title: Bradenton, Florida

text: A settlement established by Maroons or escaped slaves named Angola existed in Bradenton's present area starting in the late 1700s and ending in 1821. It is believed to been spread out between the Manatee River (then known as Oyster River) all the way to Sarasota Bay. The community is estimated to have had 600–750 residents in it. Angola was a rather large maroon settlement as the Manatee River at that time was too shallow for US Navy vessels to navigate. The settlement was abandoned after the Creeks who were aligned with Andrew Jackson attacked Angola.


title: Bradenton, Florida

text: When the United States annexed Florida in 1821, there were two known claimants of land in the vicinity of Bradenton but neither of them was confirmed by the US federal government.


title: Bradenton, Florida

text: Josiah Gates along with his family and eight slaves moved to the area where present-day Bradenton exists in January 1842 after being attracted to the area for its natural beauty. Gates thought the area would be a popular place for new settlers to arrive at because it was near Fort Brooke, and he also figured that while they were building their homes they would need a place to stay at temporarily. He built his home near present-day 15th Street East and his inn at another location naming it Gates House. Gates is also credited as being the first known American settler in present-day Manatee County.


title: Bradenton, Florida

text: Bradenton is named after Dr. Joseph Braden, whose nearby fort-like house was a refuge for early settlers during the Seminole Wars. Braden owned a sugar plantation in the area, covering and being worked by slave labor. Dr. Joseph Braden was originally from Virginia and relocated to Leon County in Florida shortly after its annexation by the United States in 1821 where he established a cotton plantation bringing his preexisting Virginia slaves along with him. After having financial difficulties from the Panic of 1837, he tried to reestablish himself financially in Manatee County in 1843 moving to the area along with his slaves. To help with the shipment of sugar grown at the plantation, he constructed a pier in present-day Downtown Bradenton where ships could dock at and pick up sugar. Where the pier met the land he constructed a stockade getting the name of Fort Braden. Braden was financially successful with his plantation but ended up moving back to Leon County in 1857 because of a financial panic that occurred that year.


title: Bradenton, Florida

text: Major Alden Joseph Adams purchased 400 acres of land in 1876 between present-day Manatee Memorial Hospital and 9th Street East and build his home there in 1882. He named his three-story concrete home Villa Zanza. Alden was known for having many animals and a large amount of foliage at his home. At one point he owned over 300,000 acres of land in Manatee County. Major Alden Joseph Adams served in the Union Army during the American Civil War and eventually reached the rank of major. After the war he served in the US Secret Service and later as a newspaper correspondent for the "New York Herald". He reported from Paris during the time when the Paris Commune existed. At one point he was asked to look for Dr. David Livingstone but declined and suggested that Henry Morton Stanley should look for him instead. Adams died in 1915, and his home was bought in 1924 with the intent of remodeling it. However it was not completed, and his home was demolished at some point in the late 1920s.


title: Bradenton, Florida

text: William I. Turner bought 7 acres from John Crews Pelot in 1877 and create a subdivision from that land creating what is now Bradenton. The land itself was plotted by Axel Emil Broberg and it contained 19 plots on both sides of what is 12th Street West along with a cross street that is currently 3rd Avenue. Turner sold the lots building a store and a warehouse along with his own home where he lived at.


title: Bradenton, Florida

text: The town was originally spelled "Braidentown," as a spelling error was made when it applied for a post office on May 9, 1878. The first bridge across Wares Creek was built in 1886. The following year, Bradenton was designated the county seat after DeSoto County was formed from eastern Manatee County, as the then county seat, Pine Level, was in the new county. A county courthouse was built in 1890 at Courthouse Square.


title: Bradenton, Florida

text: Railroad service was extended from Palmetto across the Manatee River to Bradenton in 1902. Bradenton was incorporated on May 19, 1903, with 59 voting in favor of incorporating and 34 voting against it. Shortly after incorporation, a local election was held to choose the city's first elected municipal officials. A.T Cornwell was elected as mayor, Robert H. Roesch as clerk and tax assessor, A.B. Murphy as treasurer and F. Dryman as tax collector along with seven city council members. One of the earliest moves made by the municipal government was amending the name to "Bradentown". However the name change would not be reflected with the US Postal Service until 1905. On December 29, a streetcar line began operation going from Bradenton to the neighboring city of Manatee and went west crossing Wares Creek to the nearby community of Fogartyville. The company operating the line had financial difficulties, likely due to a lack of ridership, and cancelled the line in 1906. The Manavista Hotel was opened in January 1907 bordering the Manatee River on Main Street.


title: Bradenton, Florida

text: The Davis Bridge, the first general traffic bridge across the Manatee River was opened in June 1910. It was a wooden toll bridge built by C.H. Davis that had one lane and passing spots. The bridge went from present-day 9th Street East (located within then nearby Manatee) to near where the Atwood Grapefruit Groves were located at west of Ellenton. In 1912, the first road, Range Road leading from present-day Bradenton (then, Manatee) to Sarasota was built. Also during that year, the original county courthouse was bought and moved to a new location becoming a grade school for black students in the area, Lincoln Academy Grammar School. A new courthouse was built on the site of the old one which still stands today in the following year, 1913. The Victory Bridge was opened in August 1919 running from current 10th Street West in Bradenton to 8th Avenue in Palmetto. Funding for the bridge came from bond issues by both Bradenton and Palmetto. The bridge itself had two lanes and was made of wood. Its name came from the United States' recent victory in World War I against the Central Powers. With the Victory Bridge's construction, the municipal government of Manatee attempted to buy Davis Bridge and make it public as a way to compete with Bradenton's Victory Bridge but the deal however never went through. The rest of the bridge ended up being dismantled with the exception of its draw section which was sold to county government and put into use for the Snead Island's Cut off bridge in 1920.


title: Bradenton, Florida

text: Baseball spring training began in Bradenton with the construction of Ninth Street Park in 1923. The first team to train in the city was the St. Louis Cardinals, doing so for 1923 and 1924. The city council began the process of removing the "w" letter from its then name "Bradentown" in January 1925 and be completed on May 2, 1925, when the state Governor signed a bill relating to it making it official. All streets in the city were renamed in 1926 with a numbering system.


title: Bradenton, Florida

text: After the collapse of the Florida land boom and the Great Depression starting, the city faced an economic downturn. Along with an economic downturn, the city had financial issues as well with the city going into debt. During the Florida land boom, Bradenton borrowed money as a way to pay for infrastructure to areas that were considered outlying. As a result, the city retracted its municipal boundaries so it could not provide services to those areas and defaulted their municipal bonds as a result. After the municipal boundaries were retracted, the bonds were refunded, and residents who lived in the new boundaries would be responsible for paying it. Bradenton ended up eventually getting its bonds paid off. Despite the economic downtown, several new projects were done in the city. A municipal pier (interchangeably referred to as Memorial pier) was built in 1927 with a building at its end. The pier itself still stands and the building at its end has served a variety of functions ever since. As the Victory Bridge was deemed too unsafe to use after a hurricane hit it in 1926, the Green Bridge was built the following year in 1927 as a replacement to it. In the meantime, a ferry operated until the Green Bridge was built. On July 22, 1931, a joint committee was appointed by the municipal city councils of Bradenton, Manatee, and Palmetto to consider and possibly even merge the three cities but nothing would come out of the committee in the end. A new post office building in 1937 was built on Manatee Avenue and 9th Street West as a Works Progress Administration project. The post office is still in operation.


title: Bradenton, Florida

text: Compiled in the late 1930s and first published in 1939, the Florida guide listed Bradenton's population as being 5,986 and described it as:


title: Bradenton, Florida

text: Bradenton was affected by World War II like many other cities in Florida and the United States. During the war, Manatee County had its own Civil Defense battalion in it with two subunits existing in Bradenton and another for nearby Manatee. A recreational center was opened in March 1942 at a building on the intersection of 6th Avenue and 12th Street West in the downtown area to be used by soldiers. The recreation center closed in November 1945 and was popular with local soldiers and visited even by those who were stationed outside of Bradenton. Police Chief Clyde Benton expanded the police force by naming 45 officers to serve without pay during the war. Camp Weatherford located at LECOM Field existed for eight months at some point during the war as a training center for the US Army Signal Corps. About 350 soldiers were trained there during its existence. The camp itself often had an issue with being flooded because of the rainy climate, showers at the camp occurring often, clothes being washed, its low elevation and is located nearby to Wares Creek. A soldier named Joe Grossman at the camp ran a radio show broadcasting on WSPB called Weatherford Shinings. Local residents accommodated the troops stationed at the base in a variety of ways. Bradenton merged with nearby Manatee (incorporated in 1888) in 1943. Manatee faced similar financial problems as Bradenton did in regards to their bonds and faced high debt levels as a result but Manatee could not pay off the bonds.


title: Bradenton, Florida

text: Mayor A. Sterling Hall took office in January 1948. During his tenure lasting the next 20 years before retiring, the city was radically transformed. While serving as mayor he was considered progressive in his time period when it came to racial issues. As mayor, he created a municipal housing authority and also do slum clearance. He created quality housing for black residents along with paving streets, bringing sewage service, water, and expanded garbage collection services to black neighborhoods. Despite Mayor Hall's racial progressiveness, a Ku Klux Klan march occurred during his tenure in 1958 between Palmetto and Bradenton. The reason for the march was in response to a black group asking the county school board to either give them a new school building in Bradenton or integrate junior and senior high schools in the county. The Manavista Hotel was demolished in 1959 and replaced with a motel and later a retirement community. During the 1960s the Manatee River was dredged, and an area nicknamed "the Sandpile" was formed getting developed over the course of the rest of the 20th century and the 21st century. During the Civil Rights Movement, Mayor Hall tried to make desegregation come about in his city in a nonviolent manner. Lunch counters were desegregated sometime during 1960 and a bi-racial commission was created during the summer of 1963.


title: Bradenton, Florida

text: Bradenton built a new city hall located on 15th Street West bordering Wares Creek in January 1970 as a replacement to their location on 13th Street West, which the city had used since 1913. Governor Claude R. Kirk Jr. arrived in Bradenton on April 6, 1970, in an attempt to stop Manatee County School District's desegregation busing. When he arrived he suspended the district superintendent along with the school district, leading to the district stopping the busing of 2,500 students and 107 teachers. During February he threatened to impeach a federal judge and said he would not sign checks that would pay for busing students. He stayed in the Manatee County School District's Administration building then located at the corner of 9th Avenue and 14th Street for a week before being threatened with a $10,000 fine per day if he continued to stay in the building and was unsuccessful with preventing bussing. The 8-floor Hotel Dixie Grande, which opened in April 1926, was demolished in August 1974.


title: Bradenton, Florida

text: The Green Bridge was replaced in 1986. The city hall moved to a new location on 12th Street West in November 1998 after the property was sold to a local resident with the intention of redeveloping it but plans never materialized.


title: Bradenton, Florida

text: The local resident who had owned the former city hall property along Wares Creek sold it to a development group sometime in 2004, and it was demolished in December 2004. The Bradenton Riverwalk, a 1.5-mile long park along the Manatee River opened in October 2012. McKechnie Field, the spring training stadium for the Pittsburgh Pirates, was renamed LECOM Park in February 2017.


title: Bradenton, Florida

text: According to the United States Census Bureau, Bradenton has a total area of , of which is land and (16.14%) is water.


title: Bradenton, Florida

text: Bradenton is located on US 41 between Tampa and Sarasota. The area is surrounded by waterways, both fresh and saltwater. Along the Gulf of Mexico and into Tampa Bay are over of Florida beaches, many of which are shaded by Australian pines. Bordered on the north by the Manatee River, Bradenton is located on the mainland and is separated from the outer barrier islands of Anna Maria Island and Longboat Key by the Intracoastal Waterway.


title: Bradenton, Florida

text: Downtown Bradenton is located in the northwest area of the city. Home to many of Bradenton's offices and government buildings, the tallest is the Bradenton Financial Center, 12 stories high, with its blue-green windows. The next tallest is the brand new Manatee County Judicial Center with nine floors, located next to the historic courthouse. Other major downtown buildings include the Manatee County Government building and the headquarters of the School Board of Manatee County.


title: Bradenton, Florida

text: Bradenton has a typical Central Florida humid subtropical climate (Köppen "Cfa") characterized by hot, humid summers and warm winters. Bradenton borders a tropical climate, with only one month (January) having a mean temperature below , which is the threshold for a tropical climate.


title: Bradenton, Florida

text: Bradenton is a principal city of the North Port–Sarasota–Bradenton metropolitan statistical area, which had a 2018 estimated population of 821,573.


title: Bradenton, Florida

text: As of the census of 2000, there were 49,504 people, 21,379 households, and 12,720 families residing in the city. The population density was 4,088.5 inhabitants per square mile (1,578.3/km). There were 24,887 housing units at an average density of . The racial makeup of the city was 78.14% White, 15.11% African American, 0.79% Asian, 0.29% Native American, 0.05% Pacific Islander, 3.91% from other races, and 1.71% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 11.26% of the population.


title: Bradenton, Florida

text: There were 21,379 households, out of which 23.0% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 43.5% were married couples living together, 12.1% had a female householder with no husband present, and 40.5% were non-families. 34.1% of all households were made up of individuals, and 17.8% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.24 and the average family size was 2.85.


title: Bradenton, Florida

text: In the city 21.6% of the population was under the age of 18, 7.7% from 18 to 24, 25.3% from 25 to 44, 19.9% from 45 to 64, and 25.4% were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 42 years. For every 100 females, there were 90.3 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 85.9 males.


title: Bradenton, Florida

text: The median income for a household in the city was $34,902, and the median income for a family was $42,366. Males had a median income of $28,262 versus $23,292 for females. The per capita income for the city was $20,133. About 9.7% of families and 13.6% of the population were below the poverty line, including 22.3% of those under age 18 and 8.2% of those age 65 or over.


title: Bradenton, Florida

text: Tropicana Products was founded in Bradenton in 1947 by Anthony T. Rossi, an Italian immigrant. By 2004 it had over 8,000 employees and marketed its products throughout the United States. PepsiCo, Inc., acquired it in 1998. Tropicana's Juice Trains have been running to northern markets via CSX and predecessor railroads since 1971. In 2003, Pepsi relocated Tropicana's corporate headquarters to Chicago after it acquired Gatorade and consolidated its non-carbonated beverage businesses. However, their juice production facilities remain in Bradenton.


title: Bradenton, Florida

text: Bradenton was significantly affected by the United States housing market correction, as reported by CNN, projecting a 24.8% loss in median home values by the third quarter of 2008. Real estate has shown a recovery since 2012, as home prices stabilize and inventory subsides.


title: Bradenton, Florida

text: Bradenton is served by Sarasota-Bradenton International Airport and is connected to St. Petersburg by the Sunshine Skyway Bridge. The Sunshine Skyway is a cross-bay bridge that rises above the bay at its highest point. Remnants of the old Skyway bridge have been converted into a fishing pier extending into Tampa Bay from both sides of the bay.


title: Bradenton, Florida

text: Manatee County Area Transit (MCAT) buses serve Bradenton along with the cities/communities of Palmetto, Ellenton, Anna Maria, Holmes Beach, Bradenton Beach, Longboat Key, Tallevast and Samoset, with transfers to Sarasota and St. Petersburg. Free trolleys run north–south on Anna Maria Island, as well as to/from various points on the mainland. Amtrak charter buses run through downtown Bradenton outside the courthouse to Tampa Union Station and Venice.


title: Bradenton, Florida

text: The city is governed by a city council with five members. Each of the members are residents of one of the five wards. The city council selects the city's vice mayor. The mayor is elected at-large for a four-year term, as are the five council members.


title: Bradenton, Florida

text: WSNN-LD is based in Sarasota but transmits from Manatee County. WWSB channel 40, the local ABC affiliate, is based in Sarasota, but has a transmitter in Parrish, northeast of Bradenton; it is seen on cable channel 7 on most cable systems in the area. WXPX-TV channel 66, the local Ion Television affiliate, is licensed in Bradenton, with its transmitter in Riverview in Hillsborough County.


title: Bradenton, Florida

text: The State College of Florida, Manatee-Sarasota's (SCF) main campus is located in Bayshore Gardens, and State College of Florida Collegiate School has a campus on the SCF Bradenton campus.


title: Bradenton, Florida

text: Bradenton is home to the Village of the Arts, a renovated neighborhood immediately south of downtown where special zoning laws allow residents to live and work in their homes. Many of these once dilapidated houses have been converted into studios, galleries, small restaurants and other small businesses. The Village of the Arts promotes its 'First Fridays' activities celebrating the seasons and different holidays. The Village of the Arts remains the largest arts district on the Gulf Coast.


title: Bradenton, Florida

text: The Manatee Players, who reside at the Manatee Performing Arts Center, have a three-year record of first-place wins within the Florida Theatre Conference and the Southeastern Theatre Conference competitions. In addition, the theatre currently holds the first place title from the American Association of Community Theatre competition.


title: Bradenton, Florida

text: Located on the Manatee River in downtown Bradenton is the South Florida Museum, Bishop Planetarium and Parker Manatee Aquarium. This one-stop museum-planetarium-aquarium offers a glimpse of Florida history, a star and multimedia show, and ongoing lecture and film series. The Parker Manatee Aquarium was the permanent home to Manatee County's most famous resident and official mascot, Snooty, the manatee. Born at the Miami Aquarium and Tackle Company on July 21, 1948, Snooty was one of the first recorded captive manatee births. He was the oldest manatee in captivity, and likely the oldest manatee in the world. On July 23, 2017, two days after his 69th birthday, Snooty died as the result of drowning.


title: Bradenton, Florida

text: ArtCenter Manatee is the center for art and art education in Manatee County. The nearly building in downtown Bradenton features three galleries, five classrooms, an Artists' Market gift shop and an art library featuring over 3,000 art volumes.


title: Bradenton, Florida

text: The nonprofit organization Realize Bradenton works with the above-listed cultural partners to promote Downtown Bradenton as a destination for the arts. It also produces events in the downtown area with a focus on arts and culture like the annual Bradenton Blues Festival, ArtSlam public art festival as well as several smaller public art and music events throughout the year.


title: Bradenton, Florida

text: Additionally, the town is the subject of the We the Kings song "This Is Our Town"; they, as well as the band Have Gun, Will Travel originate from Bradenton.


title: Bradenton, Florida

text: Bradenton is the spring training home of Major League Baseball's Pittsburgh Pirates who play their home games at downtown's LECOM Park. During the regular baseball season, the stadium is home to the minor league Bradenton Marauders who play in the Florida State League in Class A-Advanced.


title: Bradenton, Florida

text: Manatee County high schools produce several teams including Manatee High School whose football team was nationally ranked in the 1950s, 1980s, and 1990s and regained their national status in 2009. Manatee High School has won five football state championships. Bradenton is also home to the IMG Academy, the home of the U.S U-17 residential soccer program.


title: Never Rarely Sometimes Always

text: Never Rarely Sometimes Always is a 2020 drama film written and directed by Eliza Hittman. It stars Sidney Flanigan (in her acting debut), Talia Ryder, Théodore Pellerin, Ryan Eggold and Sharon Van Etten. It had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on January 24, 2020. It was also selected to compete for the Golden Bear in the main competition section at the 70th Berlin International Film Festival, where it won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize. The film was released in the United States on March 13, 2020, by Focus Features. It received widespread acclaim from critics, with praise aimed at Flanigan’s performance and Hittman’s direction.


title: Never Rarely Sometimes Always

text: Seventeen-year-old Autumn Callahan suspects she is pregnant and goes to a crisis pregnancy center. At the center, she takes a drug store test that confirms that she is pregnant. She gets told that she is 10 weeks along and is given literature on adoption and is shown an anti-abortion video.


title: Never Rarely Sometimes Always

text: After learning that she is unable to get an abortion in Pennsylvania without parental consent, she tries to induce a miscarriage by swallowing pills and punching herself in the stomach. When those methods fail, she confides in her cousin, Skylar, that she is pregnant. Skylar steals cash from the grocery store where they work, and the two buy bus tickets to New York City.


title: Never Rarely Sometimes Always

text: On the bus they meet Jasper, a young man who is persistently interested in Skylar even though she tries to blow him off.


title: Never Rarely Sometimes Always

text: At the Planned Parenthood clinic, Autumn learns that the crisis pregnancy center lied to her about how far along she was and that she is actually 18 weeks pregnant. Though she is still able to get an abortion, she must go to a secondary clinic the following morning in order to have the abortion performed.


title: Never Rarely Sometimes Always

text: Autumn and Skylar spend an uncomfortable night riding the subway and playing games at an arcade. The following morning at the clinic, Autumn learns that a second-trimester abortion is a two-day procedure and that paying for the abortion will wipe out most of her funds. The counselor also asks her a series of questions about her sexual partners which reveal that Autumn's partners have been physically and sexually abusive.


title: Never Rarely Sometimes Always

text: Out of money, Skylar realizes the two have no way of going home. As Autumn refuses to let Skylar call either of their mothers, Skylar reaches out to Jasper, who takes them bowling and to karaoke. At the end of the night, Skylar asks Jasper to loan them the money for their bus tickets, and he agrees. Skylar leaves with Jasper to find an ATM, and Autumn later goes looking for them. She finds them kissing. Realizing Skylar is only going along with it for the loan, Autumn discreetly grabs Skylar's hand to comfort her.


title: Never Rarely Sometimes Always

text: In the morning, Autumn goes to her appointment and has the abortion. Autumn and Skylar go to a restaurant, where Skylar asks her questions about the procedure, but Autumn remains vague. The two ride a bus back to Pennsylvania.


title: Never Rarely Sometimes Always

text: In April 2019, it was announced Sidney Flanigan, Talia Ryder, Théodore Pellerin, Ryan Eggold and Sharon Van Etten had joined the cast of the film, with Eliza Hittman directing from a screenplay she wrote. Adele Romanski and Sara Murphy produced the film under their Pastel Productions banner, while Rose Garnett, Tim Headington, Elika Portnoy and Alex Orlovsky executive produced the film under their BBC Films and Tango Entertainment banners respectively. Focus Features was slated to distribute.


title: Never Rarely Sometimes Always

text: The film shot for a total of 29 days in March and April 2019, in New York City and Shamokin, Pennsylvania.


title: Never Rarely Sometimes Always

text: "Never Rarely Sometimes Always" had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on January 24, 2020. It was released in the United States on March 13, 2020. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the film was released on video on demand on April 3, 2020. Focus debated re-releasing the film theatrically but was concerned about competition once theaters re-opened. It was released through video on demand in the United Kingdom on May 13, 2020, after being initially planned for a theatrical release.


title: Never Rarely Sometimes Always

text: On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of based on reviews, with an average rating of . The site's critical consensus reads, "Powerfully acted and directed, "Never Rarely Sometimes Always" reaffirms writer-director Eliza Hittman as a filmmaker of uncommon sensitivity and grace." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 92 out of 100, based on 38 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".


title: Never Rarely Sometimes Always

text: Critics praised the film for its approach to visual storytelling and naturalistic acting, particularly the film’s avoidance of polemic to focus on the lives of and the bond between its two female lead characters. Justin Chang of the "Los Angeles Times" wrote, “What makes ‘"Never Rarely Sometimes Always"’ so forceful — and certainly the most searingly confrontational American drama about abortion rights in recent memory — is its quality of understatement, its determination to build its argument not didactically but cinematically.” Richard Lawson of "Vanity Fair" voiced a similar sentiment, saying “It’s rare that the topic of abortion gets such a empathetic and holistic film treatment: passionate but unsentimental, principled without any predetermined moral.” Chang concluded, “if the picture Hittman paints is stirringly bleak, it is not without its passages of tentative hope, even grace.”


title: Never Rarely Sometimes Always

text: Karen Han of "Polygon" wrote, “The slow build-up — and Autumn and Skylar’s stoicism through it all — makes it all the more affecting when the reasoning behind the film’s title is revealed.”


title: Never Rarely Sometimes Always

text: Naomi Fry of "The New Yorker" said, “In its profound sensitivity to everyday detail, ‘"Never Rarely Sometimes Always"’ makes the viewer aware of the mundane challenges that dog every step its heroines manage to take along that path—from the large, cheap suitcase bumped along with difficulty on subway steps, to the dwindling-down-to-nothing funds in a secreted-away pouch, to the flutter-lidded, late-night dozes taken on the subway, in lieu of a place to stay, waiting out the hours.”


title: Never Rarely Sometimes Always

text: Critic Mark Kermode gave the film a 5-star rating and wrote, “Perfectly pitched and sensitively played, this is truthful, powerful and profoundly moving fare from a film-maker at the very top of her game” and added the film “is perhaps best described as a perfectly observed portrait of female friendship; a coming-of-age story with road-movie inflections, piercingly honest and deeply affecting.” Kermode also lauded cinematographer Hélène Louvart, “who here manages to capture moments of intense intimacy in unobtrusive fashion. Through her camera, we become both observers and participants – watching these young women’s lives but also empathetically experiencing their shared journeys.”


title: Delroy Grant

text: Delroy Easton Grant Junior (born 3 September 1957) is a Jamaican-born British convicted serial rapist who carried out a series of offences of burglary, rape and sexual assault between October 1992 and May 2009 in the South East London area of England. Grant, also known as the Minstead Rapist and latterly the Night Stalker, is thought to have been active since 1990. He had a distinctive modus operandi, preying primarily on elderly women who lived alone. He is suspected of over 100 offences from 1990 to 2009.


title: Delroy Grant

text: In 1998, the Metropolitan Police launched the dedicated Operation Minstead team to investigate the crimes, based at Lewisham police station. (The name was chosen from an alphabetical list of English villages, the method of operational naming in use at the time). As of 2009, the operation was the largest and most complex rape investigation ever undertaken by the Metropolitan Police.


title: Delroy Grant

text: On 24 March 2011, Grant was found guilty of 22 offences. The following day he was given four life sentences and ordered to serve a minimum of 27 years in prison.


title: Delroy Grant

text: Operation Minstead was dramatised over the 2020 second series of the British TV show "Manhunt," based on the memoirs of former SIO Colin Sutton.


title: Delroy Grant

text: Grant was an accomplished burglar and had broken into the homes of over 90 elderly women aged between 68 and 93. He was positively linked to four reported rapes and around 30 other sexual assaults. Police believe he was also responsible for at least another two rapes where the victims felt unable to make any official allegation. The true total may be higher as his victims were often too traumatised to speak to police.


title: Delroy Grant

text: In addition, the Operation Minstead investigation team had to decide which incidents were unmistakably the work of the same offender and which were similar but possibly unrelated. Therefore, many possible Minstead incidents flagged up by police for the attention of the Operation Minstead team could not be definitely confirmed as the work of the same offender, and so had to be excluded from the linked series. The confirmed series of offences began in October 1992 in the Shirley area of Croydon. However, because of a break of four years between this first attack and a spate of others, Operation Minstead was not set up until 1998.


title: Delroy Grant

text: Although committing many crimes, Grant was dormant for long periods. After the first attack in October 1992, no further offences were reported until 1997. After a particularly violent rape on 5 August 1999 where his victim almost died from her injuries, there was another long break. This prompted some media speculation that the rapist had been imprisoned for an unrelated offence or that he had died. However, on 13 October 2002, ten years after the first attack, he struck again. Seven confirmed attacks took place in the summer of 2003. Another break then followed.


title: Delroy Grant

text: Detective Superintendent Simon Morgan, who headed the Minstead team from 2001 to October 2009, explained the problems in arriving at a definitive total of offences in this series by saying, "His victims come from a generation who are inclined to see good in everyone. One thanked him for being gentle when he raped her". Another said she did not want to dial 999 "because I know the police are already so busy".


title: Delroy Grant

text: The offences occurred in defined geographical clusters in and around South East London. Most of the offences occurred around Shirley in Croydon, and also Orpington. However he also struck in Coulsdon, Forest Hill, Catford, Brockley, Bromley, Beckenham, Dulwich and Sidcup. Only once was there a report of his offending outside Greater London. This was in Warlingham, Surrey.


title: Delroy Grant

text: The fact that many offences had taken place in Orpington, including one on Boxing Day in 1998, led detectives to suspect the rapist had a link to the area. Det Supt Morgan commented, "He either lives, works or has some connection with someone he visits in Orpington. This could be a child, a school or a job". On three occasions, the rapist made remarks about having to get to Brighton.


title: Delroy Grant

text: Grant gained entry to the homes of his victims from the side or the rear, either through open windows or by removing a window pane entirely. He had been known to use tools stolen from the victim's own garden shed to remove the window beading. He ripped out the telephone wires, either before entering the property, or after gaining access. He then disabled the lights either by switching off the electricity at the meter or by unscrewing lightbulbs from their sockets.


title: Delroy Grant

text: He then approached his victim, shining a torch in her eyes. Often his first words were to demand sex. However, he had been known to spend hours in victims' homes either before or without assaulting them. He exhibited a knowledge of geriatrics, knowing how to support his elderly victim's spine and how to pick her up by the elbow. He had sometimes been shamed into leaving without committing a sexual assault when his victim had chastised him. Of particular note is an incident where one victim caused him to apologise and leave by angrily demanding, "What would your mother think of you?" Police have speculated that Grant was ashamed of his actions, perhaps explaining the long period that sometimes occurred between offences. Despite this, he could be extremely violent. During his most violent attack on 5 August 1999, he raped his victim twice and left her bleeding from a perforated bowel, injuries which nearly proved fatal.


title: Delroy Grant

text: Grant had been known to burgle his victims, but this was not his primary motive. He often took money, but only small amounts. He also took credit cards and obtained their PINs. In 2004 he stole a wad of five-pound notes, but these were later discovered thrown away a mile and a half from his victim's house. He had also taken jewellery. The same year he told a victim that his mother had died four years earlier, stating that "the Government let her down anyway".


title: Delroy Grant

text: He struck on all days of the week, but most often during the early hours of a Friday or Saturday morning.


title: Delroy Grant

text: Descriptions from his many victims suggested a black male aged between 25 and 40. He was described as about 5'9" to 5'11" tall, of slim athletic build and tending to wear dark clothing. He was usually wearing gloves, a mask or balaclava, and occasionally a baseball cap. He was also described as having a soft or well-spoken voice. Some of his victims reported a curious sweet smell.


title: Delroy Grant

text: The Minstead Rapist was thought to be forensically aware since he never left a fingerprint at any scene. However, an offence committed on 13 October 2002 left behind a vital clue: a footprint from a size 10 Nike Air Terra Contego trainer. Most importantly he did not use condoms and his DNA was captured. The first time his DNA was discovered at a scene was in 1992. Thereafter, more than 2,000 DNA samples were collected from suspects.


title: Delroy Grant

text: Britain's national police DNA database contains samples from anyone arrested for a recordable offence since 1995. Even by the time of his first offence, the Minstead Rapist was clearly an accomplished burglar. However, his DNA remained unmatched and unidentified on the database. If the rapist had ever been arrested for burglary or a related offence, it would have to have been before 1995, when police began routinely to gather DNA samples from prisoners.


title: Delroy Grant

text: Advanced DNA techniques pointed towards a north Afro-Caribbean ethnic origin for the rapist; probably the Windward Islands: St Lucia, Barbados, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Tobago or Trinidad. Operation Minstead identified around 21,000 possible suspects that fitted such a profile.


title: Delroy Grant

text: In March 2004, Operation Minstead detectives hand-delivered a letter to hundreds of black men in South London, asking for their help in voluntarily providing DNA samples for elimination purposes. Police explained that they desperately needed to reduce the vast number of suspects in the operation and that this was the best way to do so. Volunteers were assured that their DNA samples would be destroyed as soon as they were confirmed to be unmatched with the rapist's DNA. The majority of those potential suspects were eager to help if it would assist police in catching the suspect. However, 125 men initially refused to provide samples believing that the exercise was discriminatory and breached their human rights. Police brought pressure to bear on those who refused, explaining that their behaviour could be construed as suspicious. Five objectors were subsequently arrested but cleared. This incident was seen by some commentators, particularly "The Voice" newspaper and Liberty, as an abuse of power that damaged relations between London's black community and the police. A Liberal Democrat MP, Lynne Featherstone, questioned police tactics in the House of Commons. Although they were able to reduce the list of potential suspects from 21,000 to 1,000, police resigned themselves to being able only to obtain the DNA of certain suspects still on the list if and when they were arrested for an unrelated offence.


title: Delroy Grant

text: According to newspaper reports the suspect was seen by cash machine CCTV cameras using his victims' credit and debit cards but the footage appeared to be useless as his face was always covered by a mask. When viewing some of the footage, one police officer spotted the reflection of a bus in a shop window. The bus was tracked down and was found to be fitted with cameras. Police trawled through the CCTV footage recorded by the bus. On the recording a Vauxhall Zafira was spotted near the cash machine and vehicle records pinpointed all models in the South London area.


title: Delroy Grant

text: On Sunday 15 November 2009, a Zafira was spotted parked in the Shirley area of Croydon, which was already being staked out by 70 police officers following recent break-ins believe to have been carried out by the Night Stalker. Grant was arrested as he approached his car having just attempted to enter a nearby pensioner's house.


title: Delroy Grant

text: On 15 November 2009 it was reported a 52-year-old male had been arrested in connection with over 100 sexual offences in the South London area. Detectives described the arrest as "significant". On 16 November, it was reported that Delroy Grant of Brockley Mews, Brockley, South East London, had been arrested and charged with twenty-two offences, and appeared at Greenwich Magistrates’


title: Delroy Grant

text: On 19 November 2009, Grant appeared at Greenwich Magistrates’ Court, where he was ordered to appear at Woolwich Crown Court on Thursday 26 November. Prosecutors said that further charges were likely. He was remanded in custody.


title: Delroy Grant

text: On 26 November 2009, Grant appeared at Woolwich Crown Court. He was remanded in custody, next due to appear at the Old Bailey for a plea and case management hearing on 8 February 2010.


title: Delroy Grant

text: On 8 February 2010, he was remanded in custody and was next due to appear at Inner London Crown Court on 30 April 2010.


title: Delroy Grant

text: On 21 June 2010, Grant pleaded not guilty at the Old Bailey. Mr Justice Bean said the trial would take place on 1 March 2011, at Woolwich Crown Court; it was thought the trial would take up to six weeks.


title: Delroy Grant

text: On 24 March 2011 Grant was found guilty of all offences charged. He was sentenced to four concurrent life sentences with a recommendation that he should serve 27 years before being eligible to apply for parole. Grant was also given concurrent eight-year sentences for seven indecent assaults, and concurrent six-year sentences for 18 burglaries and attempted burglaries.


title: The Urantia Book

text: The Urantia Book (sometimes called The Urantia Papers or The Fifth Epochal Revelation) is a spiritual, philosophical, and religious book that originated in Chicago sometime between 1924 and 1955. The authorship remains a matter of speculation. It has received various degrees of interest ranging from praise to criticism for its religious and science-related content, its unusual length, and its lack of a known author.


title: The Urantia Book

text: The text introduces the word "Urantia" as the name of the planet Earth and states that its intent is to "present enlarged concepts and advanced truth." The book aims to unite religion, science, and philosophy. Its large amount of content on topics of interest to science is unique among documents said to have been received from celestial beings. Among other topics, the book discusses the origin and meaning of life, mankind's place in the universe, the relationship between God and people, and the life of Jesus.


title: The Urantia Book

text: The Urantia Foundation, a U.S.-based non-profit group, first published "The Urantia Book" in 1955. In 2001, a jury found that the English-language book's copyright was no longer valid in the United States after 1983. The English text became a public domain work in the United States, and in 2006 the international copyright expired.


title: The Urantia Book

text: The exact circumstances of the origin of "The Urantia Book" are unknown. The book and its publishers do not name a human author. Instead, it is written as if directly presented by numerous celestial beings appointed to the task of providing an "epochal" religious revelation.


title: The Urantia Book

text: As early as 1911, William S. Sadler and his wife Lena Sadler, physicians in Chicago and well known in the community, are said to have been approached by a neighbor who was concerned because she would occasionally find her husband in a deep sleep and breathing abnormally. She reported that she was unable to wake him at these times. The Sadlers came to observe the episodes, and over time, the individual produced verbal communications that claimed to be from "student visitor" spiritual beings. This changed sometime in early 1925 with a "voluminous handwritten document," which from then on became the regular method of purported communication. The individual was never identified publicly but has been described as "a hard-boiled business man, member of the board of trade and stock exchange."


title: The Urantia Book

text: The Sadlers were both respected physicians, and William Sadler was a sometime debunker of paranormal claims. In 1929, he published a book called "The Mind at Mischief", in which he explained the fraudulent methods of mediums and how self-deception leads to psychic claims. He wrote in an appendix that there were two cases that he had not explained to his satisfaction:


title: The Urantia Book

text: The other exception has to do with a rather peculiar case of psychic phenomena, one which I find myself unable to classify. ... I was brought in contact with it, in the summer of 1911, and I have had it under my observation more or less ever since, having been present at probably 250 of the night sessions, many of which have been attended by a stenographer who made voluminous notes. A thorough study of this case has convinced me that it is not one of ordinary trance. ... This man is utterly unconscious, wholly oblivious to what takes place, and, unless told about it subsequently, never knows that he has been used as a sort of clearing house for the coming and going of alleged extra-planetary personalities. ... Psychoanalysis, hypnotism, intensive comparison, fail to show that the written or spoken messages of this individual have origin in his own mind. Much of the material secured through this subject is quite contrary to his habits of thought, to the way in which he has been taught, and to his entire philosophy. In fact, of much that we have secured, we have failed to find anything of its nature in existence.


title: The Urantia Book

text: In 1923, a group of Sadler's friends, former patients, and colleagues began meeting for Sunday philosophical and religious discussions, but became interested in the strange communications when Sadler mentioned the case at their fourth meeting and read samples at their request. Shortly afterwards, a communication reportedly was received about which this group would be allowed to devise questions and that answers would be given by celestial beings through the "contact personality."


title: The Urantia Book

text: Sadler presented this development to the group, and they generated hundreds of questions without full seriousness, but their claim is that it resulted in the appearance of answers in the form of fully written papers. They became more impressed with the quality of the answers and continued to ask questions, until all papers now collected together as "The Urantia Book" were obtained. The group was known as the Forum, and was formalized as a closed group of 30 members in 1925 who pledged not to discuss the material with others. Over time, some participants left and others joined, leading to a total membership of 486 people over the years from diverse backgrounds and a mix of interest levels. A smaller group of five individuals called the Contact Commission, including the Sadlers, was responsible for gathering the questions from the Forum, acting as the custodians of the handwritten manuscripts that were presented as answers, and arranging for proofreading and typing of the material. Bill Sadler, Jr. is noted to have composed the table of contents that is published with the book.


title: The Urantia Book

text: The Sadlers and others involved, now all deceased, claimed that the papers of the book were physically materialized from 1925 until 1935 in a way that was not understood even by them, with the first two parts being completed in 1934 and the third and fourth in 1935. The last Forum gathering was in 1942.


title: The Urantia Book

text: After the last of Part IV was obtained in 1935, an additional period of time supposedly took place where requests for clarifications resulted in revisions. Sadler and his son William (Bill) Sadler, Jr. at one point wrote a draft introduction and were told that they could not add their introduction. The Foreword was then "received."


title: The Urantia Book

text: The communications purportedly continued for another two decades while members of the Forum studied the book in depth, and according to Sadler and others, permission to publish it was given to them in 1955. The Urantia Foundation was formed in 1950 as a tax-exempt educational society in Illinois, and through privately raised funds, the book was published on October 12, 1955.


title: The Urantia Book

text: Only the members of the Contact Commission witnessed the activities of the "sleeping subject", and only they knew his identity. The individual is claimed to have been kept anonymous in order to prevent undesirable future veneration or reverence for him. Martin Gardner states that an explanation concerning the origin of the book more plausible than celestial beings is that the Contact Commission, particularly William Sadler, was responsible. Gardner's conclusion is that a man named Wilfred Kellogg was the sleeping subject and authored the work from his subconscious mind, with William Sadler subsequently editing and authoring parts. Brad Gooch believes Sadler wrote the book, possibly with help from others on the Contact Commission. A statistical analysis, using the Mosteller and Wallace methods of stylometry, indicates at least nine authors were involved in the Urantia documents. Comparing Sadler's "The Mind at Mischief" to the Urantia documents does not indicate authorship or extensive editing of the latter by Sadler, without ruling out the possibility Sadler made limited edits or contributions.


title: The Urantia Book

text: In 1991, after having compiled an index of "The Urantia Book" and distributed free copies via computer disk and printouts, Kristen Maaherra was sued by the Urantia Foundation for violating their copyright on the book. In 1995, Maaherra won a Summary Judgment declaring the Urantia Foundation's copyright renewal invalid. Upon appeal, the judgment was reversed and awarded to the Urantia Foundation.


title: The Urantia Book

text: Four years later, in 1999, Harry McMullan III and the Michael Foundation published a book, "Jesus–A New Revelation", which included verbatim 76 of the 196 papers included in "The Urantia Book". McMullan and the Michael Foundation subsequently sought a legal declaration that the Urantia Foundation's US copyright in "The Urantia Book" was either invalid or, alternatively, that the copyright had not been infringed upon. Urantia Foundation's copyright was held to have expired in 1983 because the book was deemed to have been neither a composite work nor a commissioned work for hire. These two arguments having been rejected, a U.S. court held that, since the Conduit had died prior to 1983, only the Conduit's heirs would have been eligible to renew the copyright in 1983 and, since they had not done so, the Urantia Foundation's copyright on the book had expired and the book had therefore passed into the public domain. This decision was upheld on appeal. In 2006, the international copyright on the English text expired.


title: The Urantia Book

text: "The Urantia Book" is approximately 2,000 pages long, and consists of a body of 196 "papers" divided in four parts, and an introductory foreword:


title: The Urantia Book

text: According to "The Urantia Book", God is the creator and upholder of all reality—an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, infinite, and eternal spirit personality. The most fundamental teaching about God in the book is that the human concept that most closely approximates the nature of God is that of a Father. Specifically, "the Father idea is [still] the highest human concept of God." It is also said that, "The face which the Infinite turns toward all universe personalities is the face of a Father, the Universal Father of love."


title: The Urantia Book

text: God, according to the book, is one Deity who functions on a range of different levels of reality, both personal and impersonal. God is taught to exist in a Trinity of three perfectly individualized persons who are co-equal: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit. These persons are referred to by additional titles in the book, primarily as the "Universal Father," "Eternal Son," and "Infinite Spirit." While stating that the concept of one God in three persons is difficult to fully understand, the book says that the idea: "...in no manner violates the truth of the divine unity. The three personalities of Paradise Deity are, in all universe reality reactions and in all creature relations, as one."


title: The Urantia Book

text: The Father, Son, and Spirit are considered "existential" persons of Deity, those in existence from the eternal past to the eternal future. In addition, three persons of Deity are described who are "experiential," or incomplete and in the process of actualizing: God the Supreme; God the Ultimate; and God the Absolute. Of these three, God the Supreme, or "the Supreme Being," is given the most explanation, as the person of Deity evolving in time and space to unify finite reality and the infinite. The persons of God the Ultimate and God the Absolute are considered to be remote from the possibility of comprehension and are covered on a limited basis.


title: The Urantia Book

text: Many types of celestial beings are enumerated in the book, and one of particular note is a joint "offspring" of the Universal Father and Eternal Son called a "Creator Son." A divine Creator Son is considered the highest personification of the Universal Father and Eternal Son that is possible for people to know and: "...is, to all practical intents and purposes, God." Jesus of Nazareth is identified as a Creator Son who incarnated on Earth, and the central theme of the book's section recounting his life and teachings is that the religion he preached is the highest known to the world.


title: The Urantia Book

text: God is described as the Father of each individual, and through the direct gift of a fragment of his eternal spirit, called a Thought Adjuster, is said to be able to guide the individual toward an increased understanding of him. The Thought Adjuster is a central teaching of the book and is also referred to as a "Mystery Monitor" and "indwelling presence," as well as a "divine spark." The idea is compared within the book to the Hindu atman and the ancient Egyptian ka. In relation to biblical traditions, the Thought Adjuster is said to be the meaning behind the phrases "being made in God's image" and the "kingdom of God is within you":


title: The Urantia Book

text: Each person is said to receive one such fragment at the time of his or her first independent moral decision, on average around the age of five years and 10 months. The Adjuster then serves noncoercively as a divine partner in the mind of the individual for the rest of life, and to the extent that a person consents with their free will to want to find God, it leads the person toward more mature, spiritualized thinking. A person's Thought Adjuster is described as distinct from either the soul or the conscience. In "The Urantia Book"<nowiki>'</nowiki>s teachings, the degree to which a human mind chooses to accept its Adjuster's guidance becomes the degree to which a person's soul "grows" and becomes a reality that can then survive death. The soul is in essence an embryonic spiritual development, one parental factor being the divine Adjuster and the other being the human will.


title: The Urantia Book

text: The book says: "But you yourself are mostly unconscious of this inner ministry. You are quite incapable of distinguishing the product of your own material intellect from that of the conjoint activities of your soul and the Adjuster." The book is strongly fideistic and teaches that neither science nor logic will ever be able to prove or disprove the existence of God, arguing that faith is necessary to become conscious of God's presence in human experience, the Thought Adjuster.


title: The Urantia Book

text: Persistently embracing sin is considered the same as rejecting the leadings of the Adjuster, rejecting the will of God. Constant selfishness and sinful choosing lead eventually to iniquity and full identification with unrighteousness, and since unrighteousness is unreal, it results in the eventual annihilation of the individual's identity. Personalities like this become "as if they never were." The book says that: "...in the last analysis, such sin-identified individuals have destroyed themselves by becoming wholly unreal through their embrace of iniquity." The concepts of Hell and reincarnation are not taught.


title: The Urantia Book

text: The book says that a person ultimately is destined to fuse with his or her divine fragment and become one inseparable entity with it as the final goal of faith. Uniting with the Adjuster fragment is the "reward of the ages," the moment when a human personality has successfully and unalterably won eternal life, described as typically taking place in the afterlife, but also a possibility during earthly life. The result during human life is a "fusion flash," with the material body consumed in a fiery light and the soul "translated" to the afterlife. The Hebrew prophet Elijah being taken to heaven without death in "chariots of fire" is said to be a rare example in recorded history of a person who translated instead of experiencing death.


title: The Urantia Book

text: After a person fuses with his or her fragment of God, "then will begin your real life, the ascending life, to which your present mortal state is but the vestibule." A person continues as an ascending citizen in the universe and travels through numerous worlds on a long pilgrimage of growth and learning that eventually leads to God and residence on Paradise. Mortals who reach this stage are called "finaliters." The book goes on to discuss the potential destinies of these "glorified mortals."


title: The Urantia Book

text: The book regards human life on earth as a "short and intense test," and the afterlife as a continuation of training that begins in material life. The "religion of Jesus" is considered to be practiced by way of loving God the Father, thereby learning to love each person the way Jesus loves people; that is, recognizing the "fatherhood of God and its correlated truth, the brotherhood of man," resulting in unselfish service to others.


title: The Urantia Book

text: The book describes that at the center of the cosmos is the stationary Isle of Paradise—the dwelling place of God—with Paradise being surrounded by "Havona," an eternal universe containing a billion perfect worlds, around which seven incomplete and evolutionary "superuniverses" circle.


title: The Urantia Book

text: The word "universe" in the book is used to denote a number of different scales of organization. A "superuniverse" is roughly the size of a galaxy or group of galaxies, and the seven superuniverses along with Paradise-Havona are together designated as the "grand universe." A "local universe" is a portion of a superuniverse, with 100,000 local universes being in each superuniverse. Beyond the seven superuniverses, uninhabited "outer space levels" are described. The term "master universe" refers to what in modern usage would be the total universe—all existing matter and space taken as a whole.


title: The Urantia Book

text: Urantia is said to be located in a remote local universe named "Nebadon," which itself is part of superuniverse number seven, "Orvonton." The physical size of a local universe is not directly stated, but each is said to have up to 10 million inhabited worlds.


title: The Urantia Book

text: The book's extensive teachings about the history of the world include its physical development about 4.5 billion years ago, the gradual changes in conditions that allowed life to develop, and long ages of organic evolution that started with microscopic marine life and led to plant and animal life in the oceans, later on land. The emergence of humans is presented as having occurred about a million years ago from a branch of superior primates originating from a lemur ancestor. The first humans are said to have been male and female twins called Andon and Fonta, born "993,419 years prior to 1934."


title: The Urantia Book

text: "The Urantia Book" teaches not only biological evolution, but that human society and spiritual understandings evolve by slow progression, subject both to periods of rapid improvement and the possibility of retrogression. Progress is said to follow a divine plan that includes periodic gifts of revelation and ministry by heavenly teachers, which eventually will lead to an ideal world status of "light and life" in the far distant future.


title: The Urantia Book

text: Although there is the ideal and divine plan of progression, it is said to be fostered and administered by various orders of celestial beings who are not always perfect. Urantia is said to be a markedly "confused and disordered" planet that is "greatly retarded in all phases of intellectual progress and spiritual attainment" compared to more typical inhabited worlds, due to an unusually severe history of rebellion and default by its spiritual supervisors.


title: The Urantia Book

text: More than one third of the content of "The Urantia Book" is devoted to a narrative of the life and teachings of Jesus, and the Judeo-Christian tradition is given an importance exceeding any other. The book's teachings claim to be a clarification and expansion of Christian belief. However, numerous differences are noted between its teachings and commonly accepted Christian doctrines.


title: The Urantia Book

text: Jesus is held in high regard by "The Urantia Book," as he is in the New Testament of the Bible. The following are attributed to him in both texts:


title: The Urantia Book

text: Gardner notes similarities between Seventh-day Adventism and the teachings of "The Urantia Book", and sees this as evidence that William Sadler and Wilfred Kellogg had a role in editing or writing the book, since they both were one-time believers in Adventism. For instance, two basic Adventist beliefs that distinguish it from mainline Christianity are the doctrines of soul sleeping and annihilationism, both of which "The Urantia Book" also supports. Lewis notes that from the perspective of the book being a "revelation," it could be claimed the "celestial beings" simply found areas of Adventist belief to be accurate and therefore presented and expanded on them. While the book supports aspects of Adventism, it also is mixed with teachings that are heresies to Adventists.


title: The Urantia Book

text: The book can be seen as belonging in the genre of spiritual literature that includes "A Course in Miracles" and "Conversations with God". Gardner compares it with "Oahspe", noting that though "Oahspe" is "vastly inferior to the UB both in ideas and style of writing," they are similar in claiming to have been written by celestial beings channelled through a human conduit, teaching that there is "one ultimate God who oversees a vast bureaucracy of lesser deities" while both outline an elaborate cosmology. The book's claimed supernatural origin has been compared to similar claims of the Book of Mormon, Science and Health, the Quran, and the Bible, with belief in it not being seen as necessarily a greater leap in reason.


title: The Urantia Book

text: Comparisons with facets of various world religions are incorporated in the book, including Buddhism, Islam, Taoism, Judaism, Hinduism, Shinto, and Confucianism. For example, Paper 131, "The World's Religions" discusses the aspects of these religions that are in common with what the book claims is the "religion of Jesus." The stance of the book is that there "is not a Urantia religion that could not profitably study and assimilate the best of the truths contained in every other faith."


title: The Urantia Book

text: "The Urantia Book" has been enjoyed by some as a form of science fiction, historical fiction or fantasy. "The Urantia Book" is noted for its high level of internal consistency and an advanced writing style. Skeptic Martin Gardner, in a book otherwise highly critical of "The Urantia Book", writes that it is "highly imaginative" and that the "cosmology outrivals in fantasy the cosmology of any science-fiction work known to me." Gooch says that for nonbelievers, the book is a mixture of being "fascinating, inspiring, compelling, haunting, entertaining, annoying, incomprehensible, and always wordy."


title: The Urantia Book

text: Parts I, II, and III are chiefly written in expository language. The papers are informational, matter-of-fact, and instructional. Part IV of the book is written as a biography of Jesus' life, and some feel it is a rich narrative with well-developed characters, high attention to detail, woven sub-plots, and realistic dialogue. Considered as literature, Part IV is favorably compared to retellings of Jesus' life, such as "The Gospel According to Jesus Christ" by José Saramago and "Behold the Man" by Michael Moorcock. Martin Gardner considers Part IV to be an especially "well-written, impressive work," and says, "Either it is accurate in its history, coming directly from higher beings in position to know, or it is a work of fertile imagination by someone who knew the New Testament by heart and who was also steeped in knowledge of the times when Jesus lived."


title: The Urantia Book

text: The authors refer to the book as the fifth revelation of "epochal significance" to humankind, the fourth epochal revelation having been the life of Jesus. The claim of revelation in "The Urantia Book" has been criticized for various reasons. Skeptics such as Martin Gardner say it is a product of human efforts. Because the book does not support certain tenets of Christianity, such as the atonement doctrine, while at the same time presenting an account of parts of Jesus' life absent in the Bible, others with a Christian viewpoint have argued it cannot be genuine. Gooch notes that while its "somewhat dated, elegant" prose could be read as fiction, due to its claim of divine inspiration "the book invites reactions far more scathing than [it] ... might otherwise merit."


title: The Urantia Book

text: We full well know that, while the historic facts and religious truths of this series of revelatory presentations will stand on the records of the ages to come, within a few short years many of our statements regarding the physical sciences will stand in need of revision in consequence of additional scientific developments and new discoveries. These new developments we even now foresee, but we are forbidden to include such humanly undiscovered facts in the revelatory records. Let it be made clear that revelations are not necessarily inspired. The cosmology of these revelations is "not inspired".


title: The Urantia Book

text: As pointed out by the likes of Martin Gardner, the science in "The Urantia Book" reflects the views that prevailed at the time the book originated. The claim by the authors that no unknown scientific discoveries could be imparted can function as a ruse to allow mistakes to be dismissed later. The appeal to convenience that post-1955 scientific knowledge is not being presented is consistent with a book written by humans in the 1950s instead of celestial beings with superior knowledge.


title: The Urantia Book

text: While some adherents of the book believe that all of the information in "The Urantia Book" including its science is literally true, others accept that the science is not fully accurate. For example, Meredith Sprunger, a liberal believer in "The Urantia Book" and retired minister of the United Church of Christ, wrote that research "has revealed that virtually all of the scientific material found in the UB was the accepted scientific knowledge of the period in which the book was written, was held by some scientists of that time, or was about to be discovered or recognized." He further argued against its literal infallibility and said that fundamentalism over the book is "just as untenable as Biblical fundamentalism."


title: The Urantia Book

text: Other believers maintain that the book has prophetically anticipated scientific advances. They believe more of its science — if not all of it — will be proven correct in the future. Gardner evaluated many of these claims as of 1995 and argued that they were fairly unconvincing. Because the book is said to have been written by the revelators by 1935 but not published until 1955, discoveries from science during the two intervening decades are often declared to be prophetic by believers, while skeptics point out that edits could have been made to the book up to its 1955 publication. For instance, the catalytic role that carbon plays in the sun's nuclear reactions is described in the book, and Hans Bethe's announcement of the discovery was made in 1938.


title: The Urantia Book

text: The only apparent anticipation of science the book has made, in Gardner's opinion, is that it says the magnetic sense that homing pigeons possess is "not wholly wanting as a conscious possession by mankind." In 1980, a British zoologist, Robin Baker, published evidence that humans have a limited magnetic sense.


title: The Urantia Book

text: Mark McMenamin, a professor of geology, quotes a section of the book describing a billion-year-old supercontinent that subsequently split apart, forming ocean basins where early marine life developed. He says, "This amazing passage, written in the 1930s, anticipates scientific results that did not actually appear in the scientific literature until many decades later." McMenamin also states, "Of course I am being selective here in my choice of quotations, and there are reams of scientifically untenable material in "The Urantia Book"."


title: The Urantia Book

text: "The Urantia Book" states in its Foreword that more than one thousand "human concepts representing the highest and most advanced planetary knowledge of spiritual values and universe meanings" were selected in preparing the papers. The authors say that they were required to "give preference to the highest existing human concepts pertaining to the subjects to be presented" and would "resort to pure revelation only when the concept of presentation has had no adequate previous expression by the human mind." One of the authors wrote in Part IV: "I well know that those concepts which have had origin in the human mind will prove more acceptable and helpful to all other human minds."


title: The Urantia Book

text: In recent years, students of the papers have found that the free use of other sources appears to be true. None of the material allegedly used from other sources is directly cited or referenced within the book.


title: The Urantia Book

text: In 1992, a reader of "The Urantia Book", Matthew Block, self-published a paper that showed "The Urantia Book" utilized material from 15 other books. All of the source authors identified in Block's paper were published in English between 1905 and 1943 by U.S. publishers and are typically scholarly or academic works that contain concepts and wording similar to what is found in "The Urantia Book". Block has since claimed to have discovered over 125 source texts that were incorporated into the papers.


title: The Urantia Book

text: The use of outside source materials was studied separately by Gardner, and Gooch, and they concluded, consistent with their respective conclusion that the book's author(s) must have been human, that the book therefore plagiarized many of the sources noted by Block.


title: The Urantia Book

text: For instance, Gardner and Block note that Paper 85 appears to have been taken from the first eight chapters of "Origin and Evolution of Religion" by Edward Washburn Hopkins, published by Yale University Press in 1923. Each section of the paper corresponds to a chapter in the book, with several passages possibly used as direct material and further material used in Papers 86-90 and 92. (In addition to the book's "heavy indebtedness to Hopkins," Gardner discovered that Hopkins was a major reference in an earlier book authored by Sadler, adding to Gardner's view that it is more likely Sadler had a hand in writing or editing "The Urantia Book" than that celestial beings wrote it.) Likewise, much of "The Urantia Book" material relating to the evolution of mankind appears to have been directly taken from Henry Fairfield Osborn, "Man Rises to Parnassus: Critical Epochs in the Prehistory of Man" published by Princeton University Press in 1928.


title: The Urantia Book

text: In one example cited by Block and confirmed by Gardner and Gooch, the original author discusses the periodicity of the chemical elements and concludes that the harmony in the construction of the atom suggests some unspecified plan of organization. The authors of "The Urantia Book" assert that this harmony is evidence of the intelligent design of the universe. W. F. G. Swann writes on page 64 of "The Architecture of the Universe" (italics indicate edits as compared to "The Urantia Book", bolding indicates deletions):


title: The Urantia Book

text: Block and other believers do not see the use of the source materials as plagiarism, but express a view instead that the quality of the way the material was borrowed is consistent with authorship by celestial beings and that study of the sources leads to an even deeper understanding of "The Urantia Book". Gooch, a professor of English, assessed that the use of the sources "does reveal to us an author with a busy genius for metaphysical invention and poetic turns of phrase whose scam was at worst benign and at most visionary." Asked by Gardner what he thought of these plagiarisms, Sprunger responded in a letter by saying that if humans wrote the book the plagiarisms would indeed be disturbing but not if it was written by supermortals.


title: The Urantia Book

text: It is difficult to gauge how many adherents there may be as there are multiple organizations to census. Informal study groups "tend to sprout, ripen, then vanish or splinter" and have not been counted reliably. Readers sometimes join study groups after reading on their own for years or decades, others join them soon after developing an interest in the book, while "for most, worship remains as individual as the act of reading." Disagreements over the legal ownership of the book, its interpretation, and the reception of new revelations have led to some splintering, though these disagreements appear to have been settled to the satisfaction of most adherents. The movement generally incorporates a nonsectarian view, contending that individuals with different religious backgrounds can receive the book's teachings as an enrichment rather than as a contradiction of their faiths.


title: The Urantia Book

text: The movement inspired by "The Urantia Book" has not developed clergy or institutions such as churches, or temples.


title: The Urantia Book

text: Sarah Lewis notes that, "The Urantia Revelation is not securing legitimacy through historically known and accepted means to any great degree, nor is it even using common language that would increase the likelihood of understanding and therefore acceptance. It introduces new concepts and a new language, and this does not make acceptance any easier." She assesses that the movement is uncontroversial compared to other ones, "lacking the zealous proselytizing found within many other groups," and that it is therefore likely to remain small and unaffected by opposing views.


title: The Urantia Book

text: Urantia Foundation advocated a "slow growth" policy in the past and had not significantly marketed the book. Sales by Urantia Foundation went from 7,000 in 1990 to 24,700 in 1997, and steadily increased to nearly 38,000 in 2000, an "upturn that seems to represent a genuine trend rather than just some spike on a sales chart," but in 2011 the Foundation reported worldwide annual sales of 16,000 copies and over 60,000 downloads from various sites. Since the book was determined to be in the public domain in 2001, other organizations, such as The Urantia Book Fellowship under the publishing name Uversa Press, have also published the book. Copies of "The Urantia Book" are on the Internet in various formats and it has been adapted to more recent platforms such as the Kindle and the iOS App Store. Several audio books of the text are also on the Internet.


title: The Urantia Book

text: The International Urantia Association had twenty-six reader associations worldwide as of 2002, and the Urantia Book Fellowship (formerly the Urantia Brotherhood, founded in 1955 with Urantia Foundation as the original social fraternal organization of believers) claimed roughly twelve hundred official members, with the highest concentrations in the West of the United States and the Sun Belt, especially California, Colorado, Florida, and Texas. It appears an increasing number of people are forming study groups, participating in Internet discussion groups, and hosting or visiting websites about it.


title: The Urantia Book

text: The Teaching Mission is a group of Urantia channellers. According to Richard Landes, "The foundation considers them self-deluded, but they have created a schism that continues to disrupt the movement."


title: The Urantia Book

text: Vern Grimsley was a preacher who founded a Urantian outreach organization called Family of God in the 1970s, which was initially supported by others in the movement, including the Urantia Foundation. Beginning in the early 1980s, Grimsley claimed he heard voices that were from the same higher beings who wrote "The Urantia Book", and that the voices warned of an impending world war followed by a nuclear holocaust. While some in the movement believed him, others including the Urantia Foundation concluded Grimsley's messages were spurious, former friends eventually began to shun him, and in later years he is said to have lived in obscurity.


title: The Urantia Book

text: An important symbol described in "The Urantia Book" as "the banner of Michael" and the "material emblem of the Trinity government of all creation," consists of three azure blue concentric circles on a white background. The circles are said to be "emblematic of the infinity, eternity, and universality of the Paradise Trinity." The incarnated priest and contemporary of Abraham, Machiventa Melchizedek, wore on his breast an emblem of three concentric circles representative of the Paradise Trinity. During a system-wide rebellion instigated by Lucifer, the so-called "war in heaven," Lucifer's emblem was a banner of white with one red circle, in the center of which a black solid circle appeared.


title: Adelaide Clemens

text: Adelaide Clemens (born 30 November 1989) is an Australian actress. She was nominated for a Logie Award in 2008 for her role in the television series "Love My Way". In 2012, she played Valentine Wannop in BBC's television miniseries adaptation "Parade's End". In Hollywood, Clemens has appeared in "" and "The Great Gatsby", and starred in "" (as Heather Mason). From 2013 to 2016, she starred in the television series "Rectify".


title: Adelaide Clemens

text: Clemens was born in Brisbane, Queensland. Her parents lived in Japan but went to Australia for her birth. She has two younger brothers Sebastian and Felix. Her father, Mark Clemens, is English and was a marketing manager for Seagram. Her mother, Janea Clemens, is an Australian cardiac nurse. After living in Japan, she was raised in France until the age of 6 and then Hong Kong to the age of 12, where she attended the Hong Kong International School. When she was 12 years old, her family moved to Australia to live in Sydney, New South Wales. She attended high school at the Queenwood School for Girls, in the Sydney suburb of Balmoral.


title: Adelaide Clemens

text: At the age of 19, Clemens moved to the United States. She at first lived in Los Angeles, California, but has lived in New York City since 2015.


title: Adelaide Clemens

text: Clemens began working as an actress in Australian television while in high school. She guest-starred in a 2006 episode of "Blue Water High" as Juliet, and, in 2007, starred in the children's series "Pirate Islands: The Lost Treasure of Fiji", as Alison. Clemens played Harper in the Showtime drama "Love My Way" that year, and was nominated for the Graham Kennedy Award for Most Outstanding New Talent at the 2008 Logie Awards for the role.


title: Adelaide Clemens

text: Clemens was seen in the MTV Networks Australia dramatic film, "Dream Life" (2008), and had small roles in the television series "All Saints" and the film "", in 2009. She became the face of Jan Logan Jewellery that year. Clemens relocated to Los Angeles, California, in 2009.


title: Adelaide Clemens

text: She starred in the film "Wasted on the Young" (2010) as Xandrie. Written and directed by Ben C. Lucas, the film tells the story of a high school love triangle that leads to a party ending in gun violence.


title: Adelaide Clemens

text: She guest-starred on the Fox crime drama, "Lie To Me", and starred as a sociopathic prostitute in the film "Generation Um..." (2010).


title: Adelaide Clemens

text: , Clemens was in negotiations to join the cast of "Fury Road", the fourth in the Mad Max film series by George Miller. The following year, she starred in the film "Certainty" (2011), directed by Peter Askin. She also starred in "Vampire" (2011) as Ladybird, a suicidal single mother. The film was the English-language feature debut of noted Japanese director Shunji Iwai.


title: Adelaide Clemens

text: The next year, Clemens starred in "Camilla Dickinson" (2012), an adaptation of Madeleine L'Engle's 1951 novel. She starred as teenager Heather Mason in the horror film "" (2012). Also that year, Clemens played a lead role as the young suffragette Valentine Wannop in "Parade's End" (2012), a television mini-series adaptation of the Ford Madox Ford tetralogy co-produced by HBO and BBC Two. She also appeared in the horror film "No One Lives" (2012).


title: Adelaide Clemens

text: The following year, she appeared in "The Great Gatsby" (2013), based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel of the same name, playing Catherine, the sister of Myrtle Wilson. On television, Clemens began starring as Tawney Talbot in the 2013 Sundance Channel series, "Rectify". In 2020, Clemens took a starring role in the CBS drama "Tommy".


title: Digital Audio Broadcasting

text: Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) is a digital radio standard for broadcasting digital audio radio services in many countries around the world, defined, supported, marketed and promoted by the WorldDAB organisation. The standard is dominant in Europe and is also used in Australia, and in parts of Africa and Asia.


title: Digital Audio Broadcasting

text: As of 2022, 55 countries are running DAB services. The majority of these services are using the upgraded DAB+ standard, with only the UK, New Zealand, Romania, Brunei Darussalam, and the Philippines still using a significant number of original DAB services. Initially it was expected in many countries that existing FM services would switch over to DAB, although the take up of DAB has been much slower than expected;. , Norway is the first country to have implemented a national FM radio switch-off, with others to follow in the next years.


title: Digital Audio Broadcasting

text: The DAB standard was initiated as a European research project called Eureka-147 in the 1980s. The Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) launched the first DAB channel in the world on 1 June 1995 (NRK Klassisk), and the BBC and Swedish Radio (SR) launched their first broadcasts later that year. Consumer-grade DAB receivers have been available in many countries since the start of this millennium. The original version of DAB used the MP2 audio codec; an upgraded version of the system was later developed and released named DAB+ which uses the HE-AAC v2 (AAC+) audio codec and is more robust and efficient. DAB is not forward compatible with DAB+.


title: Digital Audio Broadcasting

text: DAB is generally more efficient in its use of spectrum than analogue FM radio, and thus can offer more radio services for the same given bandwidth. The broadcaster can select any desired sound quality, from high-fidelity signals for music to low-fidelity signals for talk radio, in which case the sound quality can be noticeably inferior to analog FM. High-fidelity equates to a high bit rate and higher transmission cost. DAB is more robust with regard to noise and multipath fading for mobile listening, although DAB reception quality degrades rapidly when the signal strength falls below a critical threshold (as is normal for digital broadcasts), whereas FM reception quality degrades slowly with the decreasing signal, providing effective coverage over a larger area.


title: Digital Audio Broadcasting

text: DAB+ is a "green" platform and brings 85 percent energy consumption savings compared to FM broadcasting.


title: Digital Audio Broadcasting

text: DAB has been under development since 1981 at the "Institut für Rundfunktechnik" (IRT). The first DAB demonstrations were held in 1985 at the WARC-ORB in Geneva, and in 1988 the first DAB transmissions were made in Germany. Later, DAB was developed as a research project for the European Union (EUREKA), which started in 1987 on an initiative by a consortium formed in 1986. The MPEG-1 Audio Layer II ("MP2") codec was created as part of the EU147 project. DAB was the first standard based on orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation technique, which since then has become one of the most popular transmission schemes for modern wideband digital communication systems.


title: Digital Audio Broadcasting

text: A choice of audio codec, modulation and error-correction coding schemes and first trial broadcasts were made in 1990. Public demonstrations were made in 1993 in the United Kingdom. The protocol specification was finalized in 1993 and adopted by the ITU-R standardization body in 1994, the European community in 1995 and by ETSI in 1997. Pilot broadcasts were launched in several countries in 1995.


title: Digital Audio Broadcasting

text: In October 2005, the World DMB Forum instructed its Technical Committee to carry out the work needed to adopt the AAC+ audio codec and stronger error correction coding. The AAC+ audio coding standard uses a modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT) audio data compression algorithm. This work led to the launch of the DAB+ system.


title: Digital Audio Broadcasting

text: By 2006, 500 million people worldwide were in the coverage area of DAB broadcasts, although by this time sales of receivers had only taken off in the United Kingdom (UK) and Denmark. In 2006 there were approximately 1,000 DAB stations in operation worldwide. As of 2018, over 68 million devices have been sold worldwide, and over 2,270 DAB services are on air.


title: Digital Audio Broadcasting

text: In October 2018, the WorldDAB organisation introduced an all-new logo for DAB (specifically DAB+) to replace the previous logo that had been in use since before DAB's initial launch in 1995.


title: Digital Audio Broadcasting

text: The term "DAB" most commonly refers both to a specific DAB standard using the MP2 audio codec, but can sometimes refer to a whole family of DAB-related standards, such as DAB+, DMB, and DAB-IP.


title: Digital Audio Broadcasting

text: WorldDAB, the organisation in charge of the DAB standards, announced DAB+, a major upgrade to the DAB standard in 2006, when the HE-AAC v2 audio codec (also known as eAAC+) was adopted. AAC+ uses a modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT) algorithm. The new standard, which is called DAB+, has also adopted the MPEG Surround audio format and stronger error correction coding in the form of Reed–Solomon coding. DAB+ has been standardised as European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) TS 102 563.


title: Digital Audio Broadcasting

text: As DAB is not forward compatible with DAB+, older DAB receivers cannot receive DAB+ broadcasts. However, DAB receivers that were capable of receiving the new DAB+ standard after a firmware upgrade were being sold as early as July 2007. Generally, if a receiver is DAB+ compatible, there will be a sign on the product packaging.


title: Digital Audio Broadcasting

text: DAB+ broadcasts have launched in several countries like Australia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Hong Kong (now terminated), Italy, Malta, Norway, Poland, Switzerland, Belgium (October 2017), the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. Malta was the first country to launch DAB+ in Europe in October 2008. South Africa began a DAB+ technical pilot in November 2014 on channel 13F in Band 3. If DAB+ stations launch in established DAB countries, they can transmit alongside existing DAB stations that use the older MPEG-1 Audio Layer II audio format, and most existing DAB stations are expected to continue broadcasting until the vast majority of receivers support DAB+.


title: Digital Audio Broadcasting

text: In the UK, DAB+ launched in January 2016 following a trial period starting September 2014. Ofcom published a consultation for a new national multiplex containing a mix of DAB and DAB+ services, with the intention of moving all services to DAB+ in the long term. In February 2016, the new national network Sound Digital launched with three DAB+ stations. In August 2021 the BBC started its first regular domestic broadcast of DAB+ in the Channel Islands and followed later with the start of local broadcasts in December 2021 in Cumbria and north Lancashire.


title: Digital Audio Broadcasting

text: Digital multimedia broadcasting (DMB) and DAB-IP are both suitable for mobile radio and TV because they support MPEG 4 AVC and WMV9 respectively as video codecs. However, a DMB video subchannel can easily be added to any DAB transmission, as it was designed to be carried on a DAB subchannel. DMB broadcasts in South Korea carry conventional MPEG 1 Layer II DAB audio services alongside their DMB video services.


title: Digital Audio Broadcasting

text: Trials for DAB-IP were held in London in 2006, as "BT Movio". It competed with DVB-H and MediaFLO which were also under testing.


title: Digital Audio Broadcasting

text: 55 countries provide regular or trial DAB(+) broadcasts. In spectrum management, the bands that are allocated for public DAB services, are abbreviated with T-DAB.


title: Digital Audio Broadcasting

text: In the European Union, "the European Electronic Communications Code (EECC) entered into force on 20 December 2018, with transposition into national legislation by Member States required by 21 December 2020. The Directive applies to all EU member states regardless of the status of DAB in each country.


title: Digital Audio Broadcasting

text: This means that since the end of 2020, across all EU countries, all radios in new cars must be capable of receiving and reproducing digital terrestrial radio."


title: Digital Audio Broadcasting

text: Norway was the first country to announce a complete switch-off of national FM radio stations. The switch-off started on 11 January 2017 and ended on 13 December 2017. The 2017 switch-off did not affect some local and regional radio stations. They can continue to transmit on FM until 2027.


title: Digital Audio Broadcasting

text: DAB uses a wide-bandwidth broadcast technology and typically spectra have been allocated for it in Band III (174–240 MHz) and L band (1452–1492 MHz), although the scheme allows for operation between 30 and 300 MHz. The US military has reserved L-Band in the USA only, blocking its use for other purposes in America, and the United States has reached an agreement with Canada to restrict L-Band DAB to terrestrial broadcast to avoid interference.


title: Digital Audio Broadcasting

text: In January 2017, an updated DAB specification (2.1.1) removed Modes II, III and IV, leaving only Mode I.


title: Digital Audio Broadcasting

text: From an OSI model protocol stack viewpoint, the technologies used on DAB inhabit the following layers: the audio codec inhabits the presentation layer. Below that is the data link layer, in charge of statistical time-division multiplexing and frame synchronization. Finally, the physical layer contains the error-correction coding, OFDM modulation, and dealing with the over-the-air transmission and reception of data. Some aspects of these are described below.


title: Digital Audio Broadcasting

text: DAB uses the MPEG-1 Audio Layer II audio codec, which is often referred to as "MP2" because of the ubiquitous MP3 (MPEG-1 Audio Layer III).


title: Digital Audio Broadcasting

text: The newer DAB+ standard adopted the HE-AAC version 2 audio codec, commonly known as 'AAC+' or 'aacPlus'. AAC+ uses a modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT) algorithm, and is approximately three times more efficient than MP2, which means that broadcasters using DAB+ are able to provide far higher audio quality or far more stations than they could with DAB, or a combination of both higher audio quality and more stations.


title: Digital Audio Broadcasting

text: One of the most important decisions regarding the design of a digital radio broadcasting system is the choice of which audio codec to use because the efficiency of the audio codec determines how many radio stations can be carried on a fixed capacity multiplex at a given level of audio quality.


title: Digital Audio Broadcasting

text: Error-correction coding (ECC) is an important technology for a digital communication system because it determines how robust the reception will be for a given signal strength – stronger ECC will provide a more robust reception than a weaker form.


title: Digital Audio Broadcasting

text: The old version of DAB uses punctured convolutional coding for its ECC. The coding scheme uses unequal error protection (UEP), which means that parts of the audio bit-stream that are more susceptible to errors causing audible disturbances are provided with more protection (i.e. a lower code rate) and vice versa. However, the UEP scheme used on DAB results in a grey area in between the user experiencing good reception quality and no reception at all, as opposed to the situation with most other wireless digital communication systems that have a sharp "digital cliff", where the signal rapidly becomes unusable if the signal strength drops below a certain threshold. When DAB listeners receive a signal in this intermediate strength area they experience a "burbling" sound which interrupts the playback of the audio.


title: Digital Audio Broadcasting

text: The DAB+ standard incorporates Reed–Solomon ECC as an "inner layer" of coding that is placed around the byte interleaved audio frame but inside the "outer layer" of convolutional coding used by the original DAB system, although on DAB+ the convolutional coding uses equal error protection (EEP) rather than UEP since each bit is equally important in DAB+. This combination of Reed–Solomon coding as the inner layer of coding, followed by an outer layer of convolutional coding – so-called "concatenated coding" – became a popular ECC scheme in the 1990s, and NASA adopted it for its deep-space missions. One slight difference between the concatenated coding used by the DAB+ system and that used on most other systems is that it uses a rectangular byte interleaver rather than Forney interleaving in order to provide a greater interleaver depth, which increases the distance over which error bursts will be spread out in the bit-stream, which in turn will allow the Reed–Solomon error decoder to correct a higher proportion of errors.


title: Digital Audio Broadcasting

text: The ECC used on DAB+ is far stronger than is used on DAB, which, with all else being equal (i.e., if the transmission powers remained the same), would translate into people who currently experience reception difficulties on DAB receiving a much more robust signal with DAB+ transmissions. It also has a far steeper "digital cliff", and listening tests have shown that people prefer this when the signal strength is low compared to the shallower digital cliff on DAB.


title: Digital Audio Broadcasting

text: Immunity to fading and inter-symbol interference (caused by multipath propagation) is achieved without equalization by means of the OFDM and DQPSK modulation techniques. For details, see the OFDM system comparison table.


title: Digital Audio Broadcasting

text: Using values for Transmission Mode I (TM I), the OFDM modulation consists of 1536 subcarriers that are transmitted in parallel. The useful part of the OFDM symbol period is 1.0 ms, which results in the OFDM subcarriers each having a bandwidth of 1 kHz due to the inverse relationship between these two parameters, and the overall OFDM channel bandwidth is 1537 kHz. The OFDM guard interval for TM I is 0.246 ms, which means that the overall OFDM symbol duration is 1.246 ms. The guard interval duration also determines the maximum separation between transmitters that are part of the same single-frequency network (SFN), which is approximately 74 km for TM I.


title: Digital Audio Broadcasting

text: OFDM allows the use of single-frequency networks (SFN), which means that a network of transmitters can provide coverage to a large area – up to the size of a country – where all transmitters use the same transmission frequency block. Transmitters that are part of an SFN need to be very accurately synchronised with other transmitters in the network, which requires the transmitters to use very accurate clocks.