South Dakota before settling in Mansfield, Missouri, in 1894. There, her parents would eventually establish a dairy farm and fruit orchards. She attended secondary school in Mansfield and Crowley, Louisiana while living with her aunt Eliza Jane Wilder, graduating in 1904 in a class of seven. Her intellect and ambition were demonstrated by her ability to compress three years of Latin into one and by graduating at the top of her high school class in Crowley. Despite her academic success, she was unable to attend college as a result of her parents' financial situation.


title: Rose Wilder Lane

text: After high school graduation, Lane returned to her parents' home in Mansfield and learned telegraphy at the Mansfield railroad station. Not satisfied with the options open to young women in Mansfield, by early 1905 she was working for Western Union in Sedalia, Missouri. By 1906, Lane was working as a telegrapher at the Midland Hotel in Kansas City. Over the next five years, Lane worked as a telegrapher in Missouri, Indiana and California.


title: Rose Wilder Lane

text: In 1908, Lane moved to San Francisco, California, where she worked as a telegrapher at the Fairmont Hotel. In March 1909, Lane married salesman, promoter and occasional newspaperman Claire Gillette Lane. Evidence exists that suggests the Lanes had met back in Kansas City and Lane's diary hints that she moved to San Francisco to join her future husband. Shortly after they wed, Lane quit her job with Western Union and the couple embarked on travels across the United States to promote various schemes. Lane soon became pregnant. While staying in Salt Lake City the following November, Lane gave birth to a premature, stillborn son, according to public records. Subsequent surgery in Kansas City likely left her unable to bear children. The topic is mentioned only briefly in a handful of existing letters written by Lane years after the infant's death in order to express sympathy and understanding to close friends who were also dealing with the loss of a child.


title: Rose Wilder Lane

text: For the next few years, the Lanes continued to live a nomadic lifestyle, including stays in Missouri, Ohio, New York and Maine to work together and separately on various promotional and advertising projects. While letters to her parents described a happy-go-lucky existence, Lane's subsequent diary entries and numerous autobiographical magazine articles later described her mindset at this time as depressed and disillusioned with her marriage. She felt her intellectual interests did not mesh with the life she was living with her husband. One account even had her attempting suicide by drugging herself with chloroform only to awake with a headache and a renewed sense of purpose in life.


title: Rose Wilder Lane

text: During these years, Lane, keenly aware of her lack of a formal education, read voraciously and taught herself several languages. Her writing career began around 1908, with occasional freelance newspaper jobs that earned much-needed extra cash. In 1913 and 1914, the Lanes sold farm land in what is now the San Jose/Silicon Valley area of Northern California. Conditions often required them to work separately to earn greater commissions and of the two Lane turned out to be the better salesperson. The marriage foundered as there were several periods of separation and eventually an amicable divorce. Lane's diaries reveal subsequent romantic involvements with several men in the years following her divorce, but she never remarried and eventually chose to remain single and free of romantic attachments.


title: Rose Wilder Lane

text: The threat of America's entry into World War I had seriously weakened the real estate market, so in early 1915 Lane accepted a friend's offer of a stopgap job as an editorial assistant on the staff of the "San Francisco Bulletin". The stopgap turned into a watershed. She immediately caught the attention of her editors not only through her talents as a writer in her own right, but also as a highly skilled editor for other writers. Before long, her photo and byline were running in the "Bulletin" daily, churning out formulaic romantic fiction serials that would run for weeks at a time. Lane's first-hand accounts of the lives of Henry Ford, Charlie Chaplin, Jack London and Herbert Hoover were published in book form.


title: Rose Wilder Lane

text: Later in 1915, Lane's mother visited San Francisco for several months. Together they attended the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Details of this visit and Wilder's daily life in 1915 are preserved in Wilder's letters to her husband in "West from Home", published in 1974. Although Lane's diaries indicate she was separated from her husband in 1915, her mother's letters do not indicate this. Lane and her husband are recorded as living together with him unemployed and looking for work during her mother's two-month visit. It seems the separation was either covered up, or had not yet involved separate households.


title: Rose Wilder Lane

text: By 1918, Lane's marriage officially ended and she had quit her job with the "San Francisco Bulletin" following the resignation of managing editor, Fremont Older. It was at this point that Lane launched her career as a freelance writer. From this period through the early 1940s, her work regularly appeared in leading publications such as "Harper's", "Saturday Evening Post", "Sunset", "Good Housekeeping" and "Ladies' Home Journal". Several of her short stories were nominated for O. Henry Prizes and a few novels became top sellers.


title: Rose Wilder Lane

text: Lane became the first biographer of Herbert Hoover, writing "The Making of Herbert Hoover" in 1920 in collaboration with Charles K. Field, editor of "Sunset" magazine. The book was published well before Hoover became president in 1929. A friend and defender of Hoover's for the remainder of her life, many of her personal papers would later be included in the Rose Wilder-Lane Collection at the Herbert Hoover Library in West Branch, Iowa. While Lane's papers contain little actual correspondence between them, the Hoover Post-Presidential Individual series contains a file of Rose's correspondence that spans from 1936–1963.


title: Rose Wilder Lane

text: In the late 1920s, Lane was reputed to be one of the highest-paid female writers in America and along with Hoover counted among her friends well known figures such as Sinclair Lewis, Isabel Paterson, Dorothy Thompson, John Patric and Lowell Thomas. Despite this success, her compulsive generosity with her family and friends often found her strapped for cash and forced to work on material that paid well, but thus did not engage her growing interests in political theory and world history. She suffered from periodic bouts of self-doubt and depression in mid-life, diagnosing herself as having bipolar disorder. During these times of depression, Lane was unable to move ahead with her own writing, but she would easily find work as a ghostwriter or silent editor for other well-known writers. In 1928, Lane returned to the United States to live on her parents' farm. Confident in her sales of her books and short stories as well as her growing stock market investments, she spent freely, building a new home for her parents on the property and modernizing the farmhouse for herself and a steady stream of visiting literary friends.


title: Rose Wilder Lane

text: Lane's occasional work as a traveling war correspondent began with a stint with the American Red Cross Publicity Bureau in post-World War I Europe. She would continue with the Red Cross through 1965, reporting from Vietnam at the age of 78 for "Woman's Day" magazine to provide "a woman's point of view". She traveled extensively in Europe and Asia as part of the Red Cross. In 1926, Lane, Helen Dore Boylston and their French maid traveled from France to Albania in a car they had named Zenobia. An account of the journey called "Travels With Zenobia: Paris to Albania by Model T Ford" was published in 1983. Lane became enamored with Albania and lived there for several long periods during the 1920s, spaced between sojourns to Paris and her parents' Rocky Ridge Farm in Missouri. She informally adopted a young Albanian boy named Rexh Meta (), who she claimed saved her life on a dangerous mountain trek. She later sponsored his education at Cambridge University. He served in the Albanian government and was imprisoned for over thirty years by both the Italian fascists and the Albanian communists, dying in Tirana in 1985.


title: Rose Wilder Lane

text: Lane's role in her mother's "Little House" book series has remained unclear. Her parents had invested with her broker upon her advice and when the market crashed the Wilders found themselves with difficult times. Lane came to the farm at 46 years old, divorced and childless, with minimal finances to keep her afloat.


title: Rose Wilder Lane

text: In late 1930, Lane's mother approached her with a rough, first-person narrative manuscript outlining her hardscrabble pioneer childhood, "Pioneer Girl". Lane took notice and started using her connections in the publishing world. Despite Lane's efforts to market "Pioneer Girl" through her publishing connections, the manuscript was rejected time and again. One editor recommended crafting a novel for children out of the beginning. Wilder and Lane worked on the idea and the result was "Little House in the Big Woods". Accepted for publishing by Harper and Brothers in late 1931, then hitting the shelves in 1932, the book's success resulted in the decision to continue the series, following young Laura into young adulthood. "The First Four Years" was discovered as a manuscript after Lane's death in 1968. Wilder had written the manuscript about the first four years of her marriage and the struggles of the frontier, but she never had intended for it to be published. However, in 1971 it became the ninth volume in the "Little House" series.


title: Rose Wilder Lane

text: The collaboration between the two is believed by literary historians to have benefited Lane's career as much as her mother's. Lane's most popular short stories and her two most commercially successful novels were written at this time and were fueled by material which was taken directly from Wilder's recollections of Ingalls-Wilder family folklore. "Let the Hurricane Roar" (later titled "Young Pioneers") and "Free Land" both addressed the difficulties of homesteading in the Dakotas in the late 19th century and how the so-called "free land" in fact cost homesteaders their life savings. "The Saturday Evening Post" paid Lane top fees to serialize both novels, which were later adapted for popular radio performances. Both books represented Lane's creative and literary peak. The "Saturday Evening Post" paid her $30,000 in 1938 to serialize her best-selling novel "Free Land" ($ by today's standards). "Let the Hurricane Roar" saw an increasing and steady sale, augmented by its adaptation into popular radio dramatization that starred Helen Hayes.


title: Rose Wilder Lane

text: In 1938, with the proceeds of "Free Land" in hand, Lane was able to pay all of her accumulated debts. She relocated to Danbury, Connecticut and purchased a rural home there with three wooded acres, on which she lived for the rest of her life. At this same time, the growing royalties from the "Little House" books were providing Lane's parents with an assured and sufficient income. Lane bought her parents an automobile and financed construction of the Rock House near the Wilder homestead. Her parents resided in the Rock House during much of the 1930s.


title: Rose Wilder Lane

text: During World War II, Lane enjoyed a new phase in her writing career. From 1942 to 1945, she wrote a weekly column for "The Pittsburgh Courier", at the time the most widely read African-American newspaper.


title: Rose Wilder Lane

text: Rather than hiding or trimming her laissez-faire views, Lane seized the chance to sell them to the readership. She sought out topics of special interest to her audience. Her first entry characterized the Double V campaign as part of the more general fight for individual liberty in the United States, writing: "Here, at last, is a place where I belong. Here are the Americans who know the value of equality and freedom". Her columns highlighted success stories of blacks to illustrate broader themes about entrepreneurship, freedom and creativity. In one, she compared the accomplishments of Robert Lee Vann and Henry Ford. Vann's rags to riches story illustrated the benefits in a "capitalist society in which a penniless orphan, one of a despised minority can create "The Pittsburgh Courier" and publicly, vigorously, safely, attack a majority opinion" while Ford's showed how a poor mechanic can create "hundreds of jobs, [...] putting even beggars into cars".


title: Rose Wilder Lane

text: Lane combined advocacy of laissez faire and anti-racism. The views she expressed on race were similar to those of Zora Neale Hurston, a fellow individualist and writer who was black. Her columns emphasized the arbitrariness of racial categories and stressed the centrality of the individual. Instead of indulging in what she referred to as the "ridiculous, idiotic and tragic fallacy of race, [by] which a minority of the earth's population has deluded itself during the past century", Lane believed it was time for all Americans. black and white, to "renounce their race". Judging by skin color was comparable to the communists who assigned guilt or virtue on the basis of class. In Lane's view, the fallacies of race and class hearkened to the "old English-feudal 'class' distinction". She further believed that the collectivists, including those who embraced President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, were to blame for filling "young minds with fantasies of 'races' and 'classes' and 'the masses,' all controlled by pagan gods, named Economic Determinism or Society or Government".


title: Rose Wilder Lane

text: Along with Hurston and Paterson, Lane was critical of Roosevelt on his foreign policy and was against drafting young men into a foreign war.


title: Rose Wilder Lane

text: For a few months in 1940, Lane's growing zeal for libertarianism united her with the well-known vagabond free-lance writer John Patric, a like-minded political thinker whose advocacy of libertarian themes culminated in his 1943 work "Yankee Hobo in the Orient". They spent several months traveling across the country in Patric's automobile to observe the effects of the Great Depression on the nation and to exchange ideas. The trip culminated in a two-month stay in Bellingham, Washington.


title: Rose Wilder Lane

text: In the early 1940s, despite continuing requests from editors for both fiction and non-fiction material, Lane turned away from commercial fiction writing, save for her collaboration on her mother's books. At this time, she became known among libertarians as influential in the movement. She vehemently opposed the New Deal, eschewed "creeping socialism", Social Security, wartime rationing, and all forms of taxation. Lane ceased writing highly paid commercial fiction to protest paying income taxes. Living on a small salary from her newspaper column and no longer needing to support her parents or adopted sons, she cut expenses to the bare minimum, living a modern-day version of her ancestors' pioneer life on her rural land near Danbury. She gained some media attention for her refusal to accept a ration card, instead working cooperatively with her rural neighbors to grow and preserve fruits and vegetables and to raise chickens and pigs for meat. Literary critic and political writer Isabel Paterson had urged Lane to move to Connecticut, where she would be only "up country a few miles" from Paterson, who had been a friend for many years.


title: Rose Wilder Lane

text: After experiencing it first hand in the Soviet Union during her travels with the Red Cross, Lane was a staunch opponent of communism. As a result, Lane's initial writings on individualism and conservative government began while she was still writing popular fiction in the 1930s, culminating with "The Discovery of Freedom" (1943). After this point, Lane promoted and wrote about individual freedom and its impact on humanity. The same year also saw the publication of Paterson's "The God of the Machine" and Ayn Rand's novel "The Fountainhead". Because of these writings, the three women have been referred to as the founding mothers of the American libertarian movement.


title: Rose Wilder Lane

text: Writer Albert Jay Nock wrote that Lane and Paterson's nonfiction works were "the only intelligible books on the philosophy of individualism that have been written in America this century". The two women had "shown the male world of this period how to think fundamentally. [...] [T]hey don't fumble and fiddle around – every shot goes straight to the centre". Journalist John Chamberlain credits Rand, Paterson and Lane with his final "conversion" from socialism to what he called "an older American philosophy" of libertarian and conservative ideas.


title: Rose Wilder Lane

text: In 1943, Lane came into the national spotlight through her response to a radio poll on Social Security. She mailed in a post-card with a response likening the Social Security system to a Ponzi scheme that would, she felt, ultimately destroy the United States. Wartime monitoring of mail eventually resulted in a Connecticut State Trooper being dispatched to her home to question her motives. Her strong response to this infringement on her right of free speech resulted in a flurry of newspaper articles and the publishing of a pamphlet, "What is this, the Gestapo?", that was meant to remind Americans to be watchful of their rights despite the wartime exigencies. The pamphlet was distributed by the National Economic Council, Inc, an anti-Semitic organization that supported the fascist government in Spain. During this time period, an FBI file was compiled on Lane.


title: Rose Wilder Lane

text: As Lane aged, her political opinions solidified as a stalwart libertarian. Her defense of what she considered to be basic American principles of liberty and freedom were seen by some as harsh and abrasive in the face of disagreement. It is documented that during this time period that she broke with her old friend and political ally Isabel Paterson in 1946. During this time period and into the 1950s, Lane also had an acrimonious correspondence with socialist writer Max Eastman.


title: Rose Wilder Lane

text: Lane played a hands-on role during the 1940s and 1950s in launching the libertarian movement and began an extensive correspondence with figures such as DuPont executive Jasper Crane and writer Frank Meyer as well as her friend and colleague Ayn Rand. She wrote book reviews for the National Economic Council and later for the Volker Fund, out of which grew the Institute for Humane Studies. Later, she lectured at and gave generous financial support to the Freedom School headed by libertarian Robert LeFevre.


title: Rose Wilder Lane

text: With her mother's death in 1957, ownership of the Rocky Ridge Farm house reverted to the farmer who had earlier bought the property on a life lease, allowing her to remain in residence. The local population put together a non-profit corporation to purchase the house and its grounds for use as a museum. After some wariness at the notion of seeing the house rather than the books themselves be a shrine to Lane's mother, she came to believe that making it into a museum would draw long-lasting attention to the books and sustain the theme of individualism she and her mother wove into the series. She donated the money needed to purchase the house and make it a museum, agreed to make significant contributions each year for its upkeep and also gave many of the family's belongings to the group. Lane's lifetime inheritance of Wilder's growing "Little House" royalties enabled her to again travel extensively and thoroughly renovated and remodeled her Connecticut home. Also during the 1960s, she revived her own commercial writing career by publishing several popular magazine series, including one about her tour of the Vietnam War zone in late 1965.


title: Rose Wilder Lane

text: In later years, Lane wrote a book detailing the history of American needlework for "Woman's Day". She edited and published "On the Way Home", providing an autobiographical setting around her mother's original 1894 diary of their six-week journey from South Dakota to Missouri. Intended to serve as the capstone to the "Little House" series, the book was the result of Wilder's fans who were writing to Lane asking "what happened next?". She contributed book reviews to the William Volker Fund and continued to work on revisions of "The Discovery of Freedom", which she never completed.


title: Rose Wilder Lane

text: Lane was the adoptive grandmother and mentor to Roger Lea MacBride, later the Libertarian Party's 1976 candidate for president. The son of one of her editors with whom she formed a close bond when he was a boy, Lane later stated she was grooming him to be a future Libertarian thought leader. In addition to being her close friend, MacBride became her attorney and business manager and ultimately the heir to the Little House series and the multimillion-dollar franchise that he built around it after her death.


title: Rose Wilder Lane

text: The last of the protégés to be taken under Lane's wing was the sister of her Vietnamese interpreter. Impressed by the young girl's intelligence, Lane helped to bring her to the United States and sponsored her enrollment in college.


title: Rose Wilder Lane

text: Lane died in her sleep at age 81 on October 30, 1968 just as she was about to depart on a three-year world tour. She was buried next to her parents at Mansfield Cemetery in Mansfield, Missouri.


title: Rose Wilder Lane

text: There are eight novels written by MacBride, telling of her childhood and early youth. Despite assertions of the accuracy of the locations, dates and people mentioned, there is heavy debate on the degree of authenticity. At least some events may be accurately represented as he was a close friend of hers.


title: Rose Wilder Lane

text: In the novel "Pioneer Girl" by Bich Minh Nguyen, a young Vietnamese-American Lee Lien researches Lane's life based on an old family story. Lee's grandfather claims that Lane became friendly with the family while visiting Vietnam in 1965 and gifted them with a gold brooch, suspected to be the one Almanzo gave to Lane's mother as described in "These Happy Golden Years."


title: Rose Wilder Lane

text: In the novel "A Wilder Rose" by Susan Wittig Albert, Lane tells the story of her work on the "Little House" books and her years at the Wilder farm (1928–1935) to Norma Lee Browning, a young friend. The novel is based on Lane's diaries and journals of the period and letters exchanged with her mother.


title: Rose Wilder Lane

text: In the alternate history novel "The Probability Broach" by L. Neil Smith in which the United States becomes a libertarian state in 1794 after a successful Whiskey Rebellion and the overthrowing and execution of George Washington by firing squad for treason, Lane served as the 21st President of the North American Confederacy from 1940 to 1952.


title: Jacques de Bascher

text: Jacques de Bascher (8 July 1951 – 3 September 1989) was a French dandy, member of the jet set, and Karl Lagerfeld's companion from 1971 until his death, as well as Yves Saint Laurent's lover in 1973.


title: Jacques de Bascher

text: Jacques de Bascher was the son of Antony de Bascher (1909-1975), governor of the province of Cholon in Vietnam and an executive of Shell's insurance department on his return to France in 1955. Bascher's mother, Armelle Petit, is descended from a line of landowners in Limousin. Jacques de Bascher had two brothers and two sisters. He spent his childhood in a bourgeois Catholic family, between an apartment in Neuilly-sur-Seine on boulevard Commandant-Charcot, which overlooks the Bois de Boulogne and the castle Berrière near Nantes. He studied at the small high school Pasteur, then high school Janson de Sailly, and finally high school Charlemagne. He seduced one of his high school teachers, realizing his beauty and physical demeanor was a major asset.


title: Jacques de Bascher

text: At the age of twenty, he spent his military service in the French Navy. He started his service on the ship Orage, which was sailing to Martinique and Papeete. He became some sort of reporter, writing a ship's newsletter and airing music and interviews on the ship's radio. He was serving a month's imprisonment at the Arue camp in Tahiti for provocative behavior and misbehaving with his mates. After just nine months in the navy, he was sent back to France. During this service, he befriended a lot of people, including Philippe Heurtault, who became his photographer in later years.


title: Jacques de Bascher

text: When he returned to Paris, he attended the Panthéon-Assas University for a few months and became a steward for Air France in 1972, but it was high society clubs that attracted him. According to , for fifteen years, Jacques de Bascher "has evolved like a snake in the grass" between the gardens of the Tuileries, the five-stars, the Parisian backrooms, the Palace, the rue Sainte-Anne, (Club Sept), the Blue Hand in Montreuil, the castle of his family and the big festivals of the fashion world.


title: Jacques de Bascher

text: Jacques de Bascher first met Karl Lagerfeld at the Nuage at the age of twenty-one. A few months later, after Jacques de Bascher resigned from Air France, they went to live together until 1989. Lagerfeld claimed their relationship was platonic and non-physical. Lagerfeld told French journalist Marie Ottavi:


title: Jacques de Bascher

text: Karl Lagerfeld appreciated Bascher's vast literary culture and impertinence, his aristocratic appearance and his manner of dressing. Kenzo Takada hired Jacques' brother Xavier de Bascher to be his general manager. They usually spend their time in gay nightclubs, like “Le 7”.


title: Jacques de Bascher

text: In 1973, Yves Saint Laurent, at the time still companion of Pierre Bergé, fell in love with Jacques de Bascher. While Lagerfeld pretended he didn't notice, Yves Saint Laurent and Jacques de Bascher had an unbalanced and destructive relationship. Bergé threatened Bascher, who put an end to this affair.


title: Jacques de Bascher

text: During these years, Jacques de Bascher, who did not work and was maintained by Karl Lagerfeld fell into risky sexual practices, and eventually drugs and alcohol put him into a paranoid state. Sex was a huge part of de Bascher's life. He had relationships with both men and women. He was known for organizing orgies and an infamous BDSM party, named “Black Moratorium”, which was funded by Lagerfeld.


title: Jacques de Bascher

text: Jacques de Bascher discovered that he was HIV positive in 1984. At the end of his life, he cut himself off from everyone, unable to bear his physical decline. He died of AIDS at Raymond Poincaré University Hospital in 1989, watched over by Karl Lagerfeld, who had an extra bed installed by his bedside. The following year Karl Lagerfeld bought a house near Hamburg, which he named Villa Jako in Jacques de Bascher's memory. In 1998, Lagerfeld launched a fragrance called Jako. The intimate, family-only funeral mass took place in the chapel of the Père-Lachaise cemetery; a second mass was celebrated in the chapel of Mée-sur-Seine, where Karl Lagerfeld owned property, in the presence of Jacques de Bascher's mother and friends, including his former fiancée, Princess Diane de Beauvau-Craon.


title: Necklacing

text: Necklacing is a method of extrajudicial summary execution and torture carried out by forcing a rubber tire drenched with petrol around a victim's chest and arms, and setting it on fire. The term "necklace" originated in the 1980s in black townships of apartheid South Africa where suspected Apartheid collaborators were publicly executed in this fashion.


title: Necklacing

text: Necklacing was used by the black community to punish its members who were perceived as collaborators with the apartheid government. Necklacing was primarily used on black police informants; the practice was often carried out in the name of the struggle, although the executive body of the African National Congress (ANC), the most broadly supported South African opposition movement, condemned it. In 1986, Winnie Mandela, then-wife of the imprisoned Nelson Mandela, and who herself had endured torture and four imprisonments to a total of two years, stated, "With our boxes of matches, and our necklaces, we shall liberate this country", which was widely seen as an explicit endorsement of necklacing. This caused the ANC to initially distance itself from her, although she later took on a number of official positions within the party.


title: Necklacing

text: The first victim of necklacing, according to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, was a young black woman, Maki Skosana, on 20 July 1985.


title: Necklacing

text: Photojournalist Kevin Carter was the first to photograph a public execution by necklacing in South Africa in the mid-1980s. He later spoke of the images:


title: Necklacing

text: Some commentators have noted that the practice of necklacing served to escalate the levels of violence during the township wars of the 1980s and early 1990s as security force members became brutalized and afraid that they might fall victim to the practice.


title: Necklacing

text: This form of lynching was used in Haiti, where it was known as "Pé Lebrun," or "Père Lebrun" (French), after a tire advertisement showing a man with a tire around his neck. It was used prominently by mobs allied with Jean-Bertrand Aristide to assassinate political enemies. Aristide himself allegedly showed strong support for this practice, calling it a "beautiful tool" that "smells good", encouraging his Lavalas supporters to use it against wealthy people as well as members of the Lavalas party who were not as strong in their fervor.


title: Necklacing

text: In the early years of the 1960s, when the seeds of the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka (Sri Lankan Civil War) related to Eelam were being sown, Sinhalese rioters used necklacing in anti-Tamil riots. Necklacing was also widely used in the second armed insurrection led by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna. A graphic description of one such necklacing appears in the book "The Island of Blood" by journalist Anita Pratap.


title: Necklacing

text: This technique was widely applied on innocent Sikhs by the mobs during state sponsored massacre of the community, following the assassination of then-Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards in the first week of November, 1984.


title: Necklacing

text: In the early 1990s, university students in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, were plagued by burglars stealing from their dormitories. The students took matters into their own hands by capturing the alleged thieves, and then executed them by placing tyres around their necks and setting the tyres on fire. Ivorian police, powerless to stop these necklacings, could do nothing but stand by and watch.


title: Necklacing

text: In 2006, at least one person died in Nigeria by necklacing in the deadly Muslim protests over satirical cartoon drawings of Muhammad.


title: Necklacing

text: The practice is widely used by drug dealers in Brazil, notably in Rio de Janeiro, where it is called "micro-ondas," or "microwave" in Portuguese. Journalist Tim Lopes was a notable victim.


title: Morphology (biology)

text: Morphology is a branch of biology dealing with the study of the form and structure of organisms and their specific structural features.


title: Morphology (biology)

text: This includes aspects of the outward appearance (shape, structure, colour, pattern, size), i.e. external morphology (or eidonomy), as well as the form and structure of the internal parts like bones and organs, i.e. internal morphology (or anatomy). This is in contrast to physiology, which deals primarily with function. Morphology is a branch of life science dealing with the study of gross structure of an organism or taxon and its component parts.


title: Morphology (biology)

text: The etymology of the word "morphology" is from the Ancient Greek (), meaning "form", and (), meaning "word, study, research".


title: Morphology (biology)

text: While the concept of form in biology, opposed to function, dates back to Aristotle (see Aristotle's biology), the field of morphology was developed by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1790) and independently by the German anatomist and physiologist Karl Friedrich Burdach (1800).


title: Morphology (biology)

text: Among other important theorists of morphology are Lorenz Oken, Georges Cuvier, Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Richard Owen, Karl Gegenbaur and Ernst Haeckel.


title: Morphology (biology)

text: In 1830, Cuvier and E.G.Saint-Hilaire engaged in a famous debate, which is said to exemplify the two major deviations in biological thinking at the time – whether animal structure was due to function or evolution.


title: Morphology (biology)

text: Most taxa differ morphologically from other taxa. Typically, closely related taxa differ much less than more distantly related ones, but there are exceptions to this. Cryptic species are species which look very similar, or perhaps even outwardly identical, but are reproductively isolated. Conversely, sometimes unrelated taxa acquire a similar appearance as a result of convergent evolution or even mimicry. In addition, there can be morphological differences within a species, such as in "Apoica flavissima" where queens are significantly smaller than workers. A further problem with relying on morphological data is that what may appear, morphologically speaking, to be two distinct species, may in fact be shown by DNA analysis to be a single species. The significance of these differences can be examined through the use of allometric engineering in which one or both species are manipulated to phenocopy the other species.


title: Morphology (biology)

text: A step relevant to the evaluation of morphology between traits/features within species, includes an assessment of the terms: homology and homoplasy. Homology between features indicate that those features have been derived from a common ancestor. Alternatively, homoplasy between features describes those that can resemble each other, but derive independently via parallel or convergent evolution.


title: Morphology (biology)

text: Invention and development of microscopy enable the observation of 3-D cell morphology with both high spatial and temporal resolution. The dynamic processes of these cell morphology which are controlled by a complex system play an important role in varied important biological process, such as immune and invasive responses.


title: Michael Latifi

text: Michael Mehrdad Latifi (born October 1962 in Iran) is an Iranian-Canadian businessman. He is the owner, Chairman and CEO of Sofina Foods Inc., a Markham, Ontario-based manufacturer of processed animal products. Sofina acquired Lilydale in a C$130 million deal in 2010, and Santa Maria Foods ULC, an importer and distributor of specialty Italian brands, in 2012.


title: Michael Latifi

text: Through the investment company Nidala (BVI) Limited, which is controlled by Latifi, he invested £200 million (around 270 million USD or C$350 million) in McLaren Group.


title: Michael Latifi

text: Michael is the father of racing driver Nicholas Latifi, former driver for the Williams Formula One team.


title: American decline

text: American decline is the idea that the United States of America is diminishing in power geopolitically, militarily, financially, economically, demographically, socially, morally, spiritually, culturally, in matters of healthcare, and/or on environmental issues. There has been debate over the extent of the decline, and whether it is relative or absolute. Those who believe America is in decline are declinists.


title: American decline

text: China challenging the United States for global dominance constitutes a core issue in the debate over American decline. For instance, the United States is no longer an uncontested superpower in every region of the world. According to the 2021 Asia Power Index, within Asia, the United States still takes the lead on "military capacity", "cultural influence", "resilience", "future resources", "diplomatic influence", and "defense networks", but falls behind China in two parameters: "economic capability" and "economic relationships".


title: American decline

text: Shrinking military advantages, deficit spending, geopolitical overreach, and a shift in moral, social, and behavioral conditions have been associated with American decline.


title: American decline

text: Some scholars say that the perception of decline, or declinism, has long been part of American culture. In a poll conducted January 11-13, 2021 of 1,019 Americans, 79% of those surveyed said that America is "falling apart".


title: American decline

text: According to American public intellectual Noam Chomsky, America's decline started shortly after the end of World War II, with the "loss of China" followed by the Indochina Wars. By 1970, the United States' share of world wealth had declined to about 25%, which was still large but sharply reduced. Chomsky dismisses the "remarkable rhetoric of the several years of triumphalism in the 1990s" as "mostly self-delusion". However, Chomsky argued in 2011 that power will not shift to China and India, because these are poor countries with severe internal problems, and there will be no competitor for global hegemonic power in the foreseeable future.


title: American decline

text: According to Jeet Heer, U.S. hegemony has always been supported by three pillars: "economic strength, military might, and the soft power of cultural dominance." According to American diplomat Eric S. Edelman, the declinists, or those who believe America is in decline, have been "consistently wrong" in the past. However, American political scientist Aaron Friedberg cautioned that just because the declinists were wrong in the past does not mean they will be incorrect in their future predictions, and that some of the arguments by the declinists deserve to be taken seriously.


title: American decline

text: Political scientist Matthew Kroenig argues Washington has "followed the same basic, three-step geopolitical plan since 1945. First, the United States built the current, rules-based international system... Second, it welcomed into the club any country that played by the rules, even former adversaries... and third, the U.S. worked with its allies to defend the system from those countries or groups that would challenge it."


title: American decline

text: According to a 98-page report by National Defense Strategy Commission, "America's longstanding military advantages have diminished", and "The country's strategic margin for error has become distressingly small. Doubts about America's ability to deter and, if necessary, defeat opponents and honor its global commitments have proliferated." The report cited "political dysfunction" and "budget caps" as factors restraining the government from keeping pace with threats in what the report described as "a crisis of national security." The report wrote that, to neutralize American strength, China and Russia were trying to achieve "regional hegemony" and were developing "aggressive military buildups". In 2018, Air Force General Frank Gorenc said that the United States airpower advantage over Russia and China was shrinking. According to Loren Thompson, the military's decline began when defense secretary Dick Cheney stopped a hundred major weapons programs 25 years ago when the Soviet Union collapsed.


title: American decline

text: Paul Kennedy posits that continued deficit spending, especially on military build-up, is the single most important reason for decline of any great power. The costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are now estimated to run as high as $4.4 trillion, which Kennedy deems a major victory for Osama bin Laden, whose announced goal was to humiliate America by showcasing its casualty averseness and lack of will to persist in a long term conflict. By 2011, the U.S. military budget — almost matching that of the rest of the world combined — was higher in real terms than at any time since WWII.


title: American decline

text: Kennedy made similar assessments about American decline in his book "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" in which he projected “a need to ‘manage’ affairs so that the relative erosion of the United States' position takes place slowly and smoothly”. The book was published in 1989, three years before the dissolution of the Soviet Union and several years before the bursting of the Japanese asset price bubble, leaving the United States as the sole remaining superpower and the dominant political and economic power internationally.


title: American decline

text: According to historian Emmanuel Todd, an expansion in military activity and aggression can appear to be an increase in power, but can mask a decline in power. He observes that this occurred with the Soviet Union in the 1970s, and with the Roman Empire, and that the United States may be going through a similar period in time.


title: American decline

text: There were 38 large and medium-sized American facilities spread around the globe in 2005—mostly air and naval bases—approximately the same number as Britain's 36 naval bases and army garrisons at its imperial zenith in 1898. Yale historian Paul Kennedy compares the U.S. situation to Great Britain's prior to World War I, saying that the map of U.S. bases is similar.


title: American decline

text: Commentators such as Allan Bloom, E. D. Hirsch and Russel Jacoby have suggested American culture is in decline. Samuel P. Huntington commented critically on a trend in American culture and politics of predicting constant decline since the late 1950s. As he saw it, declinism came in several distinct waves, namely in reaction to the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik; to the Vietnam War; to the oil shock of 1973; to Soviet tensions in the late 1970s; and to the general unease that accompanied the end of the Cold War. According to American historian Russell Jacoby, the rise of academic Marxism, radical political economies, and critical literary and cultural studies since the World War II has contributed to the decline of American culture.


title: American decline

text: William J. Bennett argues that America's cultural decline is signaling "a shift in the public's attitudes and beliefs". According to the Index of Leading Cultural Indicators, published in 1993, statistically portraying the moral, social and behavioral conditions of modern American society, often described as 'values', America's cultural condition was in decline with respect to the situations of 30 years ago, 1963. The index showed that there has been an increase in violent crime by more than 6 times, illegitimate births by more than 5 times, the divorce rate by 5 times, the percentage of children living in single-parent homes by four times, and the teenage suicide rate by three times during the 30-year period.


title: American decline

text: According to Kenneth Weisbrode, though some statistics point to American decline (increased death rate, political paralysis, and increased crime), "Americans have had a low culture for a very long time, and have long promoted it". He thinks that the obsession with decline is not something new, as something dating back to the Puritans. "Cultural decline, in other words, is as American as apple pie," Weisbrode argues. Weisbrode likens pre-revolutionary France and present-day America for their vulgarity, which he argues is "an almost natural extension or outcome of all that is civilized: a glorification of ego."


title: American decline

text: Daniel Bell argued that the perception of decline is part of the culture. "What the long history of American 'declinism' -- as opposed to America's actual possible decline -- suggests," says Daniel Bell, "is that these anxieties have an existence of their own that is quite distinct from the actual geopolitical position of our country; that they arise as much from something deeply rooted in the collective psyche of our chattering classes as from sober political and economic analyses."


title: American decline

text: According to RealClearPolitics, declarations of America's declining power have been common since the beginning of the country. According to Australian journalist Nick Bryant, "warnings of American decline are by no means new". In the 20th century, declinism came in several distinct waves. In a 2011 book, Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum argued that the United States was in the midst of "its fifth wave of Declinism." The first had come "with the 'Sputnik Shock' of 1957," the second with the Vietnam War, the third with President Jimmy Carter's "malaise" and the rise of Japan, the fourth with the increased power of China. According to Robert Lieber in 2021, “declinists’ proclamations about America have appeared ever since America’s founding" and “it can be instructive to compare current arguments and prescriptions of the new declinism with the ideas of earlier eras.”


title: American decline

text: Some researchers have linked trends towards political polarization in the United States and other countries to increased economic inequality and economic decline. David Leonhardt writes that "incomes, wealth and life expectancy in the United States have stagnated for much of the population, contributing to an angry national mood and exacerbating political divisions. The result is a semidysfunctional government that is eroding many of the country’s largest advantages over China."


title: American decline

text: According to a report by Oxford researchers including sociologist Philip N. Howard, social media played a major role in political polarization in the United States, due to computational propaganda -- "the use of automation, algorithms, and big-data analytics to manipulate public life"—such as the spread of fake news and conspiracy theories. The researchers highlighted the role of the Russian Internet Research Agency in attempts to undermine democracy in the US and exacerbate existing political divisions. The most prominent methods of misinformation were ostensibly organic posts rather than ads, and influence operation activity increased after, and was not limited to, the 2016 election. Sarah Kreps of Brookings points out that in the wake of foreign influence operations which are nothing new but boosted by digital tools, the U.S. has had to spend exorbitantly on defensive measures "just to break even on democratic legitimacy."


title: American decline

text: Michael McFaul, former U.S. Ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014, believes the U.S. has faced a democratic decline, stemming from elite polarization and damage done by former President Donald Trump to trust in elections and bonds with democratic allies. McFaul states that the decline in democracy weakens national security and heavily restrains foreign policy.


title: American decline

text: According to 2021 survey data compiled from YouGov, Nationscape, and the Voter Study Group, 36% of Republican and 33% of Democrat respondents say that they "feel justified to use violence to advance political goals". This represents a sharp increase from 2017, in which only 8% of Republican and 8% of Democrat respondents said the same. Similarly, a survey performed by the University of Virginia Center for Politics found that more than 80% of both Democrats and Republicans believe that the opposing party poses "a clear and present danger to American democracy". Overall, more than 80% of survey respondents said they are afraid that they or someone close to them will experience "personal loss or suffering due to the effects" of the opposing party's policies.


title: American decline

text: By 1970 U.S. share of world production had fallen from 40% to 25%, while economist Jeffrey Sachs observed the US share of world income was 24.6% in 1980 falling to 19.1% in 2011. The ratio of average CEO earnings to average workers’ pay in the U.S. went from 24:1 in 1965 to 262:1 in 2005. In 2018, income inequality reached the highest level recorded by the Census Bureau.


title: American decline

text: Some centrists believe that the American fiscal crisis stems from the rising expenditures on social programs or alternatively from the increases in military spending for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, both of which would lead to decline. However, Richard Lachmann argues that if military or overall spending is not pressuring the U.S. economy, they would not contribute to U.S. decline. Lachmann describes the real problem as "the misallocation of government revenue and expenditure, resulting in resources being diverted from the tasks vital to maintain economic or geopolitical dominance." Kennedy argues that as military expenses grow, this reduces investments in economic growth, which eventually "leads to the downward spiral of slower growth, heavier taxes, deepening domestic splits over spending priorities, and weakening capacity to bear the burdens of defense."


title: American decline

text: Various analysts have connected health challenges in the United States, such as rising healthcare costs, to overall national decline. A 2018 paper in the "American Journal of Public Health" reviewed multiple factors that were observed by previous researchers such as rising health care costs, decreased life expectancy, and an increase in "deaths of despair" such as suicides and opioid overdoses, and connected this to "the long-term malaise seen in the United States". The rate of maternal mortality has more than doubled in the U.S. since the late 1980s in stark contrast to other developed nations. The economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton attribute this rising mortality, which is mostly impacting the working class, to the flaws in contemporary capitalism.


title: American decline

text: According to the Social Progress Index, the US is facing "small but steady declines" in health and other matters and along with Brazil and Hungary was one of few nations to slide backwards on the index between 2010 and 2020. Concerning the index, Nicholas Kristof said this points to structural problems that predate Trump, Trump being "a symptom of this malaise, and also a cause of its acceleration".


title: American decline

text: Many scientific experts and former government officials have criticized Donald Trump and his administration's role in the COVID-19 pandemic response, such as interfering with science agencies and perpetrating falsehoods during the COVID-19 pandemic. In "Nature", Jeff Tollefson warned that Trump's damage to science could take decades to recover from, and some of this damage could be permanent. In October 2020, Pew Research found that Trump's handling of the coronavirus pandemic eroded America's already declining global reputation.


title: American decline

text: According to data from the CDC, the average US life expectancy, after falling to 77 years in 2020, in 2021 further declined to 76 years and 1 month, a record-low since 1996. COVID-19 deaths were the main cause of this decline, as well as rising suicide rates.


title: American decline

text: China challenging the United States for global dominance constitutes a core issue in the debate over the American decline. The United States is no longer the only uncontested superpower to dominate in every domain (i.e. military, culture, economy, technology, diplomatic) in every region of the world. According to the 2021 Asia Power Index, within Asia, the United States still takes the lead on "military capacity", "cultural influence", "resilience", "future resources", "diplomatic influence", and "defense networks", but falls behind China in two parameters: "economic capability" and "economic relationships".


title: American decline

text: In 2020, China signed the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, the world's largest free trade bloc. "Time" magazine argued the US could be "the big loser" of the deal. However, "The Wall Street Journal" reported that the tariff-related liberalizations from RCEP would be modest, calling it a "paper tiger". A comprehensive study into the deal shows that it would add just 0.08% to China's 2030 GDP without India's participation.


title: American decline

text: China surpassed the US in trade in goods with the European Union for the first time in 2020 while the US remained the European Union’s largest trading partner overall. In December, the EU announced the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment with China was concluded in principle. Some analysts said the agreement may damage relations with the US. In March 2021, it was reported that there were serious doubts about the ratification of the deal in light of the reciprocal sanctions the EU and China imposed against each other over the ongoing human rights violations committed by the Chinese government against the Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minorities in Xinjiang.


title: American decline

text: In 2020, China surpassed the US for a second time as the world's leading nation for foreign direct investment (FDI). Daniel Rosen, a long-time analyst of U.S.-China economic relationship, said that it is natural that foreign investment would decline sharply in the U.S. under extraordinary circumstances due to its open market economy, a feature that China lacks. Rosen said, "There is no reason to be concerned about the outlook for the FDI in the United States providing that the U.S. is sticking with its basic open-market competitive system." Previously, in 2003, China surpassed the US once as the biggest recipient of FDI.


title: American decline

text: Political scientist Matthew Kroenig states "according to an emerging conventional wisdom, China has the leg up on the U.S. in part because its authoritarian government can strategically plan for the long term, unencumbered by competing branches of government, regular elections, and public opinion. Yet this faith in autocratic ascendance and democratic decline is contrary to historical fact." Kroenig's makes the argument that open societies "facilitate innovation, trust in financial markets, and economic growth." Kroenig also suggests "the plans often cited as evidence of China’s farsighted vision, the Belt and Road Initiative and Made in China 2025, were announced by Xi only in 2013 and 2015, respectively. Both are way too recent to be celebrated as brilliant examples of successful, long-term strategic planning."


title: American decline

text: According to David Leonhardt, "Beyond the economy, China has also made stark progress in other areas over the past decade. It is close to becoming the world’s leading funder of scientific research and development, thanks to soaring increases in China and meager ones in the United States. The quality of American science remains higher, but the gap has narrowed." However, according to Barry Naughton, even at the purchasing power parity conversion rate, the average urban income was just over , and the average rural income was just under in China. Naughton questioned whether it is economically sensible for a middle income country of this kind to be taking "such a disproportionate part of the risky expenditure involved in pioneering new technologies".


title: American decline

text: According to former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd, "China has multiple domestic vulnerabilities that are rarely noted in the media. The United States, on the other hand, always has its weaknesses on full public display, but has repeatedly demonstrated its capacity for reinvention and restoration." Ryan Hass, a senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, said that much of the narrative of China "inexorably rising and on the verge of overtaking a faltering United States" was promoted by China's state-affiliated media outlets. Hass went on to say, "Authoritarian systems excel at showcasing their strengths and concealing their weaknesses. But policymakers in Washington must be able to distinguish between the image Beijing presents and the realities it confronts."


title: American decline

text: According to American economist Scott Rozelle and researcher Natalie Hell, "China looks a lot more like 1980s Mexico or Turkey than 1980s Taiwan or South Korea. No country has ever made it to high-income status with high school attainment rates below 50 percent. With China's high school attainment rate of 30 percent, the country could be in grave trouble." At age 30, the number of years of schooling in China is 34.6 percent less than in the United States. At age 40, the gap widens to 38.9 percent. At age 50, it further widens to 47 percent. At age 60, it becomes 55.5 percent. Rozelle and Hell warn that China risks falling into the middle income trap due to the rural urban divide in education and structural unemployment.


title: American decline

text: Ryan Hass at the Brookings Institution said that China's working-age population is already shrinking, adding, "by 2050, China will go from having eight workers per retiree now to two workers per retiree. Moreover, it has already squeezed out most of the large productivity gains that come with a population becoming more educated and urban and adopting technologies to make manufacturing more efficient." Nicholas Eberstadt, an economist and demographic expert at the American Enterprise Institute, said that current demographic trends will overwhelm China's economy and geopolitics, making its rise much more uncertain. He said, "The age of heroic economic growth is over."


title: American decline

text: In May 2020, in accordance with the John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019, the Trump administration delivered a report, "U.S. Strategic Approach to the People's Republic of China" to members of the U.S. Congress. The report states a whole-of-government approach to China under the 2017 National Security Strategy, which says it is time the U.S. "rethink the failed policies of the past two decades – policies based on the assumption that engagement with rivals and their inclusion in international institutions and global commerce would turn them into benign actors and trustworthy partners". The report says it "reflects a fundamental reevaluation of how the United States understands and responds to" the leaders of China, adding "The United States recognizes the long-term strategic competition between our two systems."


title: American decline

text: In February 2021, President Joe Biden said that China is the "most serious competitor" that poses challenges on the "prosperity, security, and democratic values" of the U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated that previous optimistic approaches to China were flawed, and that China poses "the most significant challenge of any nation-state in the world to the United States". Blinken also agreed that Biden's predecessor, Donald Trump, "was right in taking a tougher approach to China". In April 2021, the U.S. Senate introduced major legislation in response to China's growing clout in international affairs. The bill, titled "Strategic Competition Act of 2021", reflects hardline attitude of both congressional Democrats and Republicans, and sets out to counter the Chinese government's diplomatic and strategic initiatives.


title: American decline

text: In May 2021, the Strategic Competition Act of 2021 was consolidated into a larger bill, the United States Innovation and Competition Act (USICA), authorizing for basic and advanced technology research over a five year period. In June 2021, the USICA passed 68-32 in the Senate with bipartisan support.


title: American decline

text: Samuel P. Huntington noticed that predictions of American decline have been part of American politics since the late 1950s. According to Daniel Bell, "many of America's leading commentators have had a powerful impulse consistently to see the United States as a weak, 'bred out' basket case that will fall to stronger rivals as inevitably as Rome fell to the barbarians, or France to Henry V at Agincourt." Huntington critiqued declinism as misguided, but praised it on some counts, "declinism has predicted the imminent shrinkage of American power. In all its phases that prediction has become central to preventing that shrinkage".


title: American decline

text: Michael Hudson points to debt forgiveness being necessary when individuals' debts to the state are too large. Whereas earlier empires (Assyrian) survived through periodic debt forgiveness, this practice ended with the Roman empire, resulting in impoverishment and dispossession of farmers, creating a growing lumpenproletariat. The same process contributed to the collapse of the British empire and continues today, with periodic financial crises (1930s, 2008) which are only relieved by government bailouts and/or war. Hudson adds that every time history repeats itself, the price goes up, i.e., the U.S. is being destroyed by bank debt with no forgiveness mechanism, making collapse inevitable.


title: American decline

text: Political scientist Paul K. Macdonald writes that great powers can be in relative or absolute decline and discussed the ways they often respond. The most common is retrenchment (reducing some but not all commitments of the state).


title: American decline

text: Certain commentators, historians and politicians believe U.S. is heir to the Roman Empire. According to Kristofer Allerfeldt, there are divergent views regarding Rome vs U.S. comparison. He believes that the "use of the Roman metaphor provides a scholarly patina to the expression of visceral hopes and fears."


title: American decline

text: Kennedy argues that "British financial strength was the single most decisive factor in its victories over France during the 18th century. This chapter ends on the Napoleonic Wars and the fusion of British financial strength with a newfound industrial strength." He predicts that, as the U.S. dollar loses its role as world currency, it will not be able to continue financing its military expenditures via deficit spending.


title: American decline

text: According to Richard Lachmann, the U.S. would last much longer if, like Britain, it could restrict particular families and elites from exclusively controlling offices and governmental powers.


title: American decline

text: Historian Harold James published an article in 2020 titled "Late Soviet America", comparing the present-day United States to the former Soviet Union. James wrote that many aspects of the US now resemble the late Soviet Union: intensification of social conflict, ethnic/racial rivalries, and economic decline. He predicted that the dollar may lose its value and start looking like the Soviet rouble. James ended the article saying that the economic decline will continue, even if there is change in leadership, pointing to Mikhail Gorbachev's inability to prevent collapse after succeeding Leonid Brezhnev.


title: American decline

text: Also in 2020, political commentator Julius Krein argued that the ongoing America's state of decline parallels the late Soviet Union vis-à-vis the "unmistakable" slide into gerontocracy.