title: Mis-Teeq

text: Returning from a short hiatus, Mis-Teeq released their second album, "Eye Candy" on 29 March 2003. The album featured production by Stargate, Ed Case, Salaam Remi, singer Joe, Delroy "D-Roy" Andrews and Jermaine Dupri and debuted at its peak position of number 6 on the UK Albums Chart While "Eye Candy"'s sales failed to link on the sudden success of "Lickin' on Both Sides", pre-released lead single "Scandalous" became the group's most successful single by then: It reached number 2 in the UK and top 10 in Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, and Denmark.


title: Mis-Teeq

text: In June 2003, the album's second single "Can't Get It Back" became the band's seventh and final domestic top ten single. Originally a remake of the same-titled unreleased Blaque single from 2002, Mis-Teeq and Telstar agreed not to use album version, instead releasing the alternate "Ignorants Radio Edit" as an official single version which entered the UK charts at number 8 on 12 July 2003. The song also was included on a Special Edition of "Eye Candy" which was released in December of the same year and spawned a third single with "Style". The song peaked at number 13.


title: Mis-Teeq

text: "Scandalous" was released in the US in May 2004 (under another label, Reprise Records) and reached number 35 on the "Billboard" Hot 100 chart in June, making it their only single to chart in the US. The song was featured as the theme of the film "Catwoman", starring Halle Berry, in Summer 2004.


title: Mis-Teeq

text: Also in 2004, Mis-Teeq began touring the US. After appearing on television shows such as Jimmy Kimmel, Pepsi smash and Carson Daly, the girls had built up their fan base. Unfortunately in 2005, the demise of their record label Telstar left Mis-Teeq in a situation where they were unsure of where to go or what to do next. Following the major release of their third album "Mis-Teeq" and the single "Scandalous" in 2004, the band's record label Telstar Records went bankrupt.


title: Mis-Teeq

text: After the announcement of their split in 2005, they released a compilation album, "Greatest Hits", containing a new track, a cover of the Andrews Sisters 1940s song "Shoo Shoo Baby", and they were awarded a 2005 Soul Train Lady of Soul Nomination for Best R&B/Soul Album - Group, Band or Duo for their album "Mis-Teeq".


title: Mis-Teeq

text: On 9 February 2011, it was reported that the group were in talks to reform for a comeback tour but this was denied by Dixon. Two years later, Dixon said that she would never rule out a reunion. In September 2014, Su-Elise stated in an interview with "Fashion Plus Magazine" that the group were in talks and were working on a reunion album.


title: Mis-Teeq

text: Alesha Dixon was the group's rapper, singer and joined in 1999, alongside Washington. She would also frequently take on second lead vocals on the group's records. However, she was best known for her distinct sounding rapping voice and usually sung live in performances for the group. Following the group's split, Dixon went on to embark on a highly successful solo career, releasing four studio albums to date and appearing on TV—firstly as a winning competitor and then as a judge on "Strictly Come Dancing" and currently on "Britain's Got Talent". As well as "Strictly Come Dancing", "Walk the Line" and "Britain's Got Talent", Dixon also hosts "Alesha's Street Dance Stars" on CBBC.


title: Mis-Teeq

text: Su-Elise Nash, who joined the group in 1999, was the group's backing singer. Her vocals were rarely heard on the group's records. However, she added a lower register vocal to many of the group's harmonies, contributing to the group's sound. She was also a rapper, but only rapped on two of the group's records. Following the group's split, Nash has stayed out of the public eye and opened her own performing arts school after finishing her studies and earning a teaching qualifications.


title: Mis-Teeq

text: Sabrina Washington was the group's lead singer and joined the group in 1999 alongside Dixon. Sabrina had a very strong voice and would also rap on occasion. Following the group's split, Washington appeared on "I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here!" in 2010, and launched her solo career the same year. As of 2013, Washington was working on her debut solo album.


title: Mis-Teeq

text: Zena McNally joined the group in 1999 and released only one single with the group before leaving in 2001, owing to wanting to pursue her own solo career. She released two solo singles in 2003, and worked as a radio presenter; she is mostly known for co-presenting on BBC Radio 1Xtra. McNally now resides in the United States with her husband Cory Gibbs.


title: Boot (torture)

text: The term boot refers to a family of instruments of torture and interrogation variously designed to cause crushing injuries to the foot and/or leg. The boot has taken many forms in various places and times. Common varieties include the Spanish boot (sometimes referred to as "scarpines") and the Malay boot. One type was made of four pieces of narrow wooden board nailed together. The boards were measured to fit the victim's leg. Once the leg was enclosed, wedges would be hammered between the boards, creating pressure. The pressure would be increased until the victim confessed or lost consciousness. Newer variants have included iron vises—sometimes armed with spikes—that squeezed feet and metal frames employed red-hot. John Spreul is reported to have been tortured with two different boots. In general, the boot was a mechanically-clever torture device and was widely employed throughout Europe to extract information.


title: Boot (torture)

text: The Spanish boot was an iron casing for the leg and foot. Wood or iron wedges were hammered in between the casing and the victim's flesh. A similar device, commonly referred to as a shin crusher, squeezed the calf between two curved iron plates, studded with spikes, teeth, and knobs, to fracture the tibia and fibula.


title: Boot (torture)

text: Primitive forerunners of the archetype can be found dating back as far as a thousand years. The first Scottish effort, also referred to as a buskin, made use of a vaguely boot-shaped rawhide garment that was soaked with water, drawn over the foot and lower leg, and bound in place with cords. The contraption was slowly heated over a gentle fire, drastically contracting the rawhide and squeezing the foot until the bones were dislocated, though there would not have been sufficient pressure to actually crush the bones of the foot. A more progressive variant, found in both the British Isles and France, consisted of a trio of upright wooden boards that splinted around and between the feet, fundamentally identical to the Chinese foot torture known as "Jiagun", and were tied in place by cords. Wedges were hammered between the boards and the feet to dislocate and crush the bones. Even ancient India saw the use of the "kittee", a simplistic wooden machine, resembling a lemon press, within which the bare foot was slowly squeezed. A prototype hailing from Autun, France, consisted of high boots of spongy, porous leather that were drawn over the feet and legs. Boiling water was poured over the boots, eventually soaking through the leather and eating the flesh away from the entrapped limbs. Lastly, oversized boots of iron or copper (often soldered in place on the floor) received the prisoner's bare feet as he lay helplessly bound and gagged in a chair. The boots were slowly filled with boiling water or oil, or even molten lead, to consume the feet and legs. One variant—applied in Ireland to the martyr Dermot O'Hurley—consisted of lightweight metal boots that were filled with cool water and heated with the feet inside over a fire until the water boiled aggressively.


title: Boot (torture)

text: The Malay boot figures prominently in the movie "China Seas", in which the protagonist, portrayed by Clark Gable, is subjected to this cruel torture. The instrument splints the foot and ankle between a pair of vertical boards made of strong wood or metal. The members are vaguely boot shaped and completely enclose the prisoner's instep and toes. A crank is turned to close the uprights around the foot, squeezing the entrapped foot to first grind the metatarsal heads together and eventually inflict sufficient pressure to shatter bones. Curiously, in the movie, Clark Gable's character is tortured while wearing a sock: in actuality, the torture was applied to the naked foot.


title: Boot (torture)

text: A similar implement, the "foot press", consisted of a pair of horizontal iron plates slowly tightened around the bare foot by means of a crank mechanism, squeezing the foot with sufficient force to pulverize the bones. Although it was quite standard to line the lower plate with ribs to prevent the foot from popping out of the grip of the instrument as it became sweatier, a crueler variant of this device—typically encountered in Nuremberg, Germany—lined the upper plate with hundreds of sharp spikes. A version from Venice, sometimes called the "foot screw" or "toe breaker", connected the crank mechanism to a drill that slowly mutilated the foot by boring a hole through the center of the instep as the press was tightened. The "toe breaker" from Nuremberg was a wider instrument that accommodated both feet, side by side, simultaneously applying inexorable crushing pressure to all ten toes. Were the prisoner particularly stubborn or strong-willed, the press could be tightened until the plates met, so grinding the foot bones to powder.


title: Boot (torture)

text: Medieval boots were built according to a wide array of architectures. One commonly encountered boot consisted fundamentally of a pair of upright parallel boards that splinted the toes. Turning the screw squeezed the toes between the boards, inflicting lateral pressure on the metatarsal heads and causing agony. Curling the toes over the edge of the boot—typically on pain of being blinded with a dagger—gave the device a stronger grip on the metatarsal heads, thereby enabling the application of maximum pressure and pain. This is the type of boot commonly associated with the torture of Esmeralda in Victor Hugo's "Hunchback of Notre-Dame". Hollywood went out of its way to present exotic, even bizarre, boots that were short on historical accuracy, one of which was little more than dissociated spiked plates lying here and there. The cruelty of the torture could be increased by spacing the toes apart with stiff wooden pegs. Various extensions of the instrument were designed to crush the ankle, calf, or knee in addition to its primary target, the instep. The toes often protruded from the front of the boot, facilitating the infliction of ancillary tortures, such as forcibly tearing the nails from the toes with red-hot pincers or exploring the delicate webbing between the toes with a red-hot iron probe. This type of boot, also called the "brodequin", seems to have been the commonest torture device in France. An alternative "boot" of streamlined design, into which the bare foot was locked with an iron pin, squeezed the toes between iron bars until their bones were fractured. A hinged variant cheaply manufactured from cast iron was used to torture slaves in colonial America. Toe bones were also routinely crushed with mallets, sometimes by cruelly hammering sharp wooden wedges into the tips.


title: Boot (torture)

text: In "The Big Book of Pain", Donnelly and Diehl present an ingenious and diabolical iron torture boot. The configurable device completely encloses the naked foot. The roomy toe box is filled with iron spikes, teeth, and burs. A vertical plate behind the prisoner's heel fits into a grooved track and can be forced forward by turning a wheel. The steadily increasing pressure first forces the toes against the spikes, mangling their flesh and crushing their bones. Under continued inexorable pressure, the bones of the instep eventually give way until the arch of the foot is shattered. The heel bone is sufficiently powerful to withstand the torture, although the heel is not generously provided with afferent pain nociceptors. Another variation occasionally seen (Scott, 1991) is a compartment beneath the sole of the prisoner's foot that can be filled with red-hot coals.


title: Girl (2018 film)

text: Girl is a 2018 drama film directed by Lukas Dhont, in his feature debut. It was written by Dhont and Angelo Tijssens and stars Victor Polster, in his acting debut, as a trans girl who pursues a career as a ballerina.


title: Girl (2018 film)

text: The film screened in the "Un Certain Regard" section at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Caméra d'Or award, for best first feature film, as well as the Queer Palm, and Polster won the Un Certain Regard Jury Award for Best Performance. It was selected as the Belgian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 91st Academy Awards, although it did not make the December shortlist. It received nine nominations at the 9th Magritte Awards and won four, including Best Screenplay and Best Actor for Polster.


title: Girl (2018 film)

text: "Girl" was inspired by Nora Monsecour, a trans female dancer from Belgium, whom Dhont met when he was 18 and she was 15. While initially praised by critics, the film was criticised by some trans and queer writers for its depiction of gender dysphoria and self-harm. Monsecour, who collaborated with Dhont and Tijssens on the film, has defended the film in response.


title: Girl (2018 film)

text: Lara Verhaeghen is a fifteen year old transgender girl and aspiring professional ballerina. She applies to a prestigious ballet school in Antwerp, and upon acceptance (contingent on her performance during an eight week trial), she moves to be closer to the school, with her supportive francophone father, Mathias, and younger brother, Milo. During this transitional time, Lara is speaking to doctors about her gender dysphoria, taking puberty blockers and regularly sees a psychiatrist, who is also supportive.


title: Girl (2018 film)

text: Lara performs well in school, and, despite the public knowledge that she is transgender, her classmates accept her, including using the girls' locker room, but she always uses a private restroom. Against advice, she tucks her penis with tape during practices. Lara's body endures more pain as she trains extensively. Nevertheless, her dedication to ballet and to her external appearance reflecting her gender identity motivate her. Six year old Milo, however, does not adjust as well. Lara is supportive, and not only gets him ready and takes him to school each day but checks in on him from afar.


title: Girl (2018 film)

text: Time passes, and the doctors are ready to begin Lara's sex reassignment surgery. Although the full process will take two years, Lara eagerly signs the consent documents. Speaking to her psychiatrist later, she states that she does not want to date until she has the "right body". Her psychiatrist, however, tells her to enjoy her puberty as a teenager.


title: Girl (2018 film)

text: Although she begins hormone replacement therapy in preparation for her surgery, Lara's body does not change fast enough for her. One night, at a sleepover, some classmates bully her, but she leaves and goes home. She finds her father having dinner with his new girlfriend, and tells him she has returned because she has a stomach ache. Matthias does not pressure but brings it up on the way to the doctor the next day. At the appointment, the doctor notes that Lara has lost weight and has a genital infection, and tells Lara that she must stop taping and gain weight, because she has to be physically strong for the operation. Lara insists that she is fine, but her father disagrees.


title: Girl (2018 film)

text: After a near breakdown in class, Lara finds comfort with a boy in her building, who has shown interest in her. While she kisses him and he kisses back, she prevents him from touching her, and begins to perform oral sex on him but flees. Returning home, Lara instigates an argument with Matthias, who tries to be understanding but Lara refuses to open up.


title: Girl (2018 film)

text: Studio rehearsals are over and the students move to their first stage practice. Lara barely finishes, then collapses from exhaustion backstage. The next day, she wakes late and tries to leave, but when her father says she hasn't eaten, Lara lashes out and breaks down in tears. Later, at the doctor's office, her doctors tell her that she must stop dancing and regain her strength, otherwise, she will not be able to have the surgery, which is delayed.


title: Girl (2018 film)

text: At a family dinner some time later, Lara seems better. Some guests comment on how gorgeous she looks in her new dress, and later, she falls asleep cradling Milo. The next day, Matthias takes her coffee in bed before leaving for work and to drop off Milo at school. Lara prepares a bowl of ice, calls emergency services and mutilates her penis with a pair of scissors. Matthias stays at her side in the ambulance and at her bedside. In the final scene, a recovered Lara, with shorter hair, walks determinedly down a street.


title: Girl (2018 film)

text: The film was inspired by Nora Monsecour, a professional dancer and trans woman from Belgium. In 2009, Dhont, then 18 and a newly enrolled film student, read a newspaper article about Monsecour's request to her ballet school that she take the girls' class so she could learn "en pointe" skills. Unlike the protagonist of the film, Monsecour was not accepted to the girls' class, and since shifted her focus from ballet to contemporary dance. Dhont approached Monsecour to make a documentary about her, which she declined. Instead, he then went on to write a fictional narrative film with her and Tijssens, although Monsecour remained uncredited at her wish. Dhont consulted Monsecour, other transgender people and medical professionals for the film. Doctors at Ghent University Hospital, where Monsecour had been a patient, advised against casting a trans girl because she would be in a sensitive period of her transition.


title: Girl (2018 film)

text: The casting for the lead role was done with no regard to the actors' gender. After failing to find an actor who could both dance and act to their satisfaction among the 500 people aged between 14 and 17 who auditioned (six of whom were trans female), the filmmakers began casting the rest of the dancers who would appear in the film. It was in this group casting process that they found Polster. Monsecour was involved in the casting of Polster and was present on set during the filming. Polster took three months of voice training and of dance practices with pointe shoes. The filming involved nude scenes of Polster, then 14, with his parents' consent. The crew took particular care not to show his face and lower body in the same shot. Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, artistic director of the Royal Ballet of Flanders, served as choreographer.


title: Girl (2018 film)

text: "Girl" premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival on 12 May 2018. In May 2018, Netflix acquired the rights to the film for North America and Latin America. While Netflix originally planned to release the film on its platform on 18 January 2019, the release was pushed back to 15 March 2019. Netflix released the film with a warning card, which read, "This film covers sensitive issues, and includes some sexual content, graphic nudity, and an act of self-harm", with a link to a website providing information about The Trevor Project's suicide hotline.


title: Girl (2018 film)

text: On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of , based on reviews, and an average rating of . The site's critical consensus reads, ""Girl" uses one aspiring dancer's story as the framework for a poignant drama that approaches its difficult themes with fittingly alluring grace." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 73 out of 100, based on 15 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".


title: Girl (2018 film)

text: David Ehrlich of IndieWire called the film "arrestingly empathetic" and gave the film a grade of B+, while expressing a concern over the casting of the cisgender male actor for the role of a trans woman. Peter Debruge of "Variety" praised Polster's performance and called the film "an intuitively accessible look at a gender nonconforming teenager trying to find the courage to be herself". Boyd van Hoeij of "The Hollywood Reporter" praised the film's reliance on visuals and editing rather than dialogue, while raising concern about the casting and nudity, which he nonetheless found to be "a logical choice".


title: Girl (2018 film)

text: Wendy Ide of "Screen International" called the film "assured and empathetic", saying, "There is a compassion and intimacy to Dhont's approach to gender issues which evokes the work of Céline Sciamma, particularly in "Tomboy"." Steve Pond of TheWrap described the film as "a quiet movie until it isn't, a gentle character study that goes into extreme territory, a wrenching drama that you think is about finding acceptance until it threatens to become about the impossibility of that very thing", and wrote, "by the end, this quiet movie goes to a place of horrific pain and desperation. ... Dhont manages to find the briefest of grace notes in its aftermath".


title: Girl (2018 film)

text: Kimber Myers of the "Los Angeles Times" wrote that the cinematography which focuses on the protagonist's body "feels exploitative, rather than empathetic", and that "it's the irresponsible handling of the film's final, shocking scenes that is the most problematic". Myers concluded, "Dhont's film is a strong debut from a technical angle, but it lacks the humanity necessary for a story of this nature".


title: Girl (2018 film)

text: "Girl" has been met with criticism from some trans and queer writers, particularly in regard to its depiction of gender dysphoria and self-harm.


title: Girl (2018 film)

text: Matthew Rodriguez of the "Into" magazine wrote, "the film is bloody and obsessed with trans bodies in a way that reminds us that a cisgender person wrote and directed it. It's trans trauma porn and, as a cisgender person, I'm warning trans people not to watch it and cis people not to fall for it", and that the shots of the cisgender male actor Polster's genitalia "convey a creepy, voyeuristic obsession with Lara's body that never loses its ick factor. ... Rather than uplifting Lara, the film almost seems to want to humiliate her and lament her struggle." Rodriguez also criticised the casting of Polster despite the character being supposed to be on puberty blockers: "young trans girls on blockers don't look like feminine or androgynous boys—they look like girls. Lara has started taking estrogen, and she is frustrated because her breasts haven't developed. Hormones affect more than breasts, yet the film focuses on breasts and the vagina as the sole things that make a trans girl a girl", while acknowledging some aspects of the film, such as the relationship between Lara and her father and the microaggressions she faces, as "well-wrought".


title: Girl (2018 film)

text: On the British Film Institute's website, trans female critic Cathy Brennan wrote, "Dhont's camera dwells on the teenage Lara's crotch with a troubling fascination throughout the entire runtime. ... The camera's gaze in "Girl" belongs to that of a cis person. It fits comfortably into the way cis audiences see people like me. They may smile to my face while wondering what's between my legs." In regard to the ending of the film in which the protagonist mutilates her penis, Brennan wrote, "It's a scene of severe trauma that the film has not earned the right to depict. Dhont's portrayal of gender dysphoria is so focused on the genitals that he offers no insight into the psychological facets of trans girl's psychology. To reduce it down to this one act of self-mutilation is cinematic barbarism."


title: Girl (2018 film)

text: Writing for "The Hollywood Reporter", Oliver Whitney, who identifies as trans masculine, described "Girl" as "the most dangerous movie about a trans character in years". Whitney criticised the film's "disturbing fascination with trans bodies", writing, "Lara's genitals, shown in multiple full-frontal nude shots of Polster's penis, have a bigger presence throughout "Girl" and are central to more plot points than the character herself. ... What could have been a thoughtful exploration of a difficult part of a trans girl's daily life instead uses her body as a site of trauma, inviting the audience to react with disgust. Much like the cisgender characters who continually silence Lara and tell her how to feel, the director shows no interest in understanding her internal struggles." Whitney identified the depiction of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) to be the film's largest issue, writing that it "sends the inaccurate message that HRT will cause a trans person more agony" and is "outrageously irresponsible filmmaking", and concluded with a call for further inclusion of transgender people in the film industry, which in his opinion would have prevented the film from getting as much acclaim.


title: Girl (2018 film)

text: Tre' Anderson of the "Out" magazine also condemned the film's depiction of self-mutilation and lack of "substantive participation of trans voices". GLAAD posted quotations from these critics on Twitter, warning to "read what trans and queer critics are saying". GLAAD also sent out an email asking recipients to attend screenings and share articles critical of the film on social media in order to promote inclusion in the industry. In North America, the lack of early access to the film for critics not in major cities or in award-giving circles was criticised as consequentially diminishing and delaying opportunities for queer critics to voice their opinions.


title: Girl (2018 film)

text: The film was also met with criticism from the trans community in Belgium and France. The critics found the film to be fixated on physical, especially genital, aspects of transitioning when, according to Camille Pier, project manager at Brussels association network RainbowHouse, other factors such as administrative complications, environment, respect to human rights, and being a minor can pose more pressing problems. Researcher Héloïse Guimin-Fati described the film as having a "cis-centred" and "terribly masculine" vision, and said that "the character of Lara became an object when she should have been the subject of the film". They also found the film's emphasis on the protagonist's suffering and isolation and her not seeking help from the trans community despite having a supportive father and living in modern Belgium incongruous and perpetuating stereotypes. Londé Ngosso, director of Belgian organisation Genres Pluriels, said, "This does not take into account the reality of the country, social networks, the commitment of young people, all of the work we've done for eleven years. It makes us invisible instead of putting us forward."


title: Girl (2018 film)

text: In response to the criticism, Nora Monsecour, the dancer who inspired the film, defended the film in "The Hollywood Reporter", writing, ""Girl" is not a representation of all transgender experiences, but rather a retelling of experiences that I faced during my journey. ... "Girl" tells my story in a way that doesn't lie, doesn't hide. To argue that Lara's experience as trans is not valid because Lukas is cis or because we have a cis lead actor offends me." In a subsequent interview with IndieWire, Monsecour repeated that she was "offended", saying, "My story is not a fantasy of the cis director. Lara's story is my story." She also stated that she viewed the self-mutilation at the end of the film as "a metaphor for suicidal thoughts or dark thoughts that are taking over, which I experienced myself", and that it was "crucial to show", adding, "The scene should not be interpreted [as] encouraging trans youth to cut certain body parts off themselves. That is not the message. The message is to show that these things are a result of dark thoughts, [which] are the result of the struggle that we face." In another interview, Monsecour told "The New York Times", "The words people have used to describe "Girl" came close to my heart because the scenes they are criticizing are scenes that I had in mind during my transition. To criticize Lukas for portraying those things made me think, am I the only person who had suicidal thoughts or was bodily focused?"


title: Girl (2018 film)

text: Dhont responded to the criticism by saying, "We wanted to show this young trans girl in the world of the ballet, which is very binary, and her struggling with that. ... Not everyone can always like everything. I really am someone who wants to see trans directors directing trans stories, and someone that wants to see trans actors playing trans parts, any part. But let's not fight for inclusion by the tool of exclusion. Let's fight for inclusion by having everyone at the table."


title: Girl (2018 film)

text: Writing for "The Advocate", Ann Thomas, the founder of a trans talent agency, defended the film, attributing the casting of the cis male actor to the lack of young trans actors working in Europe at the time of the pre-production, and described the film's portrayals as accurate. Non-binary dancer Chase Johnsey found the film's focus on the protagonist's physicality to be consistent with his experience as a ballet dancer, and said, "The struggles that trans and gender-fluid people often have in the ballet world are with their body, because it's a body-oriented art form." Phia Ménard, a French transgender director and performer, also found the film consistent with her experience, and the self-mutilation in the film comparable to teenage suicidal impulse.


title: Girl (2018 film)

text: Netflix was reported to be working with GLAAD and considering adding a warning to accompany the film, which Dhont has said he would endorse. In January 2019, "The New York Times" reported that Netflix had reached out to organisations for suggestions on how to word the warning. In December 2018, Netflix organised a screening of the film in Los Angeles to which queer and trans people were invited.


title: Prudhoe Bay, Alaska

text: Prudhoe Bay is a census-designated place (CDP) located in North Slope Borough in the U.S. state of Alaska. As of the 2010 census, the population of the CDP was 2,174 people, up from just five residents in the 2000 census; however, at any given time, several thousand transient workers support the Prudhoe Bay oil field. The airport, lodging and general store are located in Deadhorse, and the rigs and processing facilities are located on scattered gravel pads laid atop the tundra. It is only during winter that the surface is hard enough to support heavy equipment, and new construction happens at that time.


title: Prudhoe Bay, Alaska

text: Prudhoe Bay is the unofficial northern terminus of the Pan-American Highway. As the bay itself is still 10 miles further north through a security checkpoint, open water is not visible from the highway. A few tourists, arriving by bus after a two-day ride up the Dalton Highway from Fairbanks, come to see the tundra, the Arctic Ocean and the midnight sun, staying in lodgings assembled from modular buildings. Tours must be arranged in advance to see the Arctic Ocean and the bay itself.


title: Prudhoe Bay, Alaska

text: Prudhoe Bay was named in 1826 by British explorer Sir John Franklin after his classmate Captain Algernon Percy, Baron Prudhoe. Franklin traveled westerly along the coast from the mouth of the Mackenzie River in Canada almost to Point Barrow.


title: Prudhoe Bay, Alaska

text: According to the United States Census Bureau, the CDP has a total area of of which, is land and is water. The total area is 25.40% water.


title: Prudhoe Bay, Alaska

text: Prudhoe Bay, along with similar communities on the North Slope of Alaska, features a tundra climate (Köppen "ET"). Winters are long and frigid, and because the area is above the Arctic Circle, the sun does not rise during several weeks of each winter. Summers bring long daylight hours, with 24 hours of daylight during some summer weeks, but are still cool, being mostly between and sometimes dropping to the freezing point.


title: Prudhoe Bay, Alaska

text: Prudhoe Bay first appeared on the 1970 U.S. Census as an unincorporated village. It was made a census-designated place (CDP) in 1980.


title: Prudhoe Bay, Alaska

text: As of the 2010 United States Census, there were 2,174 people living in the CDP. The racial makeup of the CDP was 83.0% White, 1.9% Black, 7.5% Native American, 1.5% Asian, 0.1% Pacific Islander, 0.3% from some other race and 1.6% from two or more races. 4.0% were Hispanic or Latino of any race.


title: Prudhoe Bay, Alaska

text: Prudhoe Bay is classified as an isolated town/sub-regional center. It is found in EMS Region 6A in the North Slope Region. Emergency services have limited highway, coastal and airport access. Emergency service is provided by a paid emergency medical services unit and Fairweather Deadhorse Medical Clinic. Auxiliary health care is provided by oil company medical staff and the Greater Prudhoe Bay Fire Dept. Individuals requiring hospital care are usually transported to the nearest hospital/medical center, Sammuel Simmonds Memorial Hospital, in Utqiaġvik. Because no roads connect Prudhoe Bay to Utqiaġvik, patients are transported by helicopter or air ambulance (a flight of approximately 45 minutes).


title: Navy Distinguished Service Medal

text: The Navy Distinguished Service Medal is a military decoration of the United States Navy and United States Marine Corps which was first created in 1919 and is presented to sailors and Marines to recognize distinguished and exceptionally meritorious service to the United States while serving in a duty or position of great responsibility.


title: Navy Distinguished Service Medal

text: Navy Distinguished Service Medal is equivalent to the Army's Distinguished Service Medal, Air Force and Space Force's Air Force Distinguished Service Medal, and the Coast Guard Distinguished Service Medal. The Navy Distinguished Service Medal was originally senior to the Navy Cross, until August 1942 when the precedence of the two decorations was reversed. Currently, it is worn after the Defense Distinguished Service Medal and before the Silver Star Medal.


title: Navy Distinguished Service Medal

text: At the start of World War I, the Department of the Navy had the Medal of Honor as the only decoration with which to recognize heroism. To recognize acts deserving recognition, but at a level below that required for the Medal of Honor, the Navy Distinguished Service Medal and the Navy Cross were created by on 4 February 1919. The law made the award retroactive to 6 April 1917. The first award of the decoration was a posthumous presentation to Brigadier General Charles A. Doyen, USMC, on 13 March 1919. Originally senior in precedence to the Navy Cross, the Navy Distinguished Service Medal assumed its current place below the Navy Cross by Congressional action on 7 August 1942.


title: Navy Distinguished Service Medal

text: The Navy Distinguished Service Medal is bestowed upon members of the Navy or Marine Corps who distinguish themselves by exceptionally meritorious service to the United States government in a duty of great responsibility. To justify this decoration, exceptional performance of duty must be clearly above that normally expected, and contributes to the success of a major command or project. Generally, the Distinguished Service Medal is awarded to officers in principal commands at sea, or in the field, whose service is of a manner to justify the award. However, this does not preclude the award of the Navy Distinguished Service Medal to any individual who meets the service requirements. The term "great responsibility" implies senior military responsibility, and the decoration is normally only bestowed to senior Navy flag officers and Marine Corps general officers, or extremely senior enlisted positions such as the Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy or the Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps. In rare instances, it has also been awarded to Navy captains and Marine Corps colonels, typically those in positions of significant responsibility in direct support of senior flag and general officers, and then only by exception (usually at retirement).


title: Navy Distinguished Service Medal

text: The Navy Distinguished Service Medal is a gilt bronze medallion in diameter. The obverse of the medal depicts an American bald eagle in the center displaying its wings. The eagle holds an olive branch in its right talon and arrows in its left talons. The eagle is surrounded by a blue enameled ring with the words, "• UNITED • STATES • OF • AMERICA •" at the top and "• NAVY •" at the bottom. Surrounding the blue enamel ring is a gold border of scroll waves depicted moving in a clockwise direction. The medal is surmounted by a white five-pointed star, point up, the points of the star being tipped with gold balls. In the center of the star is a blue anchor, while gold rays radiate between the arms of the star.


title: Navy Distinguished Service Medal

text: The reverse of the medal depicts a trident surrounded by a laurel wreath. The wreath is surrounded by a blue enamel ring containing the inscription "FOR DISTINGUISHED SERVICE". Like the obverse, the blue enamel ring on the reverse is surrounded by scroll waves.


title: Navy Distinguished Service Medal

text: The medal's suspension and service ribbon is navy blue with a single central stripe of yellow. Additional awards of the Navy Distinguished Service Medal are denoted by gold and silver 5/16 inch stars worn on the medal's suspension and service ribbon.


title: Randi Weingarten

text: Randi Weingarten (born December 18, 1957) is an American labor leader, attorney, and educator. She is president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and a member of the AFL–CIO. She is the former president of the United Federation of Teachers.


title: Randi Weingarten

text: Rhonda "Randi" Weingarten was born in 1957 in New York City, to a Jewish family, Gabriel and Edith (Appelbaum) Weingarten. Her father was an electrical engineer and her mother a teacher. Weingarten grew up in Rockland County, New York, and attended Clarkstown High School North in New City, New York. A congregant of Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, she considers herself a deeply religious Jew.


title: Randi Weingarten

text: Weingarten's interest in trade unions and political advocacy was formed during childhood. Her mother's union went on a seven-week strike when Weingarten was in the eleventh grade. Under New York state's Taylor Law, her mother could have been fired for taking part in a strike. Instead, she was fined two days' pay for every day she was on strike. Later that year, the school board cut $2 million from the budget. Weingarten and several other students convinced the school board to let them conduct a survey regarding the impact of the cuts. The survey led several school board members to change their minds, and rescind the cuts.


title: Randi Weingarten

text: From 1979 to 1980, Weingarten was a legislative assistant for the Labor Committee of the New York State Senate. She received a B.S. degree in labor relations from the ILR School at Cornell University in 1980 and a J.D. degree from the Yeshiva University Cardozo School of Law in 1983.


title: Randi Weingarten

text: Weingarten worked as a lawyer for the firm of Stroock & Stroock & Lavan from 1983 to 1986, where she handled several acrimonious arbitration cases on behalf of the UFT. She was appointed an adjunct instructor at the Cardozo School of Law in 1986. She also worked as an attorney in the real estate department of Wien Malkin and Bettex.


title: Randi Weingarten

text: In 1986, Weingarten became counsel to Sandra Feldman, then-president of the UFT. Weingarten handled high-level grievances for the union. She was also lead counsel for the union in a number of lawsuits against New York City and the state of New York over school funding and school safety. By the early 1990s, she was the union's primary negotiator in UFT contract negotiations. Her negotiating positions became more aggressive throughout the 1990s.


title: Randi Weingarten

text: From 1991 to 1997 she taught at Clara Barton High School in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. The classes she taught included Law, Ethical Issues in Medicine, AP Political Science, and US History and Government. Weingarten was one of the coaches of students that competed in the We the People civics competition that won the New York state championship in 1994–95 and fourth in the national championship.


title: Randi Weingarten

text: Elected the UFT's treasurer in 1997, Weingarten succeeded Sandra Feldman as president of the union a year later when Feldman was elected president of the national American Federation of Teachers. Weingarten was elected a Vice President of the AFT the same year.


title: Randi Weingarten

text: Weingarten was reelected by consistently wide margins after her initial appointment in 1998. The local union's constitution required her to run for the UFT presidency within a year of her appointment. She received 74 percent of the vote against two opponents in 1999, and served the final two years of Feldman's term. She ran in 2001 for a full term and was re-elected. She won her third full three-year term with more than 88 percent of the vote, despite having two opposing candidates. On March 30, 2007, Weingarten won reelection to a fourth term as UFT President, garnering 87 percent of the vote.


title: Randi Weingarten

text: Weingarten stepped down from her post as president of the United Federation of Teachers on July 31, 2009. An opinion piece in the "New York Post" on January 16, 2011, characterized Weingarten's final paycheck from the UFT—which included payments for unused vacation days and sick time—as a $194,188 "golden parachute."


title: Randi Weingarten

text: Weingarten began negotiating her first contract as UFT president in 2000. Talks with the Giuliani administration began in early September 2000, but the contract expired on November 15, 2000, without a new agreement. By March 2001, the talks deadlocked and a state mediator was called in. Talks collapsed again on June 5, and Weingarten asked for state arbitration.


title: Randi Weingarten

text: To pressure Giuliani, Weingarten endorsed Alan Hevesi in the Democratic primary. In the run-off between Green and Ferrer, Weingarten endorsed Ferrer, who lost to Green. Michael Bloomberg defeated Green in the November 2001 election. Weingarten demanded a 22 percent wage hike; Giuliani offered 8 percent. Talks collapsed on March 9, and Weingarten began preparing the UFT for its first strike since the early 1970s. In the state arbitration panel's mid-April report, it advocated a major salary boost and a longer work week. Both sides agreed to a new collective bargaining agreement in June, raising wages 16 to 22 percent and lengthening the work week by 100 minutes.


title: Randi Weingarten

text: The UFT's contract expired on May 31, 2003. Once again, negotiations proved contentious. In January 2004, New York City School Chancellor Joel Klein proposed a merit-pay deal; in February, Mayor Bloomberg proposed replacing the union's 200-page contract with an 8-page set of guidelines. Weingarten rejected these proposals, and asked for state mediation in late March 2004. In May, Weingarten agreed to discuss merit pay. The union began a public-relations campaign featuring subway and television ads demanding a contract and held protests and marches. On June 1, 2005, nearly 20,000 teachers—about a quarter of the UFT membership—packed Madison Square Garden for a rally at which Weingarten denounced Bloomberg and Klein, asked for a strike vote, and requested state arbitration. Contract talks resumed in August and September. A tentative contract was reached on October 3, 2005. The union won a wage increase of 14.25 percent over 52 months, retroactive to June 1, 2003. Other changes include a slightly longer workday (with the extra time devoted to tutoring) and the elimination of union control over some staffing decisions. The contract, ratified on November 3, 2005, passed with just 63 percent of UFT members in favor.


title: Randi Weingarten

text: Weingarten concluded her third collective bargaining agreement on November 6, 2006, when the union and city reached a tentative deal to increase pay by 7.1 percent over two years. The agreement raised base pay for senior teachers above $100,000 a year, bringing city salaries in line with those in New York City's suburbs for the first time. The city did not seek any increases in the work day or work load or any other concessions, as it had with other unions. Negotiations over health benefits were to be conducted separately in talks with the Municipal Labor Committee, an umbrella group for municipal unions which Weingarten chairs.


title: Randi Weingarten

text: Observers said Bloomberg sought an early contract in order to win UFT support in his struggle with Governor Eliot Spitzer over school funding. In October 2007, Weingarten assented to two agreements whereby the city and the UFT would jointly seek legislative approval for a new pension deal allowing teachers with 25 years of service to retire at age 55 and providing bonuses to all teachers in schools that showed a certain level of improvement in student achievement. In June 2009, Weingarten negotiated some pension modifications for new teachers in exchange for maintaining the age 55 pension and for allowing teachers to return to their traditional post-Labor Day start date.


title: Randi Weingarten

text: In 2003, Weingarten sold the UFT's headquarters at 260 Park Avenue South and two other buildings at 48 and 49 East 21st Street for $63.6 million and moved the union's offices to Lower Manhattan, purchasing a building at 50 Broadway for $53.75 million and leasing the building next to it, 52 Broadway, for 32 years. The UFT also financed a $40 million renovation of both buildings.


title: Randi Weingarten

text: The UFT represents all teachers, paraprofessional school employees, and professionals (such as school nurses, school psychologists, and others) in the New York City schools. The UFT saw some membership growth under Weingarten among these workers.


title: Randi Weingarten

text: The UFT also has a registered nurse division which represents roughly 2,800 registered nurses at Lutheran Medical Center, Staten Island University Hospital-South, Jewish Home and Hospital Home Health Agency, and the Visiting Nurse Service of New York. The UFT saw more growth in this division, as the Visiting Nurse Service expanded and the union organized non-RN units at the non-profit company.


title: Randi Weingarten

text: Weingarten's largest organizing victory came when the UFT organized child care providers in New York City. The campaign began in 2005, and concluded in 2007. The organizing drive—the largest successful union campaign in the city since 1960, when the United Federation of Teachers itself was formed—added 28,000 workers to the union's 113,000 active and 56,000 retired members.


title: Randi Weingarten

text: On February 12, 2008, AFT President Edward J. McElroy announced he would retire at the union's regularly scheduled biennial convention in July. On July 14, Weingarten was elected to succeed him. She is the first openly gay individual to be elected president of a national American labor union. In her first year, she fought for resources to keep schools and other public institutions afloat during the ongoing fiscal crises, and started an AFT Innovation Fund to promote and disseminate innovative educational reforms by teachers and their union.


title: Randi Weingarten

text: Weingarten advocates what she describes as a "bottom up" approach to education reform, and says that public officials should welcome the views—and account for the needs—of teachers when working to help schools better serve their students. She has, as AFT president, criticized state and federal reforms proposed by her opponents.


title: Randi Weingarten

text: The AFT, during Weingarten's presidency, has focused scrutiny on well-funded third parties that have attempted to influence education policy—with the Walton Foundation, the largest philanthropic donor in the United States, drawing particular scrutiny. In a 2015 report co-authored with In the Public Interest, the AFT decried the Walton Foundation's pursuit of what the report termed a "market-based model [that] will lead to ... the eventual elimination of public education altogether, in favor of an across-the-board system of privately operated schools."


title: Randi Weingarten

text: Weingarten was among nineteen arrested in March 2013 while protesting a Philadelphia School Reform Commission meeting on school closures.


title: Randi Weingarten

text: Neighborhood public schools, according to Weingarten, can coexist with charter schools—but she opposes initiatives that work to supplant the former with the latter. Weingarten sees the role of charters as complementary to, rather than competing with, other schools.


title: Randi Weingarten

text: "Charter schools should be laboratories for innovation and creative ideas that can be scaled up so they can enrich communities," she has said.


title: Randi Weingarten

text: In a 2013 debate in New Haven, Weingarten argued that charter schools pull money from regular school districts.


title: Randi Weingarten

text: Weingarten condemns a "fixation on testing and data over everything else" as "a fundamental flaw in how our nation approaches public education," but accepts the use of standardized tests as one tool among several to evaluate student achievement and teacher performance. As AFT president, she has criticized the No Child Left Behind Act for "allow[ing] high-stakes testing to eclipse all else, including the children themselves." In a 2015 op-ed for "The New York Times", she wrote:


title: Randi Weingarten

text: Tests should be used to get teachers, parents and school communities the information they need to help students make progress — not to sanction or scapegoat, as they do now with high-stakes tests driving federal education policy. Instead, we need investments to level the playing field for kids, boost innovation, elevate the teaching profession and support educators.


title: Randi Weingarten

text: The Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 (ESSA) passed into law with the AFT's support. The law eliminates the federal requirement that states evaluate teachers according to their students' standardized test scores, and allows states to weigh factors in addition to test scores when judging the performance of school systems. Weingarten has applauded the ESSA for "relegating the era of test-and-punish strategies to the trash heap" and for offering "teachers ... flexibility to try new ways to teach, to meet the needs of their students, and to help their students think critically and analytically instead of focusing on what might be on a high-stakes test." As AFT president, Weingarten favored the act particularly because of provisions that stripped the United States Secretary of Education's role in influencing teacher-evaluation systems and maintained federal funding Title I for schools with high proportions of students from low-income households.


title: Randi Weingarten

text: An overemphasis on standardized testing and a shortage of resources, according to Weingarten, has harmed efforts to recruit and retain well-prepared teachers at public schools. "A haphazard approach to the complex and crucial enterprise of educating children," she has written, "[is] unfair to both students and teachers, who want and need to be well-prepared to teach from their first day on the job." In response to a "New York Times" story about public school systems short of teaching staff, she said that "teachers are used to the pressure cooker but are stressed out because they aren't getting the support, resources, time and respect they need to do their jobs."


title: Randi Weingarten

text: Weingarten has proposed—as a means of improving the quality of teachers in American classrooms—the creation of a professional licensing exam, akin to the bar exam taken by lawyers, for new teachers. "Better preparing teachers for entry into the profession," Weingarten says, "will dramatically reduce the loss of new teachers—nearly half of whom leave after fewer than five years—and the loss of knowledge that goes with it."


title: Randi Weingarten

text: The AFT, under Weingarten's leadership, has worked to draw attention to economic inequalities within cities and regions that can hobble public schools. With school systems in the United States heavily reliant on local property taxes, systems that rely on depressed or depleted tax bases can find themselves without the financial resources available to comparatively wealthier districts.


title: Randi Weingarten

text: Philanthropic efforts in public schools, in Weingarten's view, have incorrectly focused on the educator's role in student performance—"what we now know is 10% of student achievement," she remarked in one interview—to the exclusion of underlying problems, such as poverty, that undermine student progress. "We need to ... treat kids that have the least, give them the most," says Weingarten—"not with a blank check, but actually figure out the supports they need so that they can climb up the ladder of opportunity."


title: Randi Weingarten

text: During Weingarten's presidency, the AFT has pushed for creating what the union calls "community schools": schools that serve as hubs for non-academic programs addressed to whole communities. Undergirding that concept is the understanding—as described by former Boston Public Schools superintendent Thomas Payzant, who implemented a community-school model in the city, in a 2005 book—that "students' noneducational realities, such as nutritional deficiencies, medical problems, safety concerns, even daily hunger, are daunting barriers that can obstruct even the most flexible educational program."


title: Randi Weingarten

text: To address those perceived needs, community schools offer 'wraparound services' that target identified social issues: job banks to help parents secure employment, for example, or housing counseling for families that lack permanent homes. In a 2008 address given during her first run for the AFT presidency, Weingarten said, in the course of promoting the community-school paradigm:


title: Randi Weingarten

text: Imagine schools that are open all day and offer after-school and evening recreational activities, child care and preschool, tutoring and homework assistance. Schools that include dental, medical and counseling clinics ... Imagine if schools had the educational resources children need to thrive, like smaller classes and individualized instruction, plentiful, up-to-date materials and technology anchored to that rich curriculum, decent facilities, an early start for toddlers and a nurturing atmosphere.


title: Randi Weingarten

text: The AFT has extolled community schools that operate in Philadelphia, Cincinnati, St. Paul, Minn., Austin, Texas, Providence, R.I., and other cities where the union represents public schoolteachers. The union has itself sponsored community school efforts in Chicago, and in West Virginia, the AFT has launched a public-private partnership—called Reconnecting McDowell—that aims to "enhance educational opportunity for children in the McDowell County public schools in Central Appalachia, while addressing the underlying problems caused by severe and chronic poverty and economic decline." Efforts through the program have included the building of a "teacher village" for educators, setup of an internship program for high-school students, and mentoring of students from families in which they would be the first to attend college.


title: Randi Weingarten

text: Weingarten has resisted attempts to curtail or eliminate tenure protections for public-school teachers, arguing that the outright removal of tenure protection would hurt the quality of classroom instruction. "We know that the states with the highest academic performance have the strongest due process protections for teachers," Weingarten wrote to "Time" magazine in 2014. "Research shows that our most at-risk kids need more-experienced teachers. But why would these teachers stay at schools with few tools, little support and no ability to voice their concerns?"


title: Randi Weingarten

text: Education policy proposals built around eliminating tenure have drawn derision from Weingarten as "faddish reforms" at the expense of what she terms "the most critical issues confronting American education": teacher training, education funding, school safety, and educational reinforcement at home. She downplays the idea of worker protections as obstacles to improving schools, describing tenure "not a job for life, [but] ensuring fairness and due process before someone can be fired, plain and simple."


title: Randi Weingarten

text: When United States Secretary of Education Arne Duncan issued a statement siding with a California superior court judge who ruled the state's teacher tenure protections unconstitutional, Weingarten responded that Duncan had "added to the polarization" in debates over education policy, and charged that focusing on "quick fixes, blame games or silver bullets" such as ending tenure had "set us back in our effort to help all kids succeed." The AFT has worked, however, to reshape tenure in some states. In 2011 Weingarten offered a plan that would rely on a teacher-evaluation system with multiple parts—including assessment of student improvement on tests—to give tenured teachers rated unsatisfactory one year to improve, and allow the firing of teachers who fail to meet that deadline within the next 100 days. The proposal followed a 2008 agreement between Weingarten and District of Columbia public schools chancellor Michelle Rhee that allowed the termination of Washington Teachers' Union members evaluated as ineffective, after a one-year period—and in public remarks, Weingarten has discussed her role in efforts to modernize tenure elsewhere.


title: Randi Weingarten

text: Under Weingarten, the AFT has combatted efforts to shift responsibility for retirement investing to teachers—with Weingarten herself drawing notoriety, according to "Institutional Investor" magazine, as "the most public face in the battle for defined benefit pension funds." In a 2014 op-ed, Weingarten attacked "people who press ... to convert defined benefit pensions to 401(k) plans," asserting that advocates of 401(k) plans "never talk about the benefits retirees are likely to get under these new plans — because it's likely to be a lot less than retirees need to get by."


title: Randi Weingarten

text: In its campaign against moving teachers into defined-contribution pensions, AFT has argued that shifting investment risks to individuals has led to deleterious results for retirees. Hedge funds that manage teacher pension investments have drawn heavy criticism from AFT; the union, in 2015, prepared a report that concluded such investments "exacted a high cost, had laggard returns and generally moved in tandem with the overall stock market." The report came in the wake of a 2013 AFT study that charged some hedge-fund managers with a conflict of interest—according to "BuzzFeed", the 2013 report said that while managing teachers' defined benefit pensions, some fund managers had "support[ed] groups like the Manhattan Institute, which has recommended replacing pensions with 401(k)-type plans, and Students First, whose national branch advocates eliminating defined-benefit plans."


title: Randi Weingarten

text: Weingarten and the UFT endorsed Republican George Pataki for re-election as Governor of New York in 2002. Julia Levy reported in the "New York Sun" on February 1, 2005, that candidates for mayor of New York were meeting with Weingarten, and "political experts" were saying that "Weingarten has become something of a kingmaker." The UFT's endorsement, wrote Levy, meant "votes, campaign volunteers, and information."


title: Randi Weingarten

text: A lifelong Democrat, Weingarten is a member of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). She was an early and critically important supporter of Howard Dean as Chairman of the DNC. She is a superdelegate who was pledged to Hillary Clinton during the 2008 presidential primary. In January 2009, she was mentioned as a possible candidate in the appointment process to replace Clinton's U.S. Senate seat.


title: Randi Weingarten

text: In one of the Wikileaks emails from John Podesta, chair of the Hillary Clinton campaign, Weingarten states her desire to "go after" the National Nurses United union after their endorsement of Senator Bernie Sanders for President of the United States.


title: Randi Weingarten

text: In 2020, Weingarten was named a candidate for Secretary of Education in the Biden Administration. She was an elector for the State of New York in the 2020 United States Presidential Election.


title: Randi Weingarten

text: In spring 1998 in the "City Journal", the quarterly magazine of the conservative Manhattan Institute think tank, Sol Stern dismissed Weingarten's claim to support school reform as "pure union propaganda."


title: Randi Weingarten

text: Carl Campanile reported in the January 21, 2004, "New York Post" that Weingarten had called for union members to voice concerns by sending e-mails to the schools chancellor, Joel Klein, and Mayor Bloomberg "about the micromanagement and mismanagement issues that make your job more difficult this year."


title: Randi Weingarten

text: Pundit John Stossel wrote, in an opinion piece in the conservative "New York Sun", about a rally held by Weingarten at Madison Square Garden at which teachers demanded "a new contract and more money." Stossel said that the teachers unions "can pay for expensive rallies at 'the world's most famous arena' because every teacher in a unionized district like New York must give up some of his salary to the union. Even teachers who don't like the union, teachers who believe in school choice, and teachers who could make more on the open market must fork over their money to support the unions that fight against school choice and merit pay." Calling the present situation in New York schools a nightmare, Stossel wrote that "the unions fight to protect the nightmare" and mocked Weingarten's promise that the UFT would "police our own profession" with "I'd like to police my own job, too. And I'll bet some students would just love to police their own homework!" He accused Weingarten of "protect[ing] incompetents" and "reward[ing] mediocrity." He said that he had "confronted Weingarten," telling her, "Unionized monopolies like yours fail. In this case, it is the children who - who you are failing." She replied by rejecting the label "unionized monopoly" and by saying that her critics "don't really care about kids."


title: Randi Weingarten

text: The editorial board of the "New York Post" wrote, on February 28, 2007, about a planned gathering of opponents of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's public-school reform efforts, describing some of the participants as "a bought-and-paid-for chorus of false reformers" who "dance to the tunes of Randi Weingarten ... who has been trying to derail real reform since Mayor Mike wrested control of the schools from the educrats some five years ago." Calling the UFT "one of the richest special interests in America", the editorial board maintained that Weingarten does not care "about New York's schoolchildren" but is loyal "to her members."


title: Randi Weingarten

text: In an opinion piece in the conservative "New York Sun", Andrew Wolf wrote that Mayor Bloomberg had called the UFT the "number one" obstacle to education reform, but had reached a compromise with a coalition including the UFT, ACORN, and the Working Families Party. Wolf said that Weingarten, speaking to parent groups in a conference call, had called Department of Education officials "absolute and complete assholes" who "can't be trusted."


title: Randi Weingarten

text: On September 30, 2009, in the conservative "City Journal", Sol Stern asserted that "the UFT and the Bloomberg administration [had] increasingly developed a cartel-like working relationship, with New York taxpayers paying the price."


title: Randi Weingarten

text: The editorial board of "The New York Post" said on June 2, 2009, that Weingarten, "who'd previously vowed to gut City Hall's control over the schools," had now "delivered a nearly full-throated endorsement of it," reflecting her recognition of the "sweeping, and undeniable" progress in test scores of elementary-school pupils,


title: Randi Weingarten

text: Reacting on July 7, 2009, to Weingarten's statement, upon taking control of the AFT, that New York City is "the best laboratory in the world for trying new things," the conservative editorial board of "The Wall Street Journal" asserted this could be true "if it weren't for Ms. Weingarten's union," and wrote that the UFT under her direction had done everything possible "to block significant reforms to New York's public schools."


title: Randi Weingarten

text: In a 2009 essay by Steven Brill in The New Yorker, New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein was quoted as calling the teacher tenure policies defended by the UFT "ridiculous"—with Klein asserting that "the three principles that govern our system are lockstep compensation, seniority, and tenure. All three are not right for our children." Brill attributed to "many education reformers" the belief "that the U.F.T. and its political allies had gained so much clout" over the years "that it had become impossible for the city's Board of Education, which already shared a lot of power with local boards, to maintain effective school oversight." However, Brill later reversed his view of Weingarten, and proposed that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg appoint her chancellor of the school system.


title: Randi Weingarten

text: During her tenure as UFT president, Weingarten pushed for higher salaries and improved training for teachers, often agreeing to longer work days and more tutoring time in order to win better pay. Between 2002 and 2007, salaries for New York City teachers rose 42 percent. Weingarten has endorsed merit pay for city teachers, and in 2007 negotiated a controversial contract which paid teachers bonuses if their students' test scores rose.


title: Randi Weingarten

text: Nicole Gelinas wrote in the conservative "City Journal" on June 16, 2005, that "Weingarten declared that merit-pay plans 'pit teachers against each other instead of encouraging a collaborative school culture.' What Weingarten and the union do not see ... is that competition is healthy." Gelinas went on to assert that "until Weingarten budges ... virtue will have to be its own reward for New York's teachers."


title: Randi Weingarten

text: In an opinion column on June 14, 1999, Bob McManus asserted that "67 percent of New York City's fourth-graders" had "turned up functionally illiterate in state tests in May," and that the response from the UFT was to call for "more 'classroom resources' (i.e., Big League raises)." McManus argued that "there's more to this crisis than money—or the lack of it," and called on Weingarten to "get out of the way of folks who believe they can get the job done for less."


title: Randi Weingarten

text: Andrew Wolf, in an October 19, 2007, op-ed in the "New York Sun" entitled "Socialism for Schools," argued that despite some observers' perception that "Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein [had] won a victory over the teachers' union by gaining approval of a merit pay scheme," the real winner was Weingarten, who had gained power for the UFT. The new plan, Wolf asserted, did not reward individual performance but treated each school as a collective, with union committees dividing bonuses among all union members, including school secretaries and others.


title: Randi Weingarten

text: In October 2012, after what the "New York Times" called "months of intense and late-night negotiations," Weingarten and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie reached a "landmark compromise," agreeing on a new contract for teachers in the Newark school system. Although, as the "Times" noted, Weingarten "had criticized what she calls 'merit pay schemes,'" she "agreed to embrace the concept in exchange for a promise that teachers would have a rare role in evaluating performance." After this agreement was reached, supporters of merit pay for New York City public-school teachers expressed hope that the UFT, which had "always opposed individual merit pay initiatives," would now follow Weingarten's example.


title: Randi Weingarten

text: In 2009, when New York state Assemblywoman Catherine Nolan said that she had been prevented by a hip injury from introducing a measure to form a commission to study teacher-tenure reform—which the UFT had agreed to as a compromise measure—the "New York Post" editorialized that the legislative inaction which resulted "ha[d] the United Federation of Teachers chief's fingerprints all over it." The Post argued that Nolan had managed to pass "77 other education bills ... while she was out for surgery," and called it likely that Weingarten had influenced Nolan's decision.


title: Randi Weingarten

text: In a February 2011 interview, Weingarten acknowledged that "tenure needs to be reformed," noting that the AFT had adopted recommendations for tenure reform. Observing that the issue of teacher tenure had "erupted recently, with many districts anticipating layoffs because of slashed budgets" and with mayors such as Michael R. Bloomberg in New York City and Cory A. Booker in Newark "attack[ing] seniority laws," the "New York Times" reported that Weingarten had agreed to support some kind of tenure reform.


title: Randi Weingarten

text: Weingarten has strongly supported defined-benefit pension plans for teachers. Sol Stern argued in the conservative "City Journal" on June 25, 2009, that an agreement reached between Weingarten and the Bloomberg administration on teacher pensions would "probably wind up harming Gotham's students." Under the agreement, Stern asserted, teachers would "make no sacrifices to help ease the city's economic and fiscal crisis" and would even get "a shorter work year," with a ten-and-a-half-week summer vacation.


title: Randi Weingarten

text: In April 2013, Weingarten organized an action to confront Dan Loeb—a New York investment manager and board member of the New York chapter of lobbying organization StudentsFirst—over his opposition to defined-benefit pension plans for public employees. In the same month, the "Wall Street Journal" editorial board painted Weingarten as "trying to strong-arm pension trustees not to invest in hedge funds or private-equity funds that support education reform." Weingarten had, according to the editorial board, "tried to sandbag hedge fund investor Dan Loeb at a conference sponsored by the Council of Institutional Investors," describing her as troubled by the fact "that Mr. Loeb puts his own money behind school reform and charter schools."


title: Randi Weingarten

text: Weingarten had, according to the Journal editorial, demanded a meeting with Loeb at the conference, but the editorial board wrote that he had "wisely declined the honor of showing up for this political mugging." This "attempted ambush," continued the "Journal" editorial, "coincide[d] with a new report that her union sent to pension trustees this week called 'Ranking Asset Managers,'" with the rankings based not on "return on investment" but on such matters "as a manager's position on collective bargaining, privatization [read: vouchers] or proposals to discontinue providing benefits through defined benefit plans." The editorial board imputed "Ms. Weingarten's union fury" to her "know[ing that] unions are losing the moral and political debate over reform, as more Americans conclude that her policies are consigning millions of children to a life of diminished opportunity." Weingarten had "bull[ied] pension trustees to bully hedge funds," the editorial board charged, "to cut off funding for poor kids in Harlem. Every time we wonder if we're too cynical about unions, they remind us that we're not nearly cynical enough."


title: Randi Weingarten

text: In a "City Journal" essay in 1999, Sol Stern contrasted "Milwaukee's healthy approach to school choice" with what he termed Weingarten's promise to "fight with every resource at [her] disposal any attempt by the mayor to create a voucher system" in New York. Given what Stern described as the UFT's "impressive" resources, he deemed Mayor Giuliani courageous to take on "what promises to be," Stern opined, "a long fight for the beleaguered parents of New York's schoolchildren."


title: Randi Weingarten

text: Writing about a 1999 Emergency Coalition Against Vouchers "teach-in" attended by Weingarten, Stern asserted that "calling the rally ... a teach-in was almost Orwellian. Despite the nostalgic references to the Sixties," Stern continued, "this event was the antithesis of insurgency." Weingarten, he alleged, had made it clear that whatever the wishes of parents and the public, she "had the political clout to block even a tiny experimental voucher plan."


title: Randi Weingarten

text: In a February 6, 2007, op-ed in the "New York Post", Thomas W. Carroll of an advocacy organization called the Foundation for Education Reform & Accountability charged that Weingarten sought to unionize charter schools against the will of the teachers at those schools. To this end, Carroll wrote, Weingarten had tried pursue a unionization process known as card check, which involves the gathering signatures from pro-union teachers in lieu of a unionization vote by secret ballot. According to Carroll's op-ed, Weingarten had claimed that teachers had been fired from charter schools for wanting a union, but lacked the evidence to prove "these wild allegations."


title: Randi Weingarten

text: In an April 10, 2009, article, "The New York Post" asserted that UFT activists had "sought to push City Council members into grilling Department of Education officials during a hearing on charter schools ... while taking it easy on union officials." When those efforts—described by the article as "puppeteering"— became public, Weingarten told WNYW that she would "make some changes at the union to make sure that that never happens again" and said that former City Council Education Committee Chairwoman Eva Moskowitz, who had criticized the UFT's actions, "used to ask us all the time, when she was education chair, for questions to prep the City Council about what's really going on in schools." Moskowitz, who after leaving the council had become founder and CEO of Success Academy Charter Schools, called Weingarten's charge "utterly false" and "defamatory."


title: Randi Weingarten

text: The editorial board of the "New York Post" wrote, on August 6, 2011, about a PowerPoint presentation by an AFT lobbyist that "underscore[d] the sharp disparity between the union's public posture and its actual policies." The presentation, according to the editorial's retelling, had "detailed how the union successfully rebuffed efforts" in Connecticut to enact a parent trigger law designed to let parents to "reconstitute a consistently failing school into a charter school." After the presentation was made public, the editorial observed, an AFT statement said that the presentation did "not represent AFT's position." The editorial quoted Gwen Samuel of the Connecticut Parents Union, a pro-parent trigger advocacy organization, saying: "I'm concerned that they [AFT] were so bold. This screams, 'I'm untouchable.'"


title: Randi Weingarten

text: The editorial board of the "New York Post" wrote on October 8, 2012, that the film "Won't Back Down"—a fictionalized account of a parent-trigger takeover at a neighborhood public school—had drawn what the editorial termed "the acid-laced enmity" of Weingarten, who had accused the film of employing "the most blatant stereotypes and caricatures I have ever seen" and of placing blame for failing schools "on the wrong culprit: America's teachers unions." AFT members protested outside the film's premiere, the editorial noted. Rich Lowry, the editor of the conservative National Review, opined in the "Post" that Weingarten objected to the film not because its characters were, as she described them, stereotypes, but because "they are revelations."


title: Randi Weingarten

text: Weingarten has been frequently criticized over the years for resisting attempts to address the problem of teacher incompetence. When New York schools Chancellor Joel Klein announced a new peer-review process in 2007 to identify bad teachers, Weingarten called the plan "a stake in the heart of every teacher."


title: Randi Weingarten

text: The editors of the "New York Sun" noted on September 17, 2007, that Weingarten, when asked on a talk show about teacher accountability, replied: "When people say to me, you know, well, why shouldn't teachers be, you know, judged on the test scores of their kids? I say to them ... would you want your oncologist, or your mom or dad's oncologist to be graded on the survival rates of his or her patients?" The "Sun's" editors noted that doctors are, in fact, "held accountable for performance. ... Would that teachers were held to such standards as exist in the oncology ward."


title: Randi Weingarten

text: The "New York Post" noted on January 22, 2008, that "Weingarten promised a full-arsenal fight if the Department of Education attempts to judge individual teachers based on their students' test scores."


title: Randi Weingarten

text: Regarding a new pilot program to determine teacher effectiveness, Weingarten commented in 2008: "There are so many educational and technical flaws in this concept that I find it shocking that the school system is even considering it."


title: Randi Weingarten

text: Editorializing about Weingarten's acceptance speech at the 2008 AFT convention, the "New York Post" commented that she had "laid out her vision for 'community schools' that do everything but, well, teach." The Post described her as envisioning a "one-stop nanny state ... owned and operated by Randi Weingarten & Co." and suggested that her "push for all-purpose schools" was a way of "dodg[ing] teacher accountability in the one area schools are built for – teaching kids how to read, write and do numbers."


title: Randi Weingarten

text: Writing in the "New Yorker" on August 31, 2009, Steven Brill quoted a school principal as saying that Weingarten "would protect a dead body in the classroom." He quoted a teacher who had been suspended for incompetence, and who still earned over a hundred thousand dollars a year, as complaining that "Before Bloomberg and Klein took over, there was no such thing as incompetence."


title: Randi Weingarten

text: United States Education Secretary Arne Duncan was scheduled to hold a press conference at PS 65 in Brooklyn on May 18, 2010, but after Weingarten made a call to Duncan complaining about the school's principal, Daysi Garcia, Duncan changed the press-conference venue. The "New York Post" editorialized that it was "no surprise that Garcia is the sort of principal Weingarten can't abide," given that Garcia "makes her teachers work — and she demands results." The "Post" cited a "New Yorker" article which had reported that Garcia had dared to identify and remove incompetent teachers, and consequently turned the school around, improving reading and math scores dramatically. The "Post" suggested that the lessons here were that "It's not just charter schools that get the union's goat — it's any school that gives kids a decent education by holding teachers accountable" and that "The union will fight to the very end."


title: Randi Weingarten

text: Writing on May 30, 2013, about efforts to get "New York state's teachers unions to accept personal accountability as a bedrock principle of public-education reform," Bob McManus of the "New York Post" commented that Weingarten "once seemed to have a conscience on such matters — but no more," adhering to the principle that "No tenured teacher, under any circumstances, is to be held to account for any failing of any sort."


title: Randi Weingarten

text: New York City schools chancellor Dennis M. Walcott wrote on September 6, 2013, that the Board of Education had managed, despite resistance by the UFT, to establish "an accountability system that included qualitative reviews and Progress Reports," to end "the absurd practice of promoting students to higher grades if they lacked the skills to succeed," and to institute "the first genuine teacher-evaluation system in the history of the school system."


title: Randi Weingarten

text: Weingarten has been a severe critic of proposals to allow parents to use tax credits to help pay to send their children to private school. The editors of the "New York Sun" on November 21, 2006, quoted Weingarten's statement that allowing parents to apply tax credits to private-school tuition was "like saying government should reimburse people who drink bottled water instead of tap water — or those who park in a garage even when there is space on the street," the editors of the "New York Sun" argued on November 21, 2006, that "bottled water and garage parking are luxuries, more expensive than tap water or street parking," while educating a child in a New York Catholic school, for example, costs one-quarter as much as educating a public-school student.


title: Randi Weingarten

text: Smaller class sizes have also been a major initiative of the UFT under Weingarten. She attempted to tie smaller class sizes to salaries in each of the three collective bargaining agreements she has negotiated, and linked class size to school repair and rebuilding issues. In 2003, Weingarten and the UFT pushed for a change to the New York City Charter which would force the city to reduce class sizes. The charter revision became caught in lawsuits and was eventually dropped, although Weingarten continued to advocate for smaller class sizes.


title: Randi Weingarten

text: A "New York Sun" editorial on May 20, 2003, questioned Weingarten's focus on this issue and challenged her argument that class size is a critical factor in learning, noting that "America has been reducing class sizes steadily for the last half century, with little to show in results."


title: Randi Weingarten

text: Weingarten has been a staunch supporter of the LIFO policy ("last in, first out"), otherwise known as teacher seniority. When Education Secretary Arne Duncan changed a February 2011 speech at the last minute to remove a negative reference to the LIFO policy, under which the last teacher to be hired must be the first one fired, the "New York Post" editorialized that the action "has the fingerprints of Randi Weingarten and the American Federation of Teachers all over it." Asked in a 2011 "Wall Street Journal" interview about LIFO, Weingarten defended it, saying: "It's not the perfect mechanism but it's the best mechanism we have. You have cronyism and corruption and discrimination issues. We're saying let's do things the right way. We don't want to see people getting laid off based on who they know instead of what they know. We don't want to see people get laid off based on how much they cost."


title: Randi Weingarten

text: Poor schooling conditions, namely run-down public schools, have also drawn Weingarten's attention. The city of New York has neglected building conditions for many years.


title: Randi Weingarten

text: In an October 5, 2007, "New York Sun" article, Eliot Brown wrote that a new Bronx apartment complex would be open only to UFT members: "Our members have said we want to live in the city and raise our families in the city, but we can't afford it, so this is something we've been looking at for a while," Weingarten said.


title: Randi Weingarten

text: In December 2007, Weingarten cancelled the subsidized-housing deal after discovering that the developer would not be using unionized construction workers. Unions, she said, "should be standing up for each other." "The New York Post" commented that "it clearly doesn't occur to Weingarten that using non-union labor is a major reason developers can build 'affordable' apartments" and that "she is imperilling a project that is beneficial to her teacher constituency for the 'greater good' of the broader labor movement." "The Post" noted that Weingarten, in addition to running the UFT, "also chairs the Municipal Labor Committee – an umbrella group of more than 100 city unions." Observing that because of her solidarity, "200 or so teachers may lose out on inexpensive apartments and – if the project falls through – several jobs won't be created at all," "the Post" alluded to the "biblical adage ... that a man can't serve two masters."


title: Randi Weingarten

text: Sol Stern wrote in the Summer 1998 issue of City Journal about Weingarten's opposition to a proposed dress code for teachers, calling it "a diversion from the real job at hand."


title: Randi Weingarten

text: "The New York Post" criticized Weingarten in a February 6, 2013, editorial for signing on to a report by a coalition of unions and other groups calling for a range of new regulations to govern foreign workers. "We're not surprised the AFT is on board," the Post commented. "If you think of our public schools primarily as a jobs program, it makes perfect sense."


title: Randi Weingarten

text: A speech that Weingarten gave in 2011 turned out to have been plagiarized from a NY 1 series on a flawed Board of Education computer system. NY 1 responded, saying "When a journalist, politician or student uses someone else's words without attribution in a speech or a paper, it's called plagiarism – and it's often enough to get a journalist fired, a politician embarrassed or a student kicked out of school".


title: Randi Weingarten

text: In 2010, the AFT and Weingarten specifically were charged with interfering in the local elections of the Washington Teachers Union (WTU). The elections had been scheduled for May but postponed because of a dispute over procedural questions. In August of that year, Weingarten imposed a deadline on WTU President George Parker to comply with an order "to hold a mid-September election for new officers and delegates, or the contest will be taken out of his hands and conducted by the national parent organization." Parker objected that Weingarten had no authority to interfere in this manner. Weingarten ultimately took over the election.


title: Randi Weingarten

text: On October 11, 2007, Weingarten publicly announced she is a lesbian. Weingarten introduced Liz Margolies, 54, a psychotherapist and health care activist, as her partner while accepting the Empire State Pride Agenda's 2007 Community Service Award from Christine Quinn. By December 2012, she was in a relationship with Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum of Congregation Beit Simchat Torah. They married March 25, 2018.


title: Randi Weingarten

text: In December 2014, Weingarten wrote in "Jezebel" that she had almost been raped just after her junior year in college.


title: Ran Laurie

text: William George Ranald Mundell Laurie (4 May 1915 – 19 September 1998) was an English physician, Olympic rowing champion and gold medallist. He was the father of actor Hugh Laurie.


title: Ran Laurie

text: Laurie was born in Grantchester, Cambridgeshire, in 1915, the son of William Walker Laurie (1882–1976) and Margaret Grieve (née Mundell) (1886–1959). He was of Scottish descent.


title: Ran Laurie

text: Laurie began his rowing career at Monkton Combe School, and continued rowing when he attended Selwyn College, Cambridge, in 1933, where he was a member of the Hermes Club. A. P. McEldowney, the chronicler of Selwyn rowing and founder of University of London Boat Club, said of Laurie: "This year (1933) there arrived at Selwyn a Freshman who was not only the most famous oarsman Selwyn ever had, but also one of the most famous Great Britain ever had – WGRM Laurie. And we can truly claim him as a Selwyn oarsman. He had always told me he learnt all his rowing from Taffy Jones [W J Llewellyn-Jones] at Monkton Combe School. And where but Selwyn did Taffy learn his rowing?"


title: Ran Laurie

text: Laurie rowed for Cambridge in the 1934, 1935, and 1936 boat races, all of which were won by Cambridge. He was in the boat with Jack Wilson, who was to become his rowing partner later in their careers. At the 1936 Olympics, he rowed as stroke in Great Britain's eight, the team eventually finishing in fourth place. Together, Laurie and Wilson, rowing for Leander Club, won the Silver Goblets at Henley Royal Regatta in 1938.


title: Ran Laurie

text: After war interrupted their rowing careers, Laurie and Wilson returned to Henley in 1948, once again winning the Silver Goblets. This was followed a month later by a gold medal in the coxless pair event at the 1948 Olympics in London, rowing on their familiar Henley course. It was described by Laurie as "the best row we ever had". Laurie and Wilson were the best pair of their generation, and it was not until Steve Redgrave and Andy Holmes won the Olympics in 1988 that Britons once more excelled in this class of boat. Laurie and Wilson were known as the "Desert Rats" because of their sojourn in the Sudan. They were trained at Leander Club by Alexander McCulloch, who won a silver medal at the 1908 Olympics. Their boat is now on show at the River and Rowing Museum at Henley-on-Thames, hanging above the boat that won the 1996 Summer Olympics with Redgrave and Pinsent.


title: Ran Laurie

text: Laurie was elected a steward of Henley Royal Regatta in 1951, and also served as a Henley umpire. He sat on Henley's management committee between 1975 and 1986.


title: Ran Laurie

text: Laurie joined the Sudan Political Service in 1936, becoming District Commissioner of Nyala. In 1954, he qualified as a medical doctor, working for 30 years as a general practitioner in Blackbird Leys, Oxford. He also chaired the Oxford Committee of The Duke of Edinburgh's Award between 1959 and 1969, and the Oxford branch of Save the Children from 1986 to 1989. In 2005, it was proposed that the newly refurbished health centre in Blackbird Leys be named after Laurie in recognition of his service to the local community; however, it was subsequently named The Leys, after the local area, when it opened in February 2006.


title: Ran Laurie

text: Laurie was married to Patricia Laidlaw from 1944 until her death from motor neuron disease in 1989; both were members of their local Presbyterian church, now St Columba's United Reformed Church, Oxford. They had two daughters and two sons, the youngest of whom is the actor Hugh Laurie, who followed in his father's footsteps, rowing for Selwyn College and Cambridge University, and playing a doctor in "House". Ran Laurie married Mrs Douglas Ernest Arbuthnot, (Evaline) Mary Arbuthnot, née Morgan in 1990 in Norfolk.


title: The Big Bang Theory (season 8)

text: The eighth season of the American sitcom "The Big Bang Theory" premiered on CBS with two back-to-back episodes on Monday, September 22, 2014. The season returned to its regular Thursday night time slot on October 30 for the season's seventh episode. The season concluded on May 7, 2015. On March 12, 2014, "The Big Bang Theory" was renewed for an additional three years, extending it through the 2016–17 season for a total of ten seasons.


title: The Big Bang Theory (season 8)

text: Mayim Bialik submitted the episode "The Prom Equivalency" for consideration due to her nomination for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series at the 67th Primetime Emmy Awards. Christine Baranski submitted the episode "The Maternal Combustion" for consideration due to her nomination for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series at the 67th Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards.


title: The Big Bang Theory (season 8)

text: Carol Ann Susi, the voice of the never-seen Mrs. Wolowitz, died of cancer on November 11, 2014, at age 62. In the season's fifteenth episode, "The Comic Book Store Regeneration", Howard Wolowitz receives a phone call that his mother has died while visiting family in Florida.


title: The Big Bang Theory (season 8)

text: In February 2014, CBS CEO Leslie Moonves confirmed an eighth season, when announcing that the first part of the new season would air on a different night, due to to "Thursday Night Football" games. In May 2014, CBS announced at its annual upfront presentation, that the series would begin its eighth season on Mondays, before returning to the Thursday slot it has held since 2010 on October 30, once the football games end.


title: The Big Bang Theory (season 8)

text: Production for the season was expected to begin on July 30, 2014, however the start was delayed due to the five main cast members' desire to renegotiate new contracts, with Johnny Galecki, Jim Parsons and Kaley Cuoco seeking approximately $1 million per episode, as well as more backend money. Simon Helberg and Kunal Nayyar negotiated together, separate from Galecki, Parsons and Cuoco's negotiations. Production was officially delayed on July 30, due to the contract negotiations, and was rescheduled for August 6, 2014. On August 4, Galecki, Parsons and Cuoco signed new contracts, worth $1 million per episode for three years, with the possibility to extend for a fourth year. The deals also include larger pieces of the show, signing bonuses, production deals and advances towards the back-end. The following day, Helberg and Nayyar renegotiated their contracts, giving them a per-episode pay in the "mid six-figure range", up from around $100,000 per episode they each received in years prior. The first table read for season 8 took place on August 6.


title: The Big Bang Theory (season 8)

text: The first episode of season 8, "The Locomotion Interruption", first aired in the US on September 22, 2014. In Australia, season 8 premiered on October 13, 2014. In the UK, "The Locomotion Interruption" first aired on October 23, 2014.


title: The Big Bang Theory (season 8)

text: The eighth season received positive reviews. MaryAnn Sleasman of TV.com praised character developments, and wrote that "there's a lot to be excited about with regard to this coming season" with some of the central characters more comfortable around each other.


title: The Big Bang Theory (season 8)

text: Emily Gould of "Salon" criticized the humor, writing that "I watched all seven episodes that had aired so far this season and didn't so much as expel air forcefully from my nose in response to any of the jokes". Oliver Sava of "The A.V. Club" also criticized the humor, writing that "A lot of the jokes are tired and the plotlines are standard sitcom material, but if it's worked for seven seasons, why switch it up now?"


title: Marisa Coughlan

text: Marisa Christine Coughlan ( ; born March 17, 1974) is an American actress and writer. Her first prominent role was a lead in Kevin Williamson's "Teaching Mrs. Tingle" (1999), followed by a role as Officer Ursula Hanson in the comedy "Super Troopers" (2001). She also had a recurring role as Melissa Hughes on the series "Boston Legal".


title: Marisa Coughlan

text: Coughlan was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She graduated from Breck School, a small private school in nearby Golden Valley, Minnesota. When she moved to Los Angeles with her father, Daniel Merritt Coughlan, she enrolled at the University of Southern California. She studied abroad in Paris in 1995, and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in French in 1996.


title: Marisa Coughlan

text: Coughlan's first film appearance to gain mainstream attention was in Kevin Williamson's directorial debut "Teaching Mrs. Tingle" (1999), in which she co-starred alongside Katie Holmes and Helen Mirren. She was cast in the role after reportedly having been rejected for a role on Williamson's series "Dawson's Creek". She followed this with a recurring role on the series "Wasteland" in 1999.


title: Marisa Coughlan

text: Other films she appeared in included "Pumpkin" (co-starring with Christina Ricci), a drama about sorority girls; "New Suit", a satirical comedy about the inner workings of Hollywood; "Super Troopers", playing Officer Ursula Hanson; and "Freddy Got Fingered" as Betty.


title: Marisa Coughlan

text: She had a recurring role on the television series "Boston Legal" as secretary Melissa Hughes in seasons two and three. In 2007, she starred as Jenny McIntyre in Lifetime Television's original series "Side Order of Life". In 2008–2009, she appeared on three episodes of the TV show "Bones".


title: Marisa Coughlan

text: Coughlan began writing while she was pregnant and taking time off from acting. She wrote and produced her first pilot, "Lost & Found" for ABC in 2011. In 2014, she completed writing a comedy based on "Peter and Wendy" for NBC. In 2016, it was reported by "Variety" that Fox was developing a comedy series titled "Pushing", written by Coughlan and produced by Greg Berlanti.


title: Marisa Coughlan

text: In November 2008, Coughlan married childhood friend Stephen Wallack in a ceremony at a private estate in Pasadena, California. They have four children together. As of 2015 she lived in Deephaven, Minnesota, after several years in Studio City, California.


title: Hybrid regime

text: A hybrid regime is a mixed type of political system often created as a result of an incomplete transition from an authoritarian regime to a democratic one (or vice versa). Hybrid regimes are categorized as combine autocratic features with democratic ones and can simultaneously hold political repressions and regular elections. Hybrid regimes are commonly found in developing countries with abundant natural resources such as petro-states. Although these regimes experience civil unrest they maybe relatively stable and tenacious for decades at a time. There has been a rise in hybrid regimes since the end of the Cold War.


title: Hybrid regime

text: The term "hybrid regime" arises from a polymorphic view of political regimes that opposes the dichotomy of autocracy or democracy. Modern scholarly analysis of hybrid regimes focuses attention on the decorative nature of democratic institutions (elections do not lead to a change of power, different media broadcast government point of view and the opposition in parliament votes the same way as the ruling party, among others), from which it is concluded that democratic backsliding, a transition to authoritarianism is the most prevalent basis of hybrid regimes. Some scholars also contend that hybrid regimes may imitate a full dictatorship.