title: Leviathan (1989 film)

text: "Leviathan" was directed by George P. Cosmatos, who had previously directed the Sylvester Stallone-starring action films "" and "Cobra". The screenplay was written by David Webb Peoples ("Blade Runner") and Jeb Stuart ("Die Hard"). Oscar-nominated and BSC Award-winning cinematographer Alex Thomson served as the film's director of photography. Four-time Oscar-winning visual effects designer Stan Winston was responsible for the creature effects.


title: Leviathan (1989 film)

text: "Leviathan" was first released to DVD on September 29, 1998. Sean Carlson of IGN compared the DVD release of "Leviathan" to that of "DeepStar Six", giving the DVD 8 of 10 stars, praising the video quality but criticizing the audio and mentioning the only extra was the film's trailer. The film was released on Blu-ray by Scream Factory in August 2014.


title: Leviathan (1989 film)

text: The film opened on 1,393 theaters generating a box office gross of $5,029,164 for its opening weekend, placing second. It went to gross $15,704,614 in the United States and Canada. In Italy it grossed $3.2 million. However, it was received poorly and currently has a 24% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 25 reviews, with an average rating of 4.60 out of 10. The site's critics consensus reads, "A deep-sea thriller with an unusually strong cast and potent ideas, "Leviathan" quickly plunges into an abyss of weak thrills and lame kills." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 51 out of 100 based on 12 critic reviews, indicating "mixed or average reviews".


title: Leviathan (1989 film)

text: Writing for "The New York Times", Janet Maslin was reserved in her praise and wrote that it "compares favorably with the other recent aquatic horror film "Deepstar Six" but probably not with anything else" and that "The latter half of the film is one long feeding frenzy, guided by a familiar horror-film principle: survival of the best-looking." Movie critic for the "Chicago Tribune", Dave Kehr, criticized the movie, writing "In the dumb fun department, "Leviathan" is the movie of the moment-a lively, well-made schlock thriller that will doubtlessly be forgotten in two weeks." Regarding the film's writing he wrote, "The script has been attributed to David Peoples and Jeb Stuart ("Die Hard"), but it plays more like a collection of random pages from "Alien", "The Thing", "Outland" and "Run Silent, Run Deep"."


title: Leviathan (1989 film)

text: On their Siskel & Ebert series, Roger Ebert gave the film a thumbs up as a moderately effective if clichéd thriller, while his colleague Gene Siskel gave it a thumbs down, calling it a ripoff of several films that have come before it but nonetheless highlighting performances by Weller and Pays.


title: Leviathan (1989 film)

text: The score to the film was written by veteran composer Jerry Goldsmith, conducting The Accademia di Santa Cecilia Orchestra at Forum Studio. Goldsmith used a number of creative ways to identify the score to the film, such as incorporating the use of recorded whale sounds into the music during the opening credits. The soundtrack was released through Varèse Sarabande in 1989 and features eleven tracks of score with a running time just under forty minutes.


title: Fifty-One

text: "Fifty-One" is the fourth episode of the fifth season of the American television crime drama series "Breaking Bad", and the 50th overall episode of the series. Written by Sam Catlin and directed by Rian Johnson, it originally aired on AMC in the United States on August 5, 2012.


title: Fifty-One

text: After having it repaired, Walter White impulsively sells his Pontiac Aztek to the mechanic for $50 and leases himself a new Chrysler 300 and a Dodge Challenger for Walter White Jr.


title: Fifty-One

text: At Madrigal's Houston branch, Lydia Rodarte-Quayle's inside man for methylamine is arrested by the DEA. Mike reassures Lydia that Ron will not talk, adding that she will have a new guy in the warehouse soon.


title: Fifty-One

text: The next day, SAC Ramey offers Hank Schrader the position of ASAC (Assistant Special Agent in Charge) vacated by Merkert. Hank accepts, even though his pursuit of Heisenberg will be given to a field agent.


title: Fifty-One

text: That evening, the Whites and the Schraders finish a meager 51st birthday dinner for Walt. After Walt Jr. leaves, Walt notes that it has been a year since his cancer diagnosis. As he reflects, a fully clothed Skyler White steps into the pool and slowly submerges herself. Marie Schrader panics while Walt jumps in to pull her out. Walt then learns that Skyler has asked Marie and Hank to look after the kids until her issues with Walt are resolved. Skyler insists that she will not have her children living in a house where dangerous events that occur are just shrugged off. She threatens to further harm herself, to fake spousal abuse, and to send Walt Jr. to boarding school if Walt brings the kids back home, but he belittles her plans as unworkable. Breaking down and realizing there is no way out of her situation without hurting her family, she relents to his arguments but not without admitting to him that her only option is to hope that Walt's cancer will come back and kill him.


title: Fifty-One

text: At the warehouse, Lydia leads Jesse Pinkman to a barrel of methylamine. They find a GPS tracker on the bottom of a barrel of methylamine, compromising it. Mike is skeptical that the tracker was planted by the DEA because of its crude placement on the bottom of the barrel. When informed by Jesse that it was Lydia who spotted it first, Mike concludes that Lydia planted it herself in order to get out of their deal and vows to kill her. Jesse pleads for Mike to show mercy and asks for Walt's opinion. Walt votes to keep her alive so no time is lost finding a new precursor supplier. Jesse later gives Walt a TAG Heuer Monaco Calibre 12 wristwatch as a birthday present, which pleases Walt.


title: Fifty-One

text: Dean Norris (Hank Schrader) spoke about the "tense" family dinner scene: "Those are some of my favorites because we all get together, and they've kind of become a signature thing on the show. I work with the DEA guys all the time, who I love, but from a personal side it's nice to hang out with the rest of the gang. Those scenes are going to be even more interesting if Hank ever knows something about Walt that Walt doesn't know he knows, because for the entire series Walt's had this secret that everybody in the audience knows and Hank is the one guy that doesn't know it."


title: Fifty-One

text: "Fifty-One" was watched by approximately 2.29 million American viewers in its original broadcast, matching the second episode's numbers.


title: Fifty-One

text: The episode received critical praise with many critics singling out Anna Gunn's and Bryan Cranston's performances. "The Baltimore Sun"s Wesley Case called Skyler's pool scene "unnerving" and "heart-wrenchingly sad", adding ""Breaking Bad" is a show built around action — big explosions, shoot-outs, throat-cutting murders, and other vivid portraits of the messy drug-dealing business. Besides Jesse's breakdowns, we rarely see the existential crises all of these characters must be dealing with at all times."


title: Fifty-One

text: For his direction of this episode, Rian Johnson won the Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directing – Drama Series. Anna Gunn won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series for her performance in this episode at the 65th Primetime Emmy Awards.


title: Rojava conflict

text: The Rojava conflict, also known as the Rojava Revolution, is a political upheaval and military conflict taking place in northern Syria, known among Kurds as Western Kurdistan or Rojava.


title: Rojava conflict

text: During the Syrian civil war that began in 2011, a Kurdish-dominated coalition led by the Democratic Union Party as well as some other Kurdish, Arab, Syriac-Assyrian, and Turkmen groups have sought to establish a new constitution for the "de facto" autonomous region, while military wings and allied militias have fought to maintain control of the region. This led to the establishment of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (NES) in 2016.


title: Rojava conflict

text: Supporters of the NES state that the events constitute a social revolution with a prominent role played by women both on the battlefield and within the newly formed political system, as well as the implementation of democratic confederalism, a form of libertarian socialism that emphasizes decentralization, gender equality and the need for local governance through direct democracy.


title: Rojava conflict

text: Repression of the Kurds and other ethnic minorities has gone on since the creation of the French Mandate of Syria after the Sykes–Picot Agreement.


title: Rojava conflict

text: The Syrian government (officially known as the Syrian Arab Republic) never officially acknowledged the existence of the Kurds and in 1962, 120,000 Syrian Kurds were stripped of their citizenship, leaving them stateless. The Kurdish language and culture have also been suppressed. The government attempted to resolve these issues in 2011 by granting all Kurds citizenship, but only an estimated 6,000 out of 150,000 stateless Kurds have been given nationality and most discriminatory regulations, including the ban on teaching Kurdish, are still on the books. Due to the Syrian Civil War, which began in 2011, the government is no longer in a position to enforce these laws.


title: Rojava conflict

text: In 2004, riots broke out against the government in the northeastern city of Qamishli. During a soccer match between a local Kurdish team and a visiting Arab team from Deir ez-Zor, some Arab fans brandished portraits of Saddam Hussein, who killed tens of thousands of Kurds in Southern Kurdistan during the Al-Anfal campaign in the 1980s. Tensions quickly escalated into open protests, with Kurds raising their flag and taking to the streets to demand cultural and political rights. Security forces fired into the crowd, killing six Kurds, including three children. Protesters went on to burn down the Ba'ath Party's local office. At least 30 and as many as 100 Kurds were killed by the government before the protests were quelled. Thousands of Kurds then fled to Iraq, where a refugee camp was established. Occasional clashes between Kurdish protesters and government forces occurred in the following years.


title: Rojava conflict

text: In 2011, the Arab Spring spread to Syria. In an echo of the Tunisian revolution, Syrian citizen Hasan Ali Akleh soaked himself in gasoline and set himself on fire in the northern city of Al-Hasakah. This inspired activists to call for a "Day of Rage", which was sparsely attended, mostly because of fear of repression from the Syrian government. Days later, however, protests again took place, this time in response to the police beating of a shopkeeper.


title: Rojava conflict

text: Smaller protests continued, and on 7 March 2011, thirteen political prisoners went on hunger strike, and momentum began to grow against the Assad government. Three days later dozens of Syrian Kurds went on hunger strike in solidarity. On 12 March, major protests took place in Qamishli and Al-Hasakah to both protest the Assad government and commemorate Kurdish Martyrs Day.


title: Rojava conflict

text: Protests grew over the months of March and April 2011. The Assad government attempted to appease Kurds by promising to grant citizenship to thousands of Kurds, who until that time had been stripped of any legal status. By the summer, protests had only intensified, as did violent crackdowns by the Syrian government.


title: Rojava conflict

text: In August, a coalition of opposition groups formed the Syrian National Council in hopes of creating a democratic, pluralistic alternative to the Assad government. But internal fighting and disagreement over politics and inclusion plagued the group from its beginnings. In the fall of 2011 the popular uprising escalated to an armed conflict. The Free Syrian Army (FSA) began to coalesce and armed insurrection spread, largely across central and southern Syria.


title: Rojava conflict

text: The National Movement of Kurdish Parties in Syria, a coalition of Syria's 12 Kurdish parties, boycotted a Syrian opposition summit in Antalya, Turkey on 31 May 2011, stating that "any such meeting held in Turkey can only be a detriment to the Kurds in Syria, because Turkey is against the aspirations of the Kurds".


title: Rojava conflict

text: During the August summit in Istanbul, which led to the creation of the Syrian National Council, only two of the parties in the National Movement of Kurdish Parties in Syria, the Kurdish Union Party and the Kurdish Freedom Party, attended the summit.


title: Rojava conflict

text: Anti-government protests had been ongoing in the Kurdish-inhabited areas of Syria since March 2011, as part of the wider Syrian uprising, but clashes started after the opposition Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) and Kurdish National Council (KNC) signed a seven-point agreement on 11 June 2012 in Erbil under the auspice of Iraqi Kurdistan president Massoud Barzani. This agreement, however, failed to be implemented and so a new cooperation agreement between the two sides was signed on 12 July which saw the creation of the Kurdish Supreme Committee as a governing body of all Kurdish-controlled territories in Syria.


title: Rojava conflict

text: The People's Protection Units (YPG) entered the conflict by capturing the city of Kobanî on 19 July 2012, followed by the capture of Amuda and Efrîn on 20 July. The cities fell without any major clashes, as Syrian security forces withdrew without any significant resistance. The Syrian Army pulled out to fight elsewhere. The KNC and PYD then formed a joint leadership council to run the captured cities.


title: Rojava conflict

text: The YPG forces continued with their advancement and on 21 July captured Al-Malikiyah (), which lies 10 kilometers from the Turkish border. The forces at the time also intended to capture Qamishli, the largest Syrian city with a Kurdish majority. On the same day, the Syrian government attacked a patrol of Kurdish YPG members and wounded one fighter. The next day it was reported that Kurdish forces were still fighting for Al-Malikiyah, where one young Kurdish activist was killed after government security forces opened fire on protesters. The YPG also took control over the towns of Ra's al-'Ayn () and Al-Darbasiyah (), after the security and political units withdrew from these areas, following an ultimatum issued by the Kurds. On the same day, clashes erupted in Qamishli between YPG and government forces in which one Kurdish fighter was killed and two were wounded along with one government official.


title: Rojava conflict

text: On 24 July, the PYD announced that Syrian security forces had withdrawn from the small Kurdish city of 16,000 of Al-Ma'bada (), between Al-Malikiyah and the Turkish borders. The YPG forces then took control of all government institutions.


title: Rojava conflict

text: On 1 August 2012, state security forces on the periphery of the country were pulled into the intensifying battle taking place in Aleppo. During this large withdrawal from the north, the YPG took control of at least parts of Qamishli, Efrin, Amude, Dirbesiye and Kobanî with very little conflict or casualties.


title: Rojava conflict

text: On 2 August 2012, the National Coordination Committee for Democratic Change announced that most Kurdish-majority cities in Syria, except Qamishli and Hasaka, were no longer controlled by government forces and were now being governed by Kurdish political parties. In Qamishli, government military and police forces remained in their barracks and administration officials in the city allowed the Kurdish flag to be raised.


title: Rojava conflict

text: After months of de facto rule, the PYD officially announced its regional autonomy on 9 January 2014. Elections were held, popular assemblies established and the Constitution of Rojava was approved. Since then, residents organized local assemblies, reopened schools, established community centers, and helped push back the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) to gain control of almost all land in Syria east of the Euphrates river. They see their model of grassroots democracy as one that can be implemented throughout Syria in the future.


title: Rojava conflict

text: After declaring autonomy, grassroots organizers, politicians and other community members have radically changed the social and political make-up of the area. The extreme laws restricting independent political organizing, women's freedom, religious and cultural expression and the discriminatory policies carried out by the Assad government have been superseded. In their place, a Constitution of Rojava guaranteeing the cultural, religious and political freedom of all people has been established. The constitution also explicitly states the equal rights and freedom of women and also "mandates public institutions to work towards the elimination of gender discrimination".


title: Rojava conflict

text: The political and social changes taking place in Rojava have in large part been inspired by the libertarian socialist politics of Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan.


title: Rojava conflict

text: The Rojava economy is a blend of private companies, the autonomous administration and worker cooperatives. Since the revolution, efforts have been made to transition the economy to one of self-sufficiency based on worker and producer cooperatives. This transition faces the major obstacles of ongoing conflict and an embargo from all neighboring countries: Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and the various forces controlling nearby areas of Syria. This has forced people to rely almost exclusively on diesel-run generators for electricity. Additionally, strong emphasis is being placed on businesses that can bring about self-sufficiency to the region.


title: Rojava conflict

text: There were at first no direct or indirect taxes on people or businesses in the region; Instead the administration funded itself mainly through the sale of oil and other natural resources and tariffs on border commerce (which is clandestine because of the embargo). However, in July 2017, it was reported that the administration in the Jazira Region had started to collect income tax to provide for public services in the region. There are partnerships that have been created between private companies and the administration. The administration also funds the school system and distributes bread to all citizens at a below-market rate.


title: Rojava conflict

text: The Movement for a Democratic Society Economic Committee has been helping businesses move towards a "community economy" based on worker cooperatives and self-sufficiency.


title: Rojava conflict

text: Other cooperatives involve bottled mineral water, construction, factories, fuel stations, generators, livestock, oil, pistachio and roasted seeds, and public markets.


title: Rojava conflict

text: The Rojava Cantons are governed through a combination of district and civil councils. District councils consist of 300 members as well as two elected co-presidents, one man and one woman. District councils decide and carry out administrative and economic duties such as garbage collection, land distribution and cooperative enterprises. Civil councils exist to promote social and political rights in the community.


title: Rojava conflict

text: Closely related to religious freedom and the protection of religious minorities is the protection of ethnic minorities. Kurds now have the right to study their language freely, as do Assyrians. For the first time, a Kurdish curriculum has been introduced to the public school system.


title: Rojava conflict

text: Residents are also now free to express their culture freely. Culture and music centers have formed, hosting dance classes, music lessons and choir practice.


title: Rojava conflict

text: There has been, however, numerous instances of discrimination toward Assyrians, including policies of seizing the property of Assyrians who had to flee due to conflict, and numerous instances of attacks against the Assyrian minority. Kurdish authorities have also shut down privately run Assyrian schools ostensibly to protect students from "exorbitant tuition costs".


title: Rojava conflict

text: Rojava's criminal justice system incorporates principles of restorative justice. Reconciliation Committees have replaced the Syrian government court system in several cities. Committees are representative of the ethnic diversity in their respective area. For example, the committee in Tal Abyad has Arabs, Kurds, Turkmen and Armenians.


title: Rojava conflict

text: Feminism, specifically jineology (the science of women), is central to the social revolution taking place in Rojava. In the Social Contract of the Autonomous Regions of Kobane, Jazira and Afrin of 2014, it is stated that women and men have the same rights. Much of the focus of the revolution has been in addressing the extreme levels of violence which women in the area have endured as well as increasing women's leadership in all political institutions. All YPG and YPJ fighters and Asayish have the study of jineology as part of their training, and it is also taught in community centers.


title: Rojava conflict

text: In every town and village under YPG control, a women's house is established. These are community centers run by women, providing services to survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault and other forms of harm. These services include counseling, family mediation, legal support, and coordinating safe houses for women and children. Classes on economic independence and social empowerment programs are also held at women's houses.


title: Rojava conflict

text: Efforts are being made to reduce cases of underage marriage, polygamy and honor killings, both socially as well as through legislation forbidding these practices.


title: Rojava conflict

text: The right to religious expression is also safeguarded in the constitution. This, as well as the extreme hostility towards religious minorities in Islamist controlled areas, has led to a large migration of religious minorities to Rojava.


title: Rojava conflict

text: There are four major forces involved in the Rojava revolution. The People's Protection Units are working with the PYD and other political parties to establish self-rule in Rojava. Syrian government forces still maintain rule in some areas of Rojava under the leadership of the Assad government. A collection of Sunni Islamist forces, the largest being the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), fought to rule the region by way of Islamic fundamentalism. Finally, there were several militias under the general banner of the Free Syrian Army whose intentions and alliances have differed and shifted over time.


title: Rojava conflict

text: While conflict between the YPG and the Syrian government has not been as active as fighting against Islamist forces, there have been several conflicts between the two forces. Territory once controlled by the Syrian government in both Qamishli and al-Hasakah has been taken over by YPG forces. At the end of April 2016, clashes erupted between government forces and YPG fighters for control of Qamishli.


title: Rojava conflict

text: As of the beginning of August 2016, YPG fighters controlled two-thirds of the northeastern city of al-Hasakah, while pro-government militias controlled the remainder. On 17 August 2016, heavy clashes broke out between YPG fighters and the pro-government militias, resulting in the deaths of four civilians, four Kurdish fighters, and three government loyalists. On 18 August, Syrian government aircraft bombed YPG positions in Hasakah, including three YPG checkpoints and three YPG bases. Syrian Kurds had recently demanded that the pro-government National Defense Forces militia disband in al-Hasakah. A government source told the AFP that the air strikes were "a message to the Kurds that they should stop this sort of demand that constitutes an affront to national sovereignty". Another possible factor behind the fighting may have been the recent thaw in Turkish–Russian relations that began in July 2016; Russia, a key ally of the Syrian government, had previously been supporting Syrian Kurdish forces as a means to apply pressure to Turkey. After the recent territorial defeat of ISIL in Syria and Iraq and improvements in the Turkish–Russian relationship, it is possible that Russia and its allies began to view a strong YPG as increasingly less useful.


title: Rojava conflict

text: In response to the attacks by the Syrian aircraft on Kurdish positions near al-Hasakah, the United States scrambled planes over the city in order to deter further attacks.


title: Rojava conflict

text: By 22 August, Syrian government troops, Hezbollah fighters, and members of the Iranian paramilitary Basij militia had become involved in the fighting against Kurdish forces in al-Hasakah.


title: Rojava conflict

text: On 28 December 2012, Syrian government forces opened fire on pro-FSA demonstrators in al-Hasakah city, killing and wounding several individuals. Arab tribes in the area attacked YPG positions in the city in reprisal, stating the Kurdish fighters were collaborating with the government. Clashes broke out, and three Arabs were killed, though it was not clear whether they were killed by YPG forces or nearby government troops. Demonstrations were organised by various Kurdish groups throughout northeastern Syria in late December as well. PYD supporters drove vehicles at low speeds through a KNC demonstration in Qamishli, raising tensions between the two groups.


title: Rojava conflict

text: From 2 to 4 January, PYD-led demonstrators staged protests in the al-Antariyah neighbourhood of Qamishli, demanding "freedom and democracy" for both Kurds and Syrians. Many activists camped out on site. On 4 January, approximately 10,000 people were participating in the rallies, which also included smaller numbers of supporters of other Kurdish parties, such as the KNC, which staged a rally in the Munir Habib neighbourhood. PYD organisers had planned for 100,000 people to participate, but such support did not materialise. The demonstrations were concurrent with rallies conducted across the country by the Arab opposition, though Kurdish parties did not use the same slogans as the Arabs, and also did not the same slogans amongst their own parties. Kurds also demonstrated in several other towns, but not across the entire Kurdish region.


title: Rojava conflict

text: Meanwhile, several armed incidents occurred between the dominant PYD-YPG and other Kurdish parties in the region, particularly the Kurdish Union ("Yekîtî") Party, part of a Kurdish political coalition called the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union formed on 15 December 2012, which excludes the PYD. On 3 January, PYD gunmen staged a drive-by shooting on a Yekîtî office in Qamishli. Armed Yekîtî members returned fire, injuring one PYD member. The same day, armed clashes broke out between YPG fighters and members of the newly formed Jiwan Qatna Battalion of Yekîtî in ad-Darbasiyah. Four Yekîtî members were abducted by the YPG, who said they were affiliated with Islamist groups, though Yekîtî activists stated that the PYD wanted to prevent other Kurdish groups from arming themselves. Following demonstrations in the town demanding their release and an intervention by the KNC, the four men were released by the end of the day. On 11 January, YPG forces raided an empty Yekîtî training ground near Ali Faru which had been built in early January, tearing down both the Kurdish and FSA flags that had been flying at the base. Though PYD members defended the raid by saying that the flags could have attracted government airstrikes, Yekîtî condemned the action.


title: Rojava conflict

text: On 31 January, Kamal Mustafa Hanan, editor-in-chief of Newroz (a Kurdish-language journal) and a former Yekîtî politician, was fatally shot in the Ashrafiyah district of Aleppo. It was not clear if he was the victim of a stray bullet or of a politically motivated assassination. Yekîtî organised a funeral procession in the town of Afrin in the Kurdish-held northwest corner of Aleppo Province on 1 February, which members of both the PYD and KNC attended. Also on 1 February, Kurds staged demonstrations in several towns and villages across West Kurdistan concurrent with opposition demonstrations elsewhere in the country. The demonstrations were organised by various Kurdish groups, including the PYD and KNC. Demonstrators from the KNC demanded an end to fighting in Ras al-Ayn and the withdrawal of armed groups from the town, while PYD demonstrators stressed solidarity with their YPG units and the Kurdish Supreme Council.


title: Rojava conflict

text: From 2 to 5 February, YPG forces blockaded the village of Kahf al-Assad (), inhabited by members of the Kurdish Kherikan tribe, after being fired upon by unknown gunmen in the village. YPG checkpoints were also established around other Kherikan villages. The Kherikan are traditionally supporters of the Massoud Barzani government of Iraqi Kurdistan, and as oppose the PYD. The blockade was the third time in two years that hostilities had broken out between the PYD/YPG and locals from Kahf al-Assad.


title: Rojava conflict

text: On 22 February, Osman Baydemir, mayor of the city of Diyarbakır in Turkey, announced the initiation of a one-month humanitarian aid programme in which his city—along with the surrounding districts of Bağlar, Yenişehir, Kayapınar, and Sur—would provide food assistance to Kurdish areas in Syria affected by the war, which had received little of the humanitarian aid that other regions of Syria had received.


title: Rojava conflict

text: On 11 April 2016, PYD supporters attacked the offices of the Kurdish National Council and the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Syria in Derbessiye and Qamishli. The head of the Kurdish National Council told Turkey's TRT World channel the "PYD's oppressive attitude in Syria is forcing Kurds to leave the region".


title: Rojava conflict

text: On 16 January 2017, more than 270 Syrian Kurdish activists signed an appeal calling for unity talks between the main Syrian Kurdish parties. In response, the Movement for a Democratic Society led by the PYD stated that they welcome unity and called on the Kurdish National Council to participate in federal project. The KNC led by the KDP-S, in response, demanded the release its political prisoners detained in Rojava. The KNC has rejected the federalism project launched by the Syrian Democratic Council and stated that it will participate in the peace talks in Astana, Kazakhstan, with Turkey and Russia. The Kurdish National Alliance in Syria, part of the SDC also welcomed the proposal of unity.


title: Rojava conflict

text: On 3 February 2017, amidst clashes between the KDP-S-affiliated Peshmerga group and the Sinjar Resistance Units in Sinjar, a KNC office was burned in Qamishli and another attacked in Dirbêsiyê. The KNC said the pro-PYD youth group the Ciwanen Soresger was perpetrating the attacks. However, the perpetrators were reportedly arrested by the Asayish.


title: Rojava conflict

text: On 3 March 2017, the Rojava Asayish arrested more than 40 members of the KNC in Syria while the KDP Asayish arrested 23 opposition protesters in Iraqi Kurdistan. 17 of them were later released but 6 were still imprisoned. By 16 March, more than 13 KNC offices and an Assyrian Democratic Organization office in Rojava were shut down by Rojava Asayish forces, reportedly for failing to register with PYD authorities. In response, the Human Rights Watch called on both sides to "immediately" release all "arbitrarily held political detainees". The Mesopotamia National Council announced their support for TEV-DEM's requirement for parties to apply to licenses to operate in Rojava. However, the council also called for the self-management to give sufficient time for applications and denounced "random" closing of the parties' offices.


title: Rojava conflict

text: On 3 April 2017, the Kurdish National Council called on the PYD to release 4 of its detainees: a Kurdish Future Movement in Syria member, a Kurdish Youth Movement member, and two KDP-S members. As of the same day, 6 detainees were still held by Iraqi Kurdish authorities.


title: Rojava conflict

text: On 12 April 2017, an official in TEV-DEM met with Gabriel Moushe Gawrieh, head of the Assyrian Democratic Organization, and discussed the closure of the latter's offices since March. It was the first time TEV-DEM officials met with the ADO.


title: Rojava conflict

text: The Syrian Kurdish–Islamist conflict is a major theater in the Syrian Civil War, starting in 2013 after fighting erupted between the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) and Islamist rebel factions in the city of Ras al-Ayn. Kurdish forces launched a campaign in an attempt to take control of the Islamist-controlled areas in the governorate of al-Hasakah and some parts of Raqqa and Aleppo governorates after al-Qaeda in Syria used those areas to attack the YPG. The Kurdish groups and their allies' goal was also to capture Kurdish areas from the Arab Islamist rebels and strengthen the autonomy of the region of Rojava.


title: Rojava conflict

text: YPG forces as well as later the broader Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) have clashed heavily with Islamist forces of all stripes in the following years, in particular with those representing the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Including the Siege of Kobanî (2014), the Al-Hasakah offensive (February–March 2015), the Al-Hasakah offensive (May 2015), the Tell Abyad offensive (May–July 2015), the Battle of Sarrin (June–July 2015), the Battle of Al-Hasakah (June–August 2015), and the Raqqa campaign (2016–present) including the Battle of Tabqa (2017).


title: Rojava conflict

text: Turkey has long called the PYD as a Syrian extension of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), and has therefore taken a hardline stance against the group, the official talking point being that it would not allow a Kurdish state to form along their southern border with Syria. Turkey's policy towards Rojava is based on an economic blockade, persistent attempts of international isolation, opposition to the cooperation of the international Anti-ISIL-coalition with Rojava militias, and support of Islamist Syrian Civil War parties hostile towards Rojava, in past times even including ISIL. Turkey has on several occasions been militarily attacking Rojava territory and defence forces. The latter has resulted in some of the most clearcut instances of international solidarity with Rojava.


title: Rojava conflict

text: Turkey received PYD co-chair Salih Muslim for talks in 2013 and in 2014, even entertaining the idea of opening a Rojava representation office in Ankara "if it's suitable with Ankara's policies". Turkey recognizes the PYD and the YPG militia as identical to the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which is listed as a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the European Union, the United States and others. However, the EU, the US, and others cooperate with the PYD and the YPG militia in the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and do not designate either a terrorist organisation. About its loss in international standing, the consequence of domestic and foreign policies of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Turkish government is contemptuous. The Turkish foreign minister called the PYD a "terrorist organisation" in his speech at the meeting of Council of Foreign Ministers of the 13th Islamic Summit of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) on 12 April 2016 at Istanbul, Turkey. In November 2016 a state-run media organization of Turkey, "Anadolu Agency", stated that the educational institutions of Rojava had "prejudice against Islam". U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said there were links between the PYD, the YPG, and the PKK. Secretary Carter replied, "Yes," to a Senate panel when Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) asked whether he believed the Syrian Kurds are "aligned or at least have substantial ties to the PKK". Rojava and YPG leaders state that the PKK is a separate organization. YPG representatives have persistently reiterated that their militia has an all Syrian agenda and no agenda of hostility whatsoever towards Turkey. However, according to the Turkish "Daily Sabah", at one occasion in January 2016 "a YouTube video has appeared of an English-speaking man, reported to be a fighter from the Democratic Union Party's (PYD) armed wing, the People's Protection Units (YPG) (...) making a call for Westerners to join the ranks of the armed group and conduct terrorist attacks against the Turkish state." In the perception of much of the Turkish public, the Rojava federal project as well as U.S. support for the YPG against ISIL are elements of a wider conspiracy scheme by a "mastermind" with the aim to weaken or even dismember Turkey, in order to prevent its imminent rise as a global power.


title: Rojava conflict

text: Following YPG successes in 2015, including the capture of Tell Abyad, Turkey began targeting YPG forces in northern Syria. On 16 February 2016, Turkish forces began shelling Kurdish forces in the Afrin District after the SDF took initiative from an SAA offensive and captured rebel-held areas of the Azaz District, including Tell Rifaat and Menagh Airbase. Turkey vowed not to allow the SDF to capture the key border town of Azaz. As a result, 25 Kurdish militants were killed and 197 injured from Turkish artillery fire. In early 2016, following the capture of Tishrin Dam, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) were allowed to cross the Euphrates River, a proclaimed 'red line' by Turkey. Turkish forces bombed the Kurdish YPG headquarters in Tell Abyad, destroying three armoured vehicles and injuring two Kurdish fighters. The following day, 21 January 2016, Turkish troops crossed the border into Syria and entered the ISIL-controlled Syrian border town of Jarabulus which the YPG had been planning on capturing as part of an offensive to unite their areas of control into one continuous banner of territory. Kurdish-led forces in northern Syria said Turkish airstrikes hit their bases in Amarneh village near Jarablus on 27 August 2016, after Turkish artillery shelled the positions the day before. The Syrian Observatory reported on 27 August 2016, about exchange of gunfire between YPG and the Turkish forces in the countryside north of Hasakah. It is unclear if Turkish forces were on Syrian territory or had fired across the border.


title: Rojava conflict

text: In March 2017, U.S. Lieutenant General Stephen Townsend said "I have seen absolutely zero evidence that they have been a threat to, or have supported any attacks on, Turkey from Northern Syria over the last two years." The top U.S. commander in the campaign against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) stated that the Peoples’ Protection Units (YPG), the military wing of the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), does not pose a threat to Turkey. "Of those YPG fighters, I’ve talked to their leaders and we’ve watched them operate and they continually reassure us that they have no desire to attack Turkey, that they are not a threat to Turkey, in fact that they desire to have a good working relationship with Turkey."


title: The Comeback Trail (2020 film)

text: The Comeback Trail is a 2020 American crime comedy film directed by George Gallo and written by Gallo and Josh Posner, based on the 1982 film of the same name by Harry Hurwitz. It stars Robert De Niro, Tommy Lee Jones, Morgan Freeman, Zach Braff, Emile Hirsch, and Eddie Griffin.


title: The Comeback Trail (2020 film)

text: The film premiered at the 2020 Monte-Carlo Comedy Film Festival. A 2023 U.S. theatrical release is planned by Cloudburst Entertainment.


title: The Comeback Trail (2020 film)

text: The project was announced in May 2019, with Robert De Niro, Tommy Lee Jones and Morgan Freeman cast in the film, written and directed by George Gallo. Zach Braff and Eddie Griffin were added later that month. Emile Hirsch joined the next month.


title: The Comeback Trail (2020 film)

text: "The Comeback Trail" premiered at the 17th Monte-Carlo Comedy Film Festival on October 9, 2020. It was initially scheduled to be theatrically released in the United States on November 13, 2020, but was delayed to July 23, 2021, again to November 18, 2022 and then to 2023.


title: The Comeback Trail (2020 film)

text: On June 19, 2021 the film was released through Sky Cinema on the Sky TV and Now TV platforms in the United Kingdom.


title: The Comeback Trail (2020 film)

text: On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of based on reviews, with an average rating of .


title: Survivor: Panama

text: Survivor: Panama — Exile Island, also known as Survivor: Exile Island and Survivor: Panama, is the twelfth season of the American CBS competitive reality television series "Survivor". The season was filmed in the Pearl Islands, off the coast of Panama from October 31, 2005 through December 8, 2005 and premiered on February 2, 2006. Hosted by Jeff Probst, it consisted of the usual 39 days of gameplay with 16 competitors, the first season with 16 competitors since "" five seasons prior.


title: Survivor: Panama

text: The season included a twist that originally came from "" called Exile Island. Each week at least one castaway is banished to an island away from all other contestants for the time period between the reward and immunity challenges. The castaway is given a single machete, a flint, a pot and a bucket of non-sanitized water. The island also contained a hidden immunity idol that could be used at tribal council after the votes have been cast. During the season finale on May 14, 2006, it was revealed that Aras Baskauskas was named the Sole Survivor over Danielle DiLorenzo in a 5-2 vote.


title: Survivor: Panama

text: The 16 players were initially split into four tribes by sex and age: young men (Viveros), older men (La Mina), young women (Bayoneta), and older women (Casaya). These four tribes were named after four islands located in the Pearl Islands. Shortly after the first Tribal Council, the Viveros and Bayoneta tribes were dissolved and a "schoolyard pick" formed two new integrated tribes using the Casaya and La Mina tribe names and camps. When there were ten contestants left, they merged into one tribe named Gitanos, the Spanish word for "gypsy." Coincidentally, a member from each of the original four tribes was represented in the final four.


title: Survivor: Panama

text: Notable contestants from this season was former NASA astronaut Dan Barry and former Miss Texas Teen USA Misty Giles. Tina Scheer was originally slated for the previous season "", but she backed out due to her son's death prior to that season.


title: Survivor: Panama

text: Cirie Fields was selected from this season to compete in "". She competed again in "" as part of the Heroes tribe, and would return for a fourth time on "". Danielle DiLorenzo also competed on "Heroes vs. Villains" as part of the Villains tribe. Aras Baskauskas returned for "", alongside his brother, Vytas. Terry Deitz and Shane Powers were included on the public poll to choose the cast of ""; Deitz was chosen to compete.


title: Survivor: Panama

text: Outside of "Survivor", Dan Barry competed on the seventh season of "BattleBots" in 2016. Fields competed on the USA Network reality competition series, "Snake in the Grass" and was a co-winner of the $100,000 prize. Outside of "Survivor", Fields competed on the USA Network reality competition series, "Snake in the Grass".


title: Survivor: Panama

text: The game began with the 16 competitors split into four tribes by both relative age and gender. They were introduced to the concept of "Exile Island" with the promise of a hidden immunity idol located somewhere on it, while one person from the losing tribe at challenges would be sent to the island and given clues to look for it. After the first four days, the four tribes were merged by schoolyard pick with mixed genders into two tribes, Casaya and La Mina. Casaya generally proved the stronger tribe, and opted to send Terry from La Mina over to Exile Island multiple times, which gave him the opportunity to discover the hidden immunity idol.


title: Survivor: Panama

text: Going into the merge, Casaya was up 6 members to 4. While Terry won several individual immunities, he did not use it or the hidden immunity idol to save his former La Mina tribe members, leaving him as the sole remaining La Mina member and a perceived immunity challenge threat by the other Casaya tribe. Bruce was evacuated due a medical emergency, leaving six players at the game. At this juncture, Cirie, who saw both Terry and Shane looking separately to take Courtney, a weaker player, into the final Tribal Council as an assurance to win the jury's favor, convinced Aras and Danielle to blindside the other three, and succeeded in achieving Courtney's elimination, followed by Shane's. The final four vote came down a fire-making tiebreaker between Cirie and Danielle; Danielle ultimately won. Danielle won the final immunity challenge and opted to take Aras to the final Tribal Council, eliminating Terry. The final jury saw both Aras and Danielle as capable players but ultimately voted Aras as the Sole Survivor, five votes to two.


title: Survivor: Panama

text: "Survivor: Panama" has received mixed to positive reviews from fans and critics. The personalities of the Casaya tribe members, in particular fan-favorite Cirie Fields, were praised. However, aside from Terry Deitz, the members of the La Mina tribe was criticized for being perceived as less entertaining compared to their Casaya counterparts. As such, critics believe that the season is uneven due to the contrast in entertainment between the members of the two main tribes. Dalton Ross of "Entertainment Weekly" ranked this season 27th out of 40 criticizing the season's final immunity challenge for being unfair to Terry Deitz which lead to an "unmemorable" final two. The gameplay of winner Aras Baskauskas received mixed to negative reception. Baskauskas placed 23rd out of the first 34 winners in a fan poll conducted by "Entertainment Weekly" in 2017 and also received the fewest first-place votes out of every winner in the poll. In 2014, Joe Reid of "The Wire" ranked this season 8th out of 27. In 2015, a poll by "Rob Has a Podcast" ranked this season 12th out of 30 with Rob Cesternino ranking this season 14th. This was updated in 2021 during Cesternino's podcast, "Survivor All-Time Top 40 Rankings", ranking 15th out of 40. In 2020, The "Purple Rock Podcast" ranked this season 10th out of 40 saying the "casting here is good" and the "gameplay is almost more interesting for what doesn’t happen than what does". Later that same year, "Inside Survivor" ranked this season 12th out of 40 saying it is a "GREAT" season that "features some of the best characters of all-time, has innovative gameplay, superb blindsides, an underdog story, and is perhaps the funniest season ever."


title: Spooky Tooth

text: Spooky Tooth were an English rock band originally formed in Carlisle in 1967. Principally active between 1967 and 1974, the band re-formed several times in later years.


title: Spooky Tooth

text: Prior to Spooky Tooth, four of the band's five founding members had performed in the band Art (formerly known as the V.I.P.'s). Following the dissolution of Art, the members of that band's final line-up (guitarist Luther Grosvenor, vocalist Mike Harrison, drummer Mike Kellie and bassist Greg Ridley) joined forces with American keyboardist/vocalist Gary Wright in October 1967 and formed Spooky Tooth. Wright was introduced to the members of Art by Chris Blackwell, founder of Island Records.


title: Spooky Tooth

text: Their debut, "It's All About", was released in June 1968 on Island Records and was produced by Jimmy Miller, who was also behind the boards for Spencer Davis Group, Traffic, the Rolling Stones and Blind Faith.


title: Spooky Tooth

text: The second album, "Spooky Two" (March 1969), also produced by Miller, gained some attention in the rock press but, like the debut, failed to sell. It was the last album release by the original lineup and included their now classic version of the Larry Weiss penned "Evil Woman" and "Better by You, Better than Me", which was covered by Judas Priest on their release "Stained Class" (1978).


title: Spooky Tooth

text: Ridley joined Humble Pie in 1969 and was replaced by Andy Leigh for the album "Ceremony" (December 1969).


title: Spooky Tooth

text: The experimental nature of Ceremony received mixed reviews and despite the project being instigated by Gary Wright, the album is considered by him to have ended the band's career. The record is described by another as being "one of the great screw-ups in rock history". As Wright describes it, "...We did a project that wasn't our album. It was with this French electronic music composer named Pierre Henry. We just told the label, 'You know this is his album, not our album. We'll play on it just like musicians.' And then when the album was finished, they said, 'Oh no no — it's great. We're gonna release this as your next album.' We said, 'You can't do that. It doesn't have anything to do with the direction of Spooky Two and it will ruin our career.' And that's exactly what happened."


title: Spooky Tooth

text: Wright left the band following the release of the album. Harrison, Grosvenor and Kellie remained and recorded "The Last Puff" (July 1970) with members of Joe Cocker's Grease Band (guitarist Henry McCullough, keyboardist Chris Stainton and bassist Alan Spenner).


title: Spooky Tooth

text: In the autumn of 1970 the band embarked on a European tour that was undertaken with a line-up of Harrison, Grosvenor, Kellie, keyboardist John Hawken (ex-Nashville Teens) and bassist Steve Thompson. After this, the group disbanded, though Harrison and Wright reformed Spooky Tooth in September 1972 with a different line-up.


title: Spooky Tooth

text: "You Broke My Heart So I Busted Your Jaw" was the first album by the reunited band, released in May 1973 on Island Records. Founding guitarist Grosvenor did not rejoin the band, as he had teamed up with Mott the Hoople, adopting the stage name of Ariel Bender. Grosvenor was succeeded by Mick Jones, while founding drummer Kellie was replaced by Bryson Graham. The bassist was Ian Herbert, then Chris Stewart.


title: Spooky Tooth

text: For their next album, "Witness" (November 1973), original drummer Mike Kellie returned in place of Graham. Wright remained the dominant songwriter at this stage of the band's history. But co-lead singer Harrison left following the album's release and Mike Patto was the new vocalist, alongside Wright, when they recorded "The Mirror" (October 1974), which also included new bass player Val Burke and Bryson Graham back on drums. But the album's failure led to Wright leaving once again for a solo career and the group disbanding in November 1974.


title: Spooky Tooth

text: Jon Milward summarized the band in "The Rolling Stone Record Guide" in 1979: "If ever there was a heavy band, Spooky Tooth had to be it. Featuring two vocalists prone to blues-wrenching extremes, and an instrumental attack comprising awesomely loud keyboards and guitars, Spooky Tooth came on like an overwhelming vat of premedicated goo." Noting their lack of commercial success, Milward concluded that the group "would remain the right band at the wrong time."


title: Spooky Tooth

text: Grosvenor later played with Stealers Wheel and joined Mott the Hoople in the 1970s (replacing Mick Ralphs who left to form Bad Company), adopting the name Ariel Bender. In 2005 he founded the Ariel Bender Band, with which he still occasionally performs. In 2018 and 2019 he toured with a reformed Mott the Hoople.


title: Spooky Tooth

text: Kellie later joined the Only Ones in the late 1970s also performing with them in 1980s. The band reformed in 2007.


title: Spooky Tooth

text: Ridley became a member of Humble Pie. On 19 November 2003 he died in Alicante, Spain, of pneumonia and resulting complications. He was 62.


title: Spooky Tooth

text: Wright began to develop an international solo career in the 1970s and had a hit with the radio-friendly "Dream Weaver".


title: Spooky Tooth

text: Harrison, Grosvenor, Ridley and Kellie reunited as Spooky Tooth at points in 1997 and 1998, which resulted in an album, "Cross Purpose", released in February 1999.


title: Spooky Tooth

text: In June 2004, Harrison, Wright and Kellie were again re-united as Spooky Tooth with Joey Albrecht (guitar) and Michael Becker (bass) for two concerts in Germany, resulting in a DVD "Nomad Poets" (2007).


title: Spooky Tooth

text: In February 2008, the latest incarnation of Spooky Tooth, featuring Harrison, Wright and Kellie, along with guitarist Steve Farris from Mr. Mister and Shem von Schroeck (bass), played a series of European dates. On 29 May 2009, this same lineup (with drummer Tom Brechtlein replacing Kellie) played at Island Records' 50th Anniversary at Shepherd's Bush Empire, before touring Germany that June.


title: Spooky Tooth

text: In 2012, Mike Kellie started work on a solo album. Kellie died on 18 January 2017 at the age of 69 after a short illness, and Mike Harrison died on 25 March 2018 at the age of 72.


title: GPT-2

text: Generative Pre-trained Transformer 2 (GPT-2) is an open-source artificial intelligence created by OpenAI in February 2019. GPT-2 translates text, answers questions, summarizes passages, and generates text output on a level that, while sometimes indistinguishable from that of humans, can become repetitive or nonsensical when generating long passages. It is a general-purpose learner; it was not specifically trained to do any of these tasks, and its ability to perform them is an extension of its general ability to accurately synthesize the next item in an arbitrary sequence. GPT-2 was created as a "direct scale-up" of OpenAI's 2018 GPT model, with a ten-fold increase in both its parameter count and the size of its training dataset.


title: GPT-2

text: The GPT architecture implements a deep neural network, specifically a transformer model, which uses attention in place of previous recurrence- and convolution-based architectures. Attention mechanisms allow the model to selectively focus on segments of input text it predicts to be the most relevant. This model allows for greatly increased parallelization, and outperforms previous benchmarks for RNN/CNN/LSTM-based models.


title: GPT-2

text: OpenAI released the complete version of the GPT-2 language model (with 1.5 billion parameters) in November 2019. GPT-2 was to be followed by the 175-billion-parameter GPT-3, revealed to the public in 2020 (whose source code has never been made available). Access to GPT-3 is provided exclusively through APIs offered by OpenAI and Microsoft.


title: GPT-2

text: Since the origins of computing, artificial intelligence has been an object of study; the "imitation game", postulated by Alan Turing in 1950 (and often called the "Turing test") proposed to establish an electronic or mechanical system's capacity for intelligent action by an evaluator's ability to distinguish its behavior from that of a human. The term "machine learning" was first used to describe a possible approach to artificial intelligence as early as 1959 by IBM researcher Arthur Samuel; current use of the term encompasses a broad variety of statistical learning, data science and neural network approaches to computational problems (often falling under the aegis of artificial intelligence).


title: GPT-2

text: Natural language processing using computers, a task originally conceived as a subfield of computational linguistics, was attempted as soon as computing hardware had the capacity; the first application of a dictionary look-up table was developed at Birkbeck College in London in 1948. The 1954 Georgetown Experiment was a demonstration of fully automated machine translation, in which sixty Russian sentences were translated into English (mostly by replacement of words with their English synonyms). The translations were often crude; the system had only 6 grammar rules and a 250-word vocabulary, and no attempt was made to analyze or translate syntactic structure. However, the experiment proved to the public that computers could interpret and process natural language, and secured CIA funding for further research. Direct substitution remains a standard against which machine translation programs are evaluated.


title: GPT-2

text: Systems for using natural language in human-computer interaction (HCI) also began to emerge in the mid-20th century. SHRDLU, a program developed at MIT in 1968–1970, consisted of a virtual environment of several objects which a user interacted with through commands in natural language (e.g."Find a block which is taller than the one you are holding and put it into the box"). ELIZA, a chatterbot written in 1966, analyzed a human interlocutor's text for keywords and provided conversationally appropriate responses. While many subjects claimed an inability to distinguish ELIZA's conversation from that of a human, the question of whether this constituted intelligence proved contentious (the most famous script parodied a psychotherapist by, largely, repeating what the user had said back to them).


title: GPT-2

text: While initial attempts at machine translation had been purely computational, by the 1950s the dominant approach to computational linguistics had come to emphasize Noam Chomsky's concept of universal grammar; NLP research in that era, accordingly, consisted largely of attempts to reduce statements in arbitrary languages to putative underlying language-agnostic logical structures. In the 1970s, semantic NLP systems would begin to eschew "syntactic" encodings in favor of more general "semantic" encodings. However, until the advent of neural networks, most systems continued to rely on large (and increasingly unwieldly) sets of manually programmed rules, which failed to scale up as initially predicted.


title: GPT-2

text: The field of artificial intelligence continued to develop in the late 20th century, but occasional periods of stagnation known as "AI winters" occurred. Various sources posit AI winters as having occurred at different times; in 1994, Howe described one as having started in 1973 and lasting a decade, while Russell & Norvig in 2003 described another as starting soon after 1988.


title: GPT-2

text: An early concept in artificial intelligence, connectionism, sought to produce intelligent behavior through artificial neural networks designed to simulate the behavior of neurons in biological brains. The first example of an artificial neural network was the SNARC, built in 1951. The perceptron (a type of binary classifier) was introduced in 1957 by psychologist Frank Rosenblatt; his machine was designed for image recognition using 400 photocells connected to "neurons", with weightings determined by potentiometers (and adjusted with electric motors during its learning process). Perceptron systems became the subject of great interest; a "New York Times" article described the perceptron as "the embryo of an electronic computer that [the Navy] expects will be able to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself and be conscious of its existence". Perceptron systems, however, fell out of favor for decades following a 1969 book by Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert ("Perceptrons: an introduction to computational geometry"), which pointed out several shortcomings of the then-present state of the art (single-layer perceptrons), including an inability to encode the exclusive or (XOR) function. The book was considered, at the time, to discredit the perceptron approach (as well as neural networks in general) as a promising area of research.


title: GPT-2

text: Neural networks become capable of classifying different inputs (i.e. sorting them into distinct categories) through a process known as "learning". This begins with the network's weights (the amount by which each neuron's "activation" influences the activation of each specific neuron in the subsequent layer) being initialized to random quantities; in this state, the output of the network is similarly random. An objective function, like a loss function, is defined, which is capable of quantitatively measuring how close the output of the network is to its desired performance (for example, how often an input consisting of a handwritten number results in the sole activation of the output neuron corresponding to that number). From this, and from the performance of the network, the weights can be adjusted in order to improve its performance.


title: GPT-2

text: Backpropagation, a supervised algorithm first applied to machine learning systems in Paul Werbos' 1974 dissertation, efficiently calculates "gradients", which are vector fields describing the optimal adjustment of all weights in the entire network for a given input/output example. The use of these gradients to train neural networks, a practice known as gradient descent, enabled the creation of much more complex systems, and wide-scale application of neural networks to natural language processing would occur in the 1980s. In 1985, D.B. Parker would rediscover Werbos' method; in 1986, Rumelhart, Hinton and Williams would apply it to generate internal representations of incoming data in neural networks with hidden layers, referred to as "deep learning" networks; this research would later form the basis for recurrent neural networks.


title: GPT-2

text: Traditional feed-forward neural networks (FFNNs) are so named because each layer takes in output from the previous layer, and feeds it into the next; a FFNN's structure contains no "cycles" where information flows backwards. In contrast, a recurrent neural network (RNN) has at least one cycle of activation flow. RNNs are often used for processing sequences of data (and predicting future sequence items), since the network can process each item using both the item itself and its own output from processing the previous item.


title: GPT-2

text: The neocognitron, proposed by Kunihiko Fukushima in 1979 based on models of neural architecture in the mammalian visual cortex, provided the basis for convolutional neural networks (CNNs), often used in image processing. By "sliding" a small layer over a larger input, a CNN can perform deeper processing with less computation. For example, a 100×100 image has 10,000 pixels, which would require 10,000 weights to process with a fully connected layer; a convolutional layer consisting of a 5×5 "window" sliding over the image can perform edge detection using only 25 learnable parameters. Convolutional layers are combined by "pooling layers", and processed by "fully connected" layers (which are typically multilayer perceptrons).


title: GPT-2

text: Due to their ability to process sequential information, recurrent neural networks have seen use in many NLP applications; unlike FFNNs, they are capable of encoding different weights (and giving different output) for identical items based on their surroundings in a sequence—that is to say, a RNN system that parsed one word at a time could still associate a "black dog" with fuzzy paws, a "corn dog" with ketchup, and a "sun dog" with refraction. Moreover, since the retention of information from previous sequence items can be performed recursively, RNN systems can be designed that recall items arbitrarily far back in a sequence: for example, being able to continue the sequences "Tom looked at the black dog", "Tom looked at the corn dog", and "Tom looked at the sun dog" with "fondly", "hungrily", and "indirectly", respectively.


title: GPT-2

text: While capable of impressive solutions, many-layered FFNNs and RNNs both proved vulnerable to the vanishing gradient problem: since gradients (encoded as finite-precision numbers) are required to backpropagate across all layers of a model, they can "vanish" to zero (or "explode" to infinity) over a sufficiently large number of layers. The long short-term memory network (LSTM), first proposed by Sepp Hochreiter and Jürgen Schmidhuber in 1995–1997, sought to resolve this issue by introducing a novel architecture consisting of multiple distinct "cells" with "input", "output" and "forget" gates. In 2009, an LSTM-based model submitted by Alex Graves' team won the ICDAR competition for handwriting recognition; another was the most accurate model in the competition and a third was the fastest.


title: GPT-2

text: Another issue RNNs and LSTMs encounter is that they can only take into account the context of "previous" sequence items. This can create issues when parsing sentences like "Tom rode his bike to the store, put out the kickstand, and turned off the engine", in which the necessary context of the "bike" being a motorcycle is revealed only at the end. One method of solving problems like this is the bidirectional LSTM, which proceeds in both directions simultaneously, giving access to both "past" and "future" input features. Conditional random fields use tags to connect inputs directly to outputs. There exist combinations of the above approaches, like the LSTM-CRF network and the BI-LSTM-CRF network. Other improvements on the RNN model include neural Turing machines, adaptive computation time, neural programmers, and attention mechanisms, the latter of which form the basis for GPT-2 and related technologies.


title: GPT-2

text: By the early 2010s, the best performance in neural machine translation was achieved with the encoder–decoder model, in which a RNN or LSTM "encoder network" encoded source sentences into vectors, and a "decoder network" of similar architecture processed these vectors into translated output. 2014 saw the introduction of significantly more complex "attention" mechanisms, which vastly augmented these models' performance. Attention mechanisms gave these models the ability to adaptively focus their decoder networks' "attention" on specific aspects of the source text, rather than forcing them to parse the entire text as one vector.


title: GPT-2

text: 2017 then saw the introduction of "transformer" models, which went a step further by using attention mechanisms to replace the RNN/LSTM architecture entirely.


title: GPT-2

text: One constraint of encoder–decoder models was the difficulty of compressing the encodings of larger sentences into fixed-length vectors; performance often deteriorated on larger inputs. In 2014, Bahdanau et al. introduced an extension to the encoder–decoder model that could "align and translate jointly". For each word of the source sentence that was translated, the Bahdanau model's encoder (a bidirectional RNN with 1000 hidden units in each direction) searched the entire rest of that sentence for the positions of relevant information. Rather than giving the decoder a fixed-length vector encoding of the entire input sequence (like previous models), it produced "context vectors", associated with those positions as well as previously generated target words. The decoder (which also had 1000 hidden units) then used these context vectors to decide where to focus its "attention".


title: GPT-2

text: Research into "attention" mechanisms was continued by Luong et al. in a 2015 paper. A "global" approach based on the Bahdanau paper was attempted, as well as a "local" approach wherein only a subset of source words were "considered" at a time; the local approach, while more architecturally complicated, was less computationally expensive and easier to train. It took 7–10 days to fully train an English–German translation model, which was specifically designed to be capable of translating 1,000 target words per second; its accuracy was tested against the 2014 ACL Workshop on Machine Translation (WMT'14) task for English–German sentence pairs, and achieved a result of 23.0 BLEU—a 2.1 BLEU improvement on the previous best result achieved by previous attempts, a phrase-based language model from Buck et al. 2014.


title: GPT-2

text: While attention mechanisms were effective in improving performance when used to augment existing convolutional and recurrent neural network architectures, it was soon discovered that performant models could be built using attention mechanisms on their own, without anything else underlying them.


title: GPT-2

text: In June 2017, the transformer architecture was first introduced, in a paper released by researchers from Google Brain, Google Research, and University of Toronto. Transformers are a type of model based solely on attention mechanisms, discarding convolution and recurrence altogether. Unlike previous RNN-based models, transformers can process sequential input without needing to perform computation on each item in sequence; this means they can be massively parallelized. On the WMT'14 French–English task, a specifically trained French–English translation model using the transformer architecture was able to establish a new single-model benchmark of 41.8 BLEU. Since their introduction, transformers have seen use in many NLP applications.


title: GPT-2

text: On June 11, 2018, OpenAI released a paper entitled "Improving Language Understanding by Generative Pre-Training", in which they introduced the "Generative Pre-trained Transformer" (GPT). At this point, the best-performing neural NLP models primarily employed supervised learning from large amounts of manually labeled data. This reliance on supervised learning limited their use on datasets that were not well-annotated, in addition to making it prohibitively expensive and time-consuming to train extremely large models; many languages (such as Swahili or Haitian Creole) are difficult to translate and interpret using such models due to a lack of available text for corpus-building. In contrast, GPT's "semi-supervised" approach involved two stages: an unsupervised generative "pre-training" stage in which a language modeling objective was used to set initial parameters, and a supervised discriminative "fine-tuning" stage in which these parameters were adapted to a target task.


title: GPT-2

text: The use of a transformer architecture, as opposed to previous techniques involving attention-augmented RNNs, provided GPT with a more structured memory than could be achieved through recurrent mechanisms; this resulted in "robust transfer performance across diverse tasks".During transfer, we utilize task-specific input adaptations derived from traversal-style approaches, which process structured text input as a single contiguous sequence of tokens.


title: GPT-2

text: The unsupervised pre-training was performed using BooksCorpus, a dataset of over 7,000 unpublished fiction books from various genres; this dataset was chosen in part because its long passages of continuous text conditioned the model to handle long-range information. Other available datasets, while larger, were rejected on the basis that they lacked this long-range structure (being "shuffled" at a sentence level). The "ftfy" library was used to clean the BooksCorpus text (standardize punctuation and whitespace); it was tokenized using "spaCy".


title: GPT-2

text: GPT's architecture itself was a twelve-layer decoder-only transformer, using twelve masked self-attention heads, with 64 dimensional states each (for a total of 768). Rather than simple stochastic gradient descent, the Adam optimization algorithm was used; the learning rate was increased linearly from zero over the first 2,000 updates, to a maximum of 2.5×10, and annealed to 0 using a cosine schedule.


title: GPT-2

text: We train for 100 epochs on minibatches of 64 randomly sampled, contiguous sequences of 512 tokens. Since layernorm is used extensively throughout the model, a simple weight initialization of N(0,0.02) was sufficient. We used a bytepair encoding (BPE) vocabulary with 40,000 merges [53]and residual, embedding, and attention dropouts with a rate of 0.1 for regularization. We also employed a modified version of L2 regularization proposed in Loshchilov et al. 2017, with "w = 0.01" on all non bias or gain weights.


title: GPT-2

text: [...]Unless specified, we reuse the hyperparameter settings from unsupervised pre-training. We add dropout to the classifier with a rate of 0.1. For most tasks, we use a learning rate of 6.25 and a batchsize of 32. Our model finetunes quickly and 3 epochs of training was sufficient for most cases. We use a linear learning rate decay schedule with warmup over 0.2% of training. "λ" was set to 0.5.


title: GPT-2

text: While GPT's fine-tuning was adapted to specific tasks, its pre-training was not; to perform the various tasks, minimal changes were performed to its underlying task-agnostic model architecture. Despite this, GPT still improved on previous benchmarks in several language processing tasks, outperforming discriminatively-trained models with task-oriented architectures on a number of diverse tasks.


title: GPT-2

text: On natural language inference (also known as "textual entailment") tasks, models are evaluated on their ability to interpret pairs of sentences from various datasets and classify the relationship between them as "entailment", "contradiction" or "neutral". Examples of such datasets include QNLI (Wikipedia articles) and MultiNLI (transcribed speech, popular fiction and government reports, among other sources); on these GPT achieved, respectively, a 5.8% and 1.5% improvement over previous best results. It similarly outperformed previous models on two tasks related to question answering and commonsense reasoning—by 5.7% on RACE, a dataset of written question–answer pairs from middle and high school exams, and by 8.9% on the Story Cloze Test.


title: GPT-2

text: Another task, "semantic similarity" (or "paraphrase detection"), assesses whether a model can predict whether two sentences are paraphrases of one another; on the Quora Question Pairs (QQP) dataset, GPT improved on previous best-performing models by 4.2%. In a text classification task using the Corpus of Linguistic Acceptability (CoLA), GPT achieved a score of 45.4, versus a previous best of 35.0. Finally, on GLUE, a multi-task test, GPT achieved an overall score of 72.8 (compared to a previous record of 68.9).


title: GPT-2

text: GPT-2 was created as a direct scale-up of GPT, with both its parameter count and dataset size increased by a factor of 10. Both are unsupervised transformer models trained to generate text by predicting the next word in a sequence of tokens. The GPT-2 model has 1.5 billion parameters, and was trained on a dataset of 8 million web pages. While GPT-2 was reinforced on very simple criteria (interpreting a sequence of words in a text sample and predicting the most likely next word), it produces full sentences and paragraphs by continuing to predict additional words, generating fully comprehensible (and semantically meaningful) statements in natural language. Notably, GPT-2 was evaluated on its performance on tasks in a zero-shot setting.


title: GPT-2

text: Since the transformer architecture enabled massive parallelization, GPT-series models could be trained on larger corpora than previous NLP models. While the initial GPT model demonstrated that the approach was viable, GPT-2 would further explore the emergent properties of networks trained on extremely large corpora. "CommonCrawl", a large corpus produced by web crawling and previously used in training NLP systems, was considered due to its large size, but was rejected after further review revealed large amounts of unintelligible content. Instead, OpenAI developed a new corpus, known as "WebText"; rather than scraping content indiscriminately from the World Wide Web, WebText was generated by scraping only pages linked to by Reddit posts that had received at least three upvotes prior to December 2017. The corpus was subsequently cleaned; HTML documents were parsed into plain text, duplicate pages were eliminated, and Wikipedia pages were removed (since their presence in many other datasets could have induced overfitting).


title: GPT-2

text: While the cost of training GPT-2 is known to have been $256 per hour, the amount of hours it took to complete training is unknown; therefore, the overall training cost cannot be estimated accurately. However, comparable large language models using transformer architectures have had their costs documented in more detail; the training processes for BERT and XLNet consumed, respectively, $6,912 and $245,000 of resources.


title: GPT-2

text: Due to the broadness of its dataset, and the broadness of its approach, GPT-2 became capable of performing a diverse range of tasks beyond simple text generation: answering questions, summarizing, and even translating between languages in a variety of specific domains, without being instructed in anything beyond how to predict the next word in a sequence.


title: GPT-2

text: One example of generalized learning is GPT-2's ability to perform machine translation between French and English, for which task GPT-2's performance was assessed using WMT-14 translation tasks. GPT-2's training corpus included virtually no French text; non-English text was deliberately removed while cleaning the dataset prior to training, and as a consequence, only 10MB of French of the remaining 40,000MB was available for the model to learn from (mostly from foreign-language quotations in English posts and articles). Despite this, GPT-2 achieved 5 BLEU on the WMT-14 English-to-French test set (slightly below the score of a translation via word-for-word substitution). It was also able to outperform several contemporary (2017) unsupervised machine translation baselines on the French-to-English test set, where GPT-2 achieved 11.5 BLEU. This remained below the highest-performing contemporary unsupervised approach (2019), which had achieved 33.5 BLEU. However, other models used large amounts of French text to achieve these results; GPT-2 was estimated to have used a monolingual French corpus approximately 1/500 the size of comparable approaches.


title: GPT-2

text: GPT-2 was first announced on 14 February 2019. A February 2019 article in "The Verge" by James Vincent said that, while "[the] writing it produces is usually easily identifiable as non-human", it remained "one of the most exciting examples yet" of language generation programs:


title: GPT-2

text: Give it a fake headline, and it’ll write the rest of the article, complete with fake quotations and statistics. Feed it the first line of a short story, and it’ll tell you what happens to your character next. It can even write fan fiction, given the right prompt.


title: GPT-2

text: "The Guardian" described this output as "plausible newspaper prose"; Kelsey Piper of "Vox" said "one of the coolest AI systems I’ve ever seen may also be the one that will kick me out of my job". GPT-2's flexibility was described as "impressive" by "The Verge"; specifically, its ability to translate text between languages, summarize long articles, and answer trivia questions were noted.


title: GPT-2

text: A study by the University of Amsterdam employing a modified Turing test found that at least in some scenarios, participants were unable to distinguish poems generated by GPT-2 from those written by humans.


title: GPT-2

text: While previous OpenAI models had been made immediately available to the public, OpenAI initially refused to make a public release of GPT-2's source code when announcing it in February, citing the risk of malicious use; limited access to the model (i.e. an interface that allowed input and provided output, not the source code itself) was allowed for selected press outlets on announcement. One commonly-cited justification was that, since generated text was usually completely novel, it could be used by spammers to evade automated filters; OpenAI demonstrated a version of GPT-2 fine-tuned to "generate infinite positive – or negative – reviews of products". Another was that GPT-2 could be used to generate text that was obscene or racist. Researchers such as Jeremy Howard warned of "the technology to totally fill Twitter, email, and the web up with reasonable-sounding, context-appropriate prose, which would drown out all other speech and be impossible to filter". The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, in response to GPT-2, announced a tool to detect "neural fake news".


title: GPT-2

text: However, opinion was divided. A February 2019 article in "The Verge" argued that the threat posed by GPT-2 had been exaggerated; Anima Anandkumar, a professor at Caltech and director of machine learning research at Nvidia, said that there was no evidence that GPT-2 had the capabilities to pose the threats described by OpenAI, and that what they did was the "opposite of open", characterizing their refusal to release the full model as "malicious BS". "The Gradient" published an open letter to OpenAI requesting that they release the model publicly, comparing the threat posed by text-generation AI to the threat posed by the printing press, and giving Photoshop as an example of "a technology that has (thankfully) not destroyed modern society despite its potential for chaos":


title: GPT-2

text: Thirty years later, society has emerged relatively unscathed despite Photoshop being simple enough for high school students to use and ubiquitous enough to commandeer its own verb. Why? Precisely because everyone knows about Photoshop.


title: GPT-2

text: While OpenAI did not release the fully-trained model or the corpora it was trained on, description of their methods in prior publications (and the free availability of underlying technology) made it possible for GPT-2 to be replicated by others as free software; one such replication, OpenGPT-2, was released in August 2019, in conjunction with a freely licensed version of WebText called OpenWebText. The cloud compute costs for OpenGPT-2 were given as approximately $50,000.


title: GPT-2

text: On August 20, 2019, OpenAI released a partial version of GPT-2, with 774 million parameters (roughly half the size of the full 1.5 billion parameter model).


title: GPT-2

text: Initial concerns that GPT-2 would lend itself to widespread misuse did not come to pass; "The Verge" said that "there are reasons to be skeptical about claims that AI technology will usher in some sort of ‘infopocalypse.’ For a start, we already have programs that can generate plausible text at high volume for little cost: humans." By November 2019, OpenAI said that they had "seen no strong evidence of misuse so far", and the full version, with 1.5 billion parameters, was released on November 5, 2019.


title: GPT-2

text: While GPT-2's ability to generate plausible passages of natural language text were generally remarked on positively, its shortcomings were noted as well, especially when generating texts longer than a couple paragraphs; "Vox" said "the prose is pretty rough, there’s the occasional non-sequitur, and the articles get less coherent the longer they get". "The Verge" similarly noted that longer samples of GPT-2 writing tended to "stray off topic" and lack overall coherence; "The Register" opined that "a human reading it should, after a short while, realize something's up", and noted that "GPT-2 doesn't answer questions as well as other systems that rely on algorithms to extract and retrieve information."


title: GPT-2

text: GPT-2 deployment is resource-intensive; the full version of the model is larger than five gigabytes, making it difficult to embed locally into applications, and consumes large amounts of RAM. In addition, performing a single prediction "can occupy a CPU at 100% utilization for several minutes", and even with GPU processing, "a single prediction can take seconds". To alleviate these issues, the company Hugging Face created DistilGPT2, using knowledge distillation to produce a smaller model that "scores a few points lower on some quality benchmarks", but is "33% smaller and twice as fast".


title: GPT-2

text: Possible applications of GPT-2 described by journalists included aiding humans in writing text like news articles. Even before the release of the full version, GPT-2 was used for a variety of applications and services, as well as for entertainment. In June 2019, a subreddit named r/SubSimulatorGPT2 was created in which a variety of GPT-2 instances trained on different subreddits made posts and replied to each other's comments, creating a situation where one could observe "an AI personification of r/Bitcoin argue with the machine learning-derived spirit of r/ShittyFoodPorn"; by July of that year, a GPT-2-based software program released to autocomplete lines of code in a variety of programming languages was described by users as a "game-changer".


title: GPT-2

text: In 2019, AI Dungeon was launched, which used GPT-2 to generate dynamic text adventures based on user input. AI Dungeon now offers access to the largest release of GPT-3 API as an optional paid upgrade, the free version of the site uses the 2nd largest release of GPT-3. Latitude, the company formed around AI Dungeon, raised $3.3 million in seed funding in 2021. Several websites host interactive demonstrations of different instances of GPT-2 and other transformer models.


title: GPT-2

text: In February 2021, a crisis center for troubled teens announced that they would begin using a GPT-2-derived chatbot to help train counselors by allowing them to have conversations with simulated teens (this use was purely for internal purposes, and did not involve having GPT-2 communicate with the teens themselves).


title: Bizim Hikaye

text: Bizim Hikaye (English: "Our Story") is a Turkish drama series starring Burak Deniz and Hazal Kaya. It is an adaptation of the UK original series "Shameless". Its first episode (in September 2017) received more than 16 million views. The show was shot in Istanbul and ran for 70 episodes.


title: Bizim Hikaye

text: Filiz is a young girl forced to take care of her five younger siblings after her mother left the lower-class family. Her father, Fikri, is an alcoholic. Filiz believes that there is no place for love in her life until she meets Barış (real name Savaş), a young man who does anything for Filiz and her family to win her heart. Cemil, a police officer who is also in love with Filiz, finds out that Barış is a car thief and threatens him to leave if he wants Cemil to hide the truth from Filiz. After, Fikri reports to the social service group that his children are living without their parents. Social services take the children away so Filiz is forced to marry Cemil. Barış has a strained relationship with his father, who dislikes Filiz because she comes from a poor background. Ömer, a mafia leader, is revealed to be the husband of Yeliz, Filiz's older sister. Ömer secretly loves Filiz, but he comes to the neighborhood to find diamonds that Yeliz stole. Ömer and Servet join forces and send Filiz to jail. Filiz and Barış fall in love with each other, but their relationship faces a lot of challenges due to Barış's mysterious past and secretive life.


title: Bizim Hikaye

text: Filiz is released from prison and is shocked to see that Barış has disappeared. She refuses to believe this, as Barış had written her letters, but her younger brothers reveal to her that they were the ones who wrote them so that she would not worry. Filiz finds Barış in a hospital where she finds out he has a son, Savaş Junior, and a wife. Barış tells her he used her because he was tired of married life and never really loved her. Filiz is heartbroken and gets drunk. Her lawyer Selim, who is secretly in love with her, escorts her home.


title: Bizim Hikaye

text: Filiz starts a business that is coincidentally right next to Barış's office. Both of them argue as Filiz does not want to leave the area, and Barış is disturbed because of the construction in her shop. Tulay loses her twins. Meanwhile, Hikmet is in love with a pregnant girl named Zeynep. He marries her and decides to raise the child as his own. He keeps her secret when Cicek, living with Filiz after coming out of prison, finds his marriage papers, and the family finds out. Tulay decides to keep Zeynep and has a soft spot for her because she is pregnant.


title: Bizim Hikaye

text: Savaş Junior gets a heart transplant, and Barış tells Filiz the truth that he only went back to his first wife Nihal because his son was sick; Filiz and Barış reconcile. Fikri marries a rich woman named Melek, who is dying of cancer. She spoils Kiraz and Feco badly and does not monitor them at all. Kiraz starts to act spoiled and is rude to Filiz, telling her to get out of her life. Melek goes to her mother in Switzerland and later dies. Fikri and his kids are kicked out of the house, and Filiz takes them into her own home. Kiraz stands on the roof of a construction building to enter a friend's club. Filiz, who is high with fever and tired, faints. Barış proposes to her in the hospital and she accepts. Nihal threatens to imprison Filiz if Barış does not return to her but Barış fakes his death in front of Nihal and marries Filiz. Hikmet leaves the house, as he does not want Barış to live there. Merve, Barış's sister, shows up and decides to help Barış by spying on Nihal by acting as Savaş Junior's babysitter. Hikmet kidnaps a woman's child, and Barış reveals him to be bipolar. Hikmet is put in the hospital. Filiz is revealed to be pregnant. Meanwhile, Nihal discovers Barış is alive and imprisons him as Merve betrays Barış. Nihal has a brain hemorrhage, and when she gets better, she repents and moves aboard with her son.


title: Bizim Hikaye

text: Neslihan is introduced as Barış's colleague and former girlfriend. Rahmet sees Baris carrying Neslihan to a hotel and accuses him of cheating on Filiz. Filiz tells Barış to divorce her, and he agrees. Later Rahmet finds out it was a misunderstanding, and Barış carried Neslihan to her room because she was drunk, and he did not sleep with her. Filiz asks Barış to forgive her, but he refuses. Filiz goes to Barış's office to find out her baby's sex, and they welcome the news that they are having a girl. Fikri has a heart attack and claims Hikmet and his granddaughter saved him from death. He vows to become a super father. Hikmet is released from the hospital and comes to live with the Elibols. A month later, Cemil and Cicek get married as well as Rahmet and Deniz. Filiz gives birth to a baby girl. Fikri buys them all apartments for his granddaughter's arrival. A baby is left at their doorstep, which turns out to be Fikri's eighth child.


title: Bizim Hikaye

text: The idea for the project was first discussed in 2015 and its name was announced as "Utanmazlar", an adaptation of the American TV series "Shameless". "Milliyet" columnist Sina Koloğlu published an article on 16 January 2017 in which he wrote that after asking the question "How our ‘Shameless’ is going to be?" from the producer, he responded by giving examples of other Turkish adaptations and asked "Americans do it this way, well, how is it going to be for us?" The series' name was later confirmed to be "Bizim Hikaye". Director Serdar Gözelekli later stated that the series would be adapted for a Turkish audience. "Bizim Hikaye"s script was written by Hatice Meryem and Banu Kiremitçi Bozkurt.


title: Bizim Hikaye

text: Gözelekli was replaced by Koray Kerimoğlu as the series' director. Banu Kiremitçi Bozkurt, who wrote the script for the first season, left the crew, and Seray Şahiner became the series' main scriptwriter.


title: Bizim Hikaye

text: In January 2017, the first actor confirmed to join the cast was Hazal Kaya, who played Filiz Elibol. On 16 June 2017, Burak Deniz was officially cast as Savaş "Barış" Aktan. On 24 July 2017, the names of all cast members were announced; Reha Özcan joined the series in the role of family's father, Fikri Elibol, while the family's mother Şükran, was said to be portrayed by Esra Bezen Bilgin. Yağız Can Konyalı, Nejat Uygur, Zeynep Selimoğlu, Alp Akar, and Ömer Sevgi joined the cast as Fikri and Şükran's children Rahmet, Hikmet, Kiraz, Fikret, and İsmet respectively. Nilay Duru joined the series as Yeliz on episode 21. Cemal Toktaş started portraying the character Ömer from episode 26. In April 2018, Beren Gökyıldız was confirmed to join the cast in episode 29 as Ayşe. It was later announced that Ayşen Gruda would also be starring in the series from episode 32 as Yedi Bela Aysel.


title: Bizim Hikaye

text: In the second season, Sahra Şaş, Miray Akay, Murat Danacı, Melisa Döngel and Hazal Adıyaman joined the cast as Çiçek, Zeynep, Selim, Deniz and Derin respectively.


title: Bizim Hikaye

text: On 5 August 2017, the first teaser for the series was released, followed by another teaser on 22 August 2017. The first episode was broadcast on 14 September 2017 on Fox. The second season premiered on 13 September 2018.


title: Bizim Hikaye

text: Writing for "Vatan", Oya Doğan praised Gözelekli for his work on the first episode of the series, adding that he succeeded in "creating a cinematographic atmosphere." She also reacted positively to Hazal Kaya's acting, stating "While watching Filiz on the screen, I forgot [the existence of] Hazal and went deep into the story."


title: Bizim Hikaye

text: The show was aired in Pakistan on Urdu1 being dubbed in Urdu with the title "hamari kahani" ("ہماری کہانی)" (The title is a translation of the original Turkish title).


title: Bizim Hikaye

text: The series is available on an Indian OTT Platform, called MX Player dubbed in Hindi with the English title "Our Story (आवर स्टोरी)", along with several other Turkish series. The show has been immensely popularity among Indian viewers, gaining 110 million views.


title: Bizim Hikaye

text: The show began airing on Deepto TV in 2022 under the name of "Our Story" (আমাদের গল্পঃ) in Bangladesh. This show has been very popular since.


title: Emma Thompson on screen and stage

text: British actress Dame Emma Thompson has appeared in many films, television programmes and stage productions. She has won and been nominated for many awards during her career, including five Academy Award nominations (winning two), nine Golden Globe Award nominations (winning two), seven BAFTA Award nominations (winning three), and six Emmy Award nominations (winning one).


title: Emma Thompson on screen and stage

text: She first came to prominence in 1987 in two BBC TV series, "Tutti Frutti" and "Fortunes of War", winning the BAFTA TV Award for Best Actress for her work in both series. Her first film role was in the 1989 romantic comedy "The Tall Guy", and in the early 1990s, she and her then husband, actor and director Kenneth Branagh co-starred in several films, including "Dead Again" (1991) and "Much Ado About Nothing" (1993).


title: Emma Thompson on screen and stage

text: In 1992, Thompson won an Academy Award and a BAFTA Award for Best Actress for the period drama "Howards End". In 1993, she garnered dual Academy Award nominations for her roles in "The Remains of the Day" as the housekeeper of a grand household and "In the Name of the Father" as a lawyer. Thompson scripted and starred in "Sense and Sensibility" (1995), which earned her numerous awards. In 2013, she received acclaim and several award nominations for her portrayal of author P. L. Travers in "Saving Mr. Banks". Other notable film and television credits include the "Harry Potter" film series (2004–2011), "Wit" (2001), "Love Actually" (2003), "Angels in America" (2003), "Nanny McPhee" (2005), "Stranger than Fiction" (2006), "Last Chance Harvey" (2008), "Men in Black 3" (2012), "Brave" (2012), "A Walk in the Woods" (2015), "Bridget Jones's Baby" (2016), "Beauty and the Beast" (2017), "Late Night" (2019), "Years and Years" directed & written by Russell Davies (2019) and "Cruella" (2021).


title: CAIG Wing Loong II

text: The Chengdu GJ-2, also known as Wing Loong 2, is an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) capable of remotely controlled or autonomous flight developed by the Chengdu Aircraft Industry Group in the People's Republic of China. Intended for use as a surveillance and aerial reconnaissance and precision strike platform, Chengdu unveiled the concept of Wing Loong II at the Aviation Expo China in Beijing in September 2015. Wing Loong II has long range strike capability with a satellite link.


title: CAIG Wing Loong II

text: The prototype of the Wing Loong II was presented for the first time to the public during the Airshow China exhibition, held in Zhuhai from 1–6 November 2016.


title: CAIG Wing Loong II

text: Wing Loong II UAV MALE is an enlarged version of Wing Loong I with longer body and wider wing span. It has a slender fuselage, V-tail and ventral fin. The aircraft features retractable landing gear, including two main wheels under the fuselage and one single wheel under the nose. Each wing has three Hardpoints under the wings with capability of carrying bombs, rockets or air-to-surface missiles. A satellite communications antenna is situated on top front surface of the fuselage, offering long range data transmission between the UAV and the ground station.


title: CAIG Wing Loong II

text: The Wing Loong II is used by UAE to perform airstrikes against the Government of National Accord in the Libyan civil war. The GNA received 12 Bayraktar TB2s in two batches between May and July. At least half of them have been destroyed during LNA airstrikes using Wing Loong IIs; the second batch delivered in July was to replace the losses of the first. As June 2020, a total of 6 Wing Loong IIs have been reported shot down or lost in Libya, all operated by the LNA. One was allegedly shot down by a laser: if this was true then it was the first time in history that a laser weapon shot down a combat vehicle.


title: CAIG Wing Loong II

text: An investigation led by BBC Africa Eye and BBC Arabic Documentaries revealed that the UAE used Wing Loong II drones to fire Chinese Blue Arrow 7 missiles at a military academy in Libya's capital, Tripoli, in January 2020, killing 26 unarmed cadets. The drone was operated from Libya's Al-Khadim air base which has been under the control of the UAE.


title: CAIG Wing Loong II

text: During the 2021 Henan floods, because of the interruption of communication in some areas due to flooding, Ministry of Emergency Management dispatched its emergency disaster-response Chengdu Wing Loong II (Wing Loong 2H) to the corresponding areas, and carried out nearly 6 hours of ground reconnaissance and communication relay services.


title: Gun laws in California

text: Gun laws in California regulate the sale, possession, and use of firearms and ammunition in the state of California in the United States.