title: Traditional Unionist Voice

text: TUV candidates won 65,788 first preference votes, more than three times the party's score in the 2017 Assembly election and 7.5% of the total first preference vote but only one of the 90 members elected to the new Northern Ireland Assembly was a TUV candidate; Jim Allister in the North Antrim constituency. Under the Single Transferable Vote system of proportional representation used in Northern Ireland a disproportionality between outcome in seats and first preference vote share can arise when a party is eliminated from the count because it has been less successful at obtaining lower preference votes on the ballot paper than at obtaining first preference votes.


title: Traditional Unionist Voice

text: In November 2009, the party caused controversy when it referred to the Irish language as a "leprechaun language" on its website. The statement was issued under the name of TUV vice-chairman Keith Harbinson and condemned the Department of Education for "wasting" money on teaching of the Irish language. The party later removed the phrase, but the original page had already been spread on numerous other websites.


title: Traditional Unionist Voice

text: In December 2009, TUV member Trevor Collins promoted a petition to release former Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF) member Torrens Knight from prison where the latter was serving a four-month sentence for assault on two people in Coleraine. Torrens Knight had previously served seven years imprisonment for taking part in the Greysteel and the Castlerock terrorist killings but had been given early release from his jail sentence in 2000 under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement. At the time, the TUV was widely criticised for refusing to suspend Collins from the party. Their response was that Collins had acted in a 'misguided' fashion which they did not support but that "there are people released from jail who were convicted of crimes in which people died and today they sit in our government".


title: Traditional Unionist Voice

text: In November 2012, former Irish rugby union international and then Ballymena TUV councillor David Tweed was convicted on 13 counts of sexual offences against two young girls. Pending sentencing he remained a member of Ballymena Borough Council and of TUV. TUV stated that the sex offences related "to a period long before he was a member of this party". In January 2013, Tweed was sentenced to eight years' imprisonment. TUV chose one of its unsuccessful 2011 candidates, Timothy Gaston, to replace Tweed as councillor. David Tweed's conviction was quashed in October 2016.


title: Traditional Unionist Voice

text: In August 2021, an organisation based in Derry called the Bloody Sunday Trust criticised remarks made in 2019 by the TUV's then Assembly election candidate for East Belfast, John Ross. Mr Ross had made a speech referencing a quote by a member of the Parachute regiment involved in the events of Bloody Sunday (1972) when 14 Catholic people were killed by paratroopers in Londonderry. The quote in question described the parachute regiment's activities that day as “A good operation, a job well done. They all came out alive”. The Bloody Sunday Trust protested that “Bloody Sunday has been the subject of a meticulous public inquiry which found that all those killed and wounded were innocent”. The TUV, in turn, replied that there had been “various conflicting judicial findings” and that Mr Ross's words had been taken out of context by the Bloody Sunday Trust.


title: Secret ballot

text: The secret ballot, also known as the Australian ballot, is a voting method in which a voter's identity in an election or a referendum is anonymous. This forestalls attempts to influence the voter by intimidation, blackmailing, and potential vote buying. This system is one means of achieving the goal of political privacy.


title: Secret ballot

text: Secret ballots are used in conjunction with various voting systems. The most basic form of a secret ballot utilizes blank pieces of paper upon which each voter writes their choice. Without revealing the votes to anyone, the voter folds the ballot paper in half and places it in a sealed box. This box is later emptied for counting. An aspect of secret voting is the provision of a voting booth to enable the voter to write on the ballot paper without others being able to see what is being written. Today, printed ballot papers are usually provided, with the names of the candidates or questions and respective check boxes. Provisions are made at the polling place for the voters to record their preferences in secret, and the ballots are designed to eliminate bias and to prevent anyone from linking voter to ballot.


title: Secret ballot

text: A privacy problem arises with moves to improve efficiency of voting by the introduction of postal voting and remote electronic voting. Some countries permit proxy voting, but some people argue that this is inconsistent with voting privacy. Popularity of the ballot selfie has challenged the secrecy of in-person voting.


title: Secret ballot

text: The secret ballot became commonplace for "individual citizens" in liberal democracies worldwide by the late 20th century.


title: Secret ballot

text: Votes taken by "elected officials" are typically public so that citizens can judge officials' and former officials' voting records in future elections. This may be done with a physical or electronic in-person system or through a roll call vote. Some faster legislative voting methods do not record who voted which way, though witnesses in the legislative chambers may still notice a given legislator's vote. These include voice votes where the volume of shouting for or against is taken as a measure of numerical support, and counting of raised hands. In some cases, a secret ballot is used, for example to allow representatives to choose party leadership without fear of retaliation against those voting for losing candidates. The parliamentary tactics of forcing or avoiding a roll call vote can be used to discourage or encourage representatives to vote in a manner that is politically unpopular among constituents (for example if a policy considered to be in the public interest is difficult to explain or unpopular but without a better alternative, or to hide pandering to a special interest) or to create or prevent fodder for political campaigns.


title: Secret ballot

text: In ancient Greece, secret ballots were used in several situations like ostracism and also to remain hidden from people seeking favors. In early 5th century BC the secrecy of ballot at ecclesia was not the primary concern, but more of a consequence of using ballots to accurately count the votes. Secret ballot was introduced into public life of Athens during second half of the fifth century.


title: Secret ballot

text: In ancient Rome, the "Tabellariae Leges ("English: "Ballot Laws)" were a series of four laws that implemented secret ballots for votes cast regarding each of the major elected assemblies of the Roman Republic. Three of the four laws were put in place in relatively quick succession with one each in the years 139 BC, 137 BC and 131 BC, applying respectively to the elections of magistrates, jury deliberations excepting charges of treason as well as the passage of laws. The final of the four laws was implemented more than two decades later in 107 BC and served solely to expand the law passed in 137 BC to require secret ballots for all jury deliberations, including treason.


title: Secret ballot

text: Prior to these ballot laws, one was required to provide their vote verbally to an individual responsible for tallying the votes, which effectively made every voter's vote publicly known. Mandating secret ballots had the effect of reducing the influence of the Roman aristocracy who were capable of influencing elections through a combination of bribes and threats. Secret balloting helps assuage both of those concerns, as not only are one's peers unable to determine which way you voted, there is additionally no proof that could be produced that you "did" vote certain way, perhaps contravening directions .


title: Secret ballot

text: Article 31 of the Constitution of the Year III of the Revolution (1795) states that "All elections are to be held by secret ballot". The same goes with the constitution of 1848: voters could hand-write the name of their preferred candidate on their ballot at home (the only condition was to write on white paper) or receive one distributed on the street. The ballot was folded in order to prevent other people from reading its contents.


title: Secret ballot

text: Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte attempted to abolish the secret ballot for the 1851 plebiscite with an electoral decree requesting electors to write down "yes" or "no" (in French: "oui" or "non") under the eyes of everyone. But he faced strong opposition and finally changed his mind, allowing the secret ballot to take place.


title: Secret ballot

text: According to the official web site of the "Assemblée nationale" (the lower house of the French parliament), the voting booth was permanently adopted only in 1913.


title: Secret ballot

text: The demand for a secret ballot was one of the six points of Chartism. The British parliament of the time refused to even consider the Chartist demands, but it is noted that Lord Macaulay, in his speech of 1842, while rejecting Chartism's six points as a whole, admitted that the secret ballot was one of the two points he could support.


title: Secret ballot

text: The London School Board election of 1870 was the first large-scale election by secret ballot in Britain.


title: Secret ballot

text: After several failed attempts (several of them spearheaded by George Grote), the secret ballot was eventually extended generally in the Ballot Act 1872, substantially reducing the cost of campaigning (as treating was no longer realistically possible) and was first used on 15 August 1872 to re-elect Hugh Childers as MP for Pontefract in a ministerial by-election following his appointment as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. The original ballot box, sealed in wax with a licorice stamp, is held at Pontefract museum.


title: Secret ballot

text: However, the UK uses numbered ballots in order to allow courts to intervene, under rare circumstances, to identify which candidate voters voted for.


title: Secret ballot

text: In Australia, secret balloting appears to have been first implemented in Tasmania on 7 February 1856.


title: Secret ballot

text: Until the original Tasmanian "Electoral Act 1856" was "re-discovered" recently, credit for the first implementation of the secret ballot often went to Victoria, where it was pioneered by the former mayor of Melbourne, William Nicholson, and simultaneously South Australia. Victoria enacted legislation for secret ballots on 19 March 1856, and South Australian Electoral Commissioner William Boothby generally gets credit for creating the system finally enacted into law in South Australia on 2 April of that same year (a fortnight later). The other British colonies in Australia followed: New South Wales (1858), Queensland (1859), and Western Australia (1877).


title: Secret ballot

text: State electoral laws, including the secret ballot, applied for the first election of the Australian Parliament in 1901, and the system has continued to be a feature of federal elections and referendums.


title: Secret ballot

text: The Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 does not explicitly set out the secret ballot but a reading of sections 206, 207, 325, 327 of the Act would imply its assumption. Sections 323 and 226(4) do however, apply the principle of a secret ballot to polling staff and would also support the assumption.


title: Secret ballot

text: Before the final years of the 19th century, partisan newspapers printed filled-out ballots which party workers distributed on election day so voters could drop them directly into the boxes. Individual states moved to secret ballots soon after the presidential election of 1884, finishing with Kentucky in 1891 when it quit using an oral ballot.


title: Secret ballot

text: Initially however, a state's new ballot did not necessarily have all four components of an "Australian ballot":


title: Secret ballot

text: After ballots are cast and no longer identifiable to the voter, several states make the ballots and copies of them available to the public, so the public can check counts and do other research with the anonymous ballots.


title: Secret ballot

text: Louisville, Kentucky, was the first city in the United States to adopt the Australian ballot. It was drafted by Lewis Naphtali Dembitz, the uncle of and inspiration for future Supreme Court associate justice Louis Brandeis. Massachusetts adopted the first state-wide Australian ballot, written by reformer Richard Henry Dana III, in 1888. Consequently, it is also known as the "Massachusetts ballot". Seven states did not have government-printed ballots until the 20th century. Georgia started using them in 1922. When South Carolina followed suit, in 1950, this completed the nationwide switch to Australian ballots. The 20th century also brought the first criminal prohibitions against buying votes, in 1925.


title: Secret ballot

text: The right to hold elections by secret ballot is included in numerous treaties and international agreements that obligate their signatory states:


title: Secret ballot

text: Ballot design and polling place architecture often deny the disabled the possibility to cast a vote in secret. In many democracies disabled persons may vote by appointing another person who is allowed to join them in the voting booth and fill the ballot in their name. This does not assure secrecy of the ballot.


title: Secret ballot

text: The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities which entered into force in 2008 assures secret ballot for disabled voters. Article 29 of the Convention requires that all Contracting States protect "the right of the person with disabilities to vote by secret ballot in elections and public referendums". According to this provision, each Contracting State should provide for voting equipment which would enable disabled voters to vote independently and secretly. Some democracies, e.g. the United States, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Albania or India allow disabled voters to use electronic voting machines. In others, among them Azerbaijan, Canada, Ghana, the United Kingdom, and most African and Asian countries, visually impaired voters can use ballots in Braille or paper ballot templates. Article 29 also requires that Contracting States ensure "that voting procedures, facilities and materials are appropriate, accessible and easy to understand and use." In some democracies, e.g. United Kingdom, Sweden and the United States, all the polling places already are fully accessible for disabled voters.


title: Secret ballot

text: The United Kingdom secret ballot arrangements are sometimes criticized because it is possible to link a ballot paper to the voter who cast it. Each ballot paper is individually numbered and each elector also has a number. When an elector is given a ballot paper, their number is noted down on the counterfoil of the ballot paper (which also carries the ballot paper number). This means, of course, that the secrecy of the ballot is not guaranteed, if anyone can gain access to the counterfoils, which are locked away securely before the ballot boxes are opened at the count. Polling station officials colluding with election scrutineers may therefore determine how individual electors have voted.


title: Secret ballot

text: This measure is thought to be justified as a security arrangement so that if there was an allegation of fraud, false ballot papers could be identified. The process of matching ballot papers to voters is formally permissible only if an Election Court requires it; in fact the Election Court has rarely made such an order since the secret ballot was introduced in 1872. One example was in a close local election contest in Richmond-upon-Thames in the late 1970s with three disputed ballots and a declared majority of two votes. Reportedly prisoners in a UK prison were observed identifying voters' ballot votes on a list in 2008. The legal authority for this system is set out in the Parliamentary Elections Rules in Schedule 1 of the Representation of the People Act 1983.


title: Secret ballot

text: In the United States, most states guarantee a secret ballot. But some states, including Indiana and North Carolina, require the ability to link some ballots to voters. This may for example be used with absentee voting to retain the ability to cancel a vote if the voter dies before election day. Sometimes the number on the ballot is printed on a perforated stub which is torn off and placed on a ring (like a shower curtain ring) before the ballot is cast into the ballot box. The stubs prove that an elector has voted and ensure that they can only vote once, but the ballots themselves are both secret and anonymous. At the end of voting day, the number of ballots inside the box should match the number of stubs on the ring, certifying that every ballot was cast by a registered elector, and that none of them were lost or fabricated. Sometimes the ballots themselves are numbered, making the vote trackable. In 2012 in Colorado, this procedure was ruled legal by Federal District Judge Christine Arguello, who determined that the U.S. Constitution does not grant a right to a secret ballot.


title: Secret ballot

text: The journalist Lynn Landers argued that the secret ballot enabled election fraud and so should be eliminated or supplemented with other ways of verifying voting, such as cryptographically secure receipts.


title: Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck

text: Anna Boden and Ryan K. Fleck are an American filmmaking duo. They are best known for their collaborations on the films "Half Nelson", "Sugar", " It's Kind of a Funny Story", "Mississippi Grind" and "Captain Marvel".


title: Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck

text: Boden is originally from Massachusetts and grew up in Newton while Fleck graduated from Castro Valley High School. Before attending New York University's Tisch School of the Arts where he studied film, Fleck went to Diablo Valley College to study science and math. Boden attended Columbia University. The two met on the set of a student film where they bonded over the works of Robert Altman and, after Fleck had finished his thesis short film "Struggle", they decided to collaborate.


title: Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck

text: Fleck was born in Berkeley, California and raised there and in Oakland. Fleck had grown up on classic fan favorites such as "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" and "Back to the Future".


title: Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck

text: Boden has said that while there was no specific film that inspired her to pursue film making, she had a fondness for watching movies as a child and cites learning about Robert Altman as a turning point in how she viewed film as a medium.


title: Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck

text: Together they made the short documentaries "Have You Seen This Man?" and "Young Rebels" before they wrote and directed the short film "Gowanus, Brooklyn", a sample feature aiming to attract potential financiers to their undeveloped script, "Half Nelson".


title: Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck

text: The short won a prize at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival and Boden and Fleck were subsequently invited to the Sundance Writer's Lab to receive professional feedback on the "Half Nelson" screenplay. The film did not receive adequate financing for years, and while trying to initiate the project, Fleck explains: "We were trying to get it off the ground so we had plenty of time to keep writing and rewriting. I think the time was valuable because I think we made it as good as we could." Though Fleck was the only of the pair to receive directing credit for the film, he has gone on record and said that the work was an equal divide.


title: Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck

text: In spite of the effort in making the script "as good as we could" prior to filming, Fleck encouraged "Half Nelson"<nowiki>'</nowiki>s actors to ad lib and improvise, although he and lead actor Ryan Gosling compromised many scenes in the rehearsal process as Fleck thought that Gosling's ideas were too different from the script in some cases. He also had several disagreements with Boden while writing; though he claims their "back and forth" system of rewriting each other's work has always worked well. "Half Nelson" was well received by critics and got nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor for Ryan Gosling. Many other nominations went to Ryan Gosling for his role as Dan Dunne.


title: Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck

text: Boden and Fleck have since co-written and co-directed the 2008 film "Sugar", which premiered at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, about a 19-year-old Dominican man who immigrates to the United States to play minor league baseball. The two wrote the screenplay after researching about many Dominican immigrants who arrive in America to play in minor league towns, saying: "The stories we heard were so fascinating that it became what we were writing before we'd even decided it was our next project". They also collaborated on a screen adaptation of Ned Vizzini's young adult novel "It's Kind of a Funny Story", which was released on October 8, 2010.


title: Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck

text: In 2012, the duo began work on a gambling movie called "Mississippi Grind". The idea for the film came when they would visit riverboat casinos in Iowa. By this point in their career, Boden and Fleck had fully committed to each other, "In the early days of our partnership we had to navigate a lot of issues concerning trust and ego. Nowadays, those issues are almost entirely gone. Having a creative partner who you can wholly trust is a wonderful asset."


title: Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck

text: In April 2017, Boden and Fleck were hired to direct the Marvel Studios film "Captain Marvel". They were previously considered to direct another Marvel film, "Guardians of the Galaxy". Producer Kevin Feige said of them, "We met with lots and lots of people... and Anna and Ryan just had an amazing way of talking about Carol Danvers and talking about her journey... We want filmmakers that can help us focus on and elevate the character journey so it doesn't get lost amongst the spectacle." The film was released in March 2019, and became a box office success, grossing more than $1 billion worldwide. In May 2019, it was revealed they would direct the first two episodes and produce the television show "Mrs. America" starring Cate Blanchett as Phyllis Schlafly. Boden and Fleck were in talks to direct a Marvel Disney+ series.


title: Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck

text: Boden and Fleck formerly dated, however, contrary to popular belief they are not a married couple (though multiple sources continue to erroneously report it). Boden was pregnant at the time of "Mississippi Grind"s release. Boden is Jewish.


title: Operation Nemesis

text: Operation Nemesis () was a program to assassinate both Ottoman perpetrators of the Armenian genocide and officials of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic responsible for the massacre of Armenians during the September Days of 1918 in Baku. Masterminded by Shahan Natalie, Armen Garo, and Aaron Sachaklian, it was named after the Greek goddess of divine retribution, Nemesis.


title: Operation Nemesis

text: Between 1920 and 1922, a clandestine cell of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation carried out seven killings, the best-known being the assassination of Talaat Pasha, the main orchestrator of the Armenian genocide, by Armenian Soghomon Tehlirian in March 1921 in Berlin.


title: Operation Nemesis

text: The Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) was active within the Ottoman Empire in the early 1890s with the aim of unifying the various small groups in the empire who advocated for reform and a certain degree of autonomy within the empire. ARF members formed "fedayi" guerrilla groups that helped organize the self-defense of Armenian civilians. In July–August 1914, the 8th congress of the ARF was a watershed event. Members of the Committee of Union and Progress requested assistance from the party in the conquest of Transcaucasia by inciting a rebellion of Russian Armenians against the Russian army in the event of a Caucasus Campaign opening up. The Armenians agreed to remain loyal to their government, but declared their inability to agree to the other proposal.


title: Operation Nemesis

text: Prominent ARF members were among the Armenian intellectuals targeted on April 24, 1915 in Constantinople. The arrested people were moved to two holding centers near Ankara under Interior Minister Mehmed Talat's , and mostly deported and killed.


title: Operation Nemesis

text: In 1919, after the Armistice of Mudros, Turkish courts-martial were convened in Constantinople, during which some of the principal perpetrators of the Armenian genocide were convicted and sentenced to death. The UK seized some of the perpetrators from the Ottoman authorities in several of Istanbul's prisons, after their incompetency in failing to hold fair trials, and transported them to the British colony of Malta. There, the Malta exiles (so-called by Turkish sources) were, after Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's incarceration of Lord Curzon's relative, exchanged for British subjects detained by the Turkish government of Atatürk. Since there were no international laws in place under which they could be tried, the men who orchestrated the genocide travelled relatively freely throughout Germany, Italy, and Central Asia.


title: Operation Nemesis

text: On May 28, 1918, the Armenian National Council, a group of professionals based in Tiflis, declared the independence of the First Republic of Armenia. Hovhannes Kachaznuni and Alexander Khatisyan, both members of the ARF, moved to Yerevan to seize power and issued the official announcement of Armenian independence on May 30, 1918. Yerevan became the capital city of Armenia. At this city, from September 27 to the end of October 1919, the ARF's 9th General Congress convened.


title: Operation Nemesis

text: The issue of justice against those responsible for the Armenian genocide was on the agenda of the congress. Over many of the Russian Armenian delegates' vociferous objections, it was decided to mete out justice through armed force. ARF Bureau members, specifically Simon Vratsyan, Ruben Ter Minasian and Ruben Darbinian, opposed Shahan Natalie's operation. However, a "black list" was created, containing the names of 200 persons deemed most responsible for organizing the genocide against the Armenian people.


title: Operation Nemesis

text: The leader of the group responsible for the task was Shahan Natalie, working with Grigor Merjanov. For Natalie, the primary target was Talaat Pasha, whom Shahan called "Number One". The mission to kill Talaat was entrusted to Soghomon Tehlirian. Natalie's aim was to turn Tehlirian's trial into the political trial of those responsible for the Armenian genocide. In his memoirs, Natalie revealed his orders to Tehlirian: "you blow up the skull of the Number One nation-murderer and you don't try to flee. You stand there, your foot on the corpse and surrender to the police, who will come and handcuff you."


title: Operation Nemesis

text: After the Sovietization of Armenia, many of the First Armenian Republic's expatriate revolutionary activists did not hesitate to collaborate with Azeri and Turk Armenophobe activists to regain governmental control. This policy was contrary to Shahan Natalie's conviction that "Over and above the Turk, the Armenian has no enemy, and Armenian revenge is just and godly." There was deep dissent on both sides, but not yet to the point of separation. To forestall the probable victory of these "freedom fighters" at the upcoming 11th General Congress of the ARF (27 March to 2 May 1929), on the eve of the meeting, the Bureau began a "cleansing campaign". The first to be "removed" from the party was Bureau member Shahan Natalie. "Knowingly" (by his definition) having joined the ARF and unjustly separated from it, Shahan Natalie wrote about this: "With Shahan began again that which had begun with Antranig; Bureau member, Shahan, was 'ousted'." After Shahan were successively ousted Haig Kntouni, Glejian and Tartizian with their partisans, General Smbad, Ferrahian with his group, future "Mardgots" (Bastion)-ists Mgrdich Yeretziants, Levon Mozian, Vazgen Shoushanian, Mesrob Kouyoumjian, Levon Kevonian and many others. As a protest to this "cleansing" by the Bureau, some members of the ARF French Central Committee also resigned.


title: Operation Nemesis

text: On 31 May 1926, the Turkish government passed Law Number 882, which assigned property to the relatives of Ottoman leaders assassinated for their role in the Armenian genocide. This law covered the families of important CUP members such as Talaat Pasha, Ahmet Cemal Pasha, Said Halim Pasha and Behaeddin Shakir, amongst others. The regulations within the law defined that they would be allocated property belonging to "fugitive Armenians". MP Recep Zühtü Soyak, a loyal follower and private secretary of Atatürk mentioned this new law was a strong "warning message to assassins: you may execute a Turk through an assassination! But, we will raise his offspring with your money so that tomorrow, he will gouge out your eye and break your head." Among those of those marked for assassination was Enver Pasha (killed 1922 in battle with the Soviets) and Abdülhalik Renda became President of Turkey and died in 1957.


title: Martina Topley-Bird

text: Martina Gillian Topley-Bird ("née" Topley; born 7 May 1975) is an English singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who first gained fame as the featured female vocalist on trip hop pioneer Tricky's debut album, "Maxinquaye" (1995). She also worked with him on his subsequent albums "Nearly God" and "Pre-Millennium Tension" (both 1996). In 2003, Topley-Bird released her debut solo album, "Quixotic", which was critically praised and earned her a Mercury Prize nomination.


title: Martina Topley-Bird

text: This was followed by "Anything" (2004), "The Blue God" (2008) and "Some Place Simple" (2010). She has also collaborated with Gorillaz, appearing on their album "Demon Days" (2005), as well as with Mark Lanegan, Diplo and Massive Attack on "Heligoland" (2010), which she followed by a world tour with the group. Her song "Sandpaper Kisses" was covered by Stephen Marley and sampled by such artists as Berry Weight and The Weeknd.


title: Martina Topley-Bird

text: Martina Topley-Bird was born in London, England, to Charlette Conlon ("née" Pouncey) and Martin Geoffrey Topley, who died in 1974 before her birth; Martina was named after him. Her stepfather is British direct marketing specialist Drayton Bird, whose surname she adopted in addition to her father's. Her mother is of Salvadoran and Seminole descent, while her father was of untraceable African-American descent. Topley-Bird grew up in a large family, with five siblings and three step-siblings.


title: Martina Topley-Bird

text: Her family later relocated from London to Bristol. "We moved about a bit when I was a child, which wasn't a problem for me", she recalled. "If you're not white and middle-class, then you're slightly different and exotic in those new environments. I thrived, and survived, on those situations." She attended Clifton College, where she was a member of the school choir and took piano lessons.


title: Martina Topley-Bird

text: Topley-Bird grew up listening to R&B, opera and soul music throughout her childhood. As a teenager, she began listening to alternative rock, and became a fan of The Sugarcubes, Faith No More and Jane's Addiction.


title: Martina Topley-Bird

text: In 1993, as a teenager at Clifton College, Topley-Bird was discovered by trip hop pioneer Tricky when he saw her sitting on a wall near his house, singing to herself. "That's really how it happened," she recalled. "It's one of those things people are always surprised to find out is true. I remember the graveyard behind the wall. A few weeks later, I went around to his house with some friends. We'd been drinking cider after our GCSEs. We were banging on his door, but he wasn't in. Then Mark Stewart, who lived there, came up to us and said: "Yeah, this is Tricky's house, jump in through the window." So I jumped through, opened the door and we got mashed."


title: Martina Topley-Bird

text: She and Tricky formed a musical partnership, and Topley-Bird collaborated with Tricky as a featured vocalist on his debut album "Maxinquaye" (1995) (a printing error credited her as "Martine"). Almost all of her vocals on the album were recorded in a single take. In describing the recording sessions, she recalled: "It was totally instinctive. There was no time to drum up an alter ego. I liked the idea that the information people needed about me was what they would hear when they put the record on. Anything else was sort of extraneous. I didn't think there was anything in my biography that would explain my musical choices." Topley-Bird continued her collaboration with Tricky on his follow-up albums "Nearly God" (1996), "Pre-Millennium Tension" (1996) and "Angels with Dirty Faces" (1998).


title: Martina Topley-Bird

text: Following a deterioration of her professional and personal relationship with Tricky in 1998, Topley-Bird began pursuing a solo career. It was not until 2003 that she released her debut album, "Quixotic" through Independiente Records, which she recorded in Los Angeles, California. The record was mainly produced by Topley-Bird and production team AMP9 (Alex McGowan, Steve Crittall, Nick Bird) at Space Eko Recording Studios London. She commented on the ideas underpinning the album, saying: A lot of it is about the notion of physical proximity relative to emotional connections between people. My dad, Martin Topley, died when he was twenty-nine. Between the release of "Quixotic" and now, I turned twenty-nine, and I started thinking about what I'd achieved in my life as a human being. Also I wanted to focus on the nature of my relationship with him and with my step father because of the way I felt those relationships were affecting my other relationships.


title: Martina Topley-Bird

text: "Quixotic" peaked at no. 70 on the UK Albums Chart, received positive reviews from critics, and was a finalist for the 2003 Mercury Music Prize. The album finally saw a limited release in the United States in July 2004, when the Palm Pictures label released a re-designed and re-sequenced version under the title "Anything", which featured a shorter track listing and all-new cover art. The following year she appeared on the Starbucks compilation album "", which features contemporary musicians covering classic love songs. She sang "I Only Have Eyes for You", a song originally by composer Harry Warren and lyricist Al Dubin.


title: Martina Topley-Bird

text: Her second solo album, "The Blue God", was released in May 2008. The track "Carnies" was released as the first single on 3 March 2008 and reached No. 20 on the UK Indie Charts. "Poison" was released as the second single and reached No.9 on the Indie Charts. The album received generally positive critical reception; the BBC said it "warps reflections of Ella Fitzgerald, two-tone ska, dark psychedelia and Pentangle's 'acid folk' into unsettling shapes ... It's an often astonishing album and one which, if Tricky's forthcoming comeback can't match it, may curse him to be known as 'that bloke who used to rap with Martina Topley Bird.'"


title: Martina Topley-Bird

text: In 2010, Topley-Bird appeared on the album "Heligoland" by Massive Attack, lending her voice on the tracks "Psyche" and "Babel". She also toured with Massive Attack as their support act and providing guest vocals at their shows. Her third album, "Some Place Simple", was released in July 2010. It contained stripped-down versions of songs from her first two releases, along with four new songs. Topley-Bird performed "Maxinquaye" live at the Sundance Festival, London, in April 2012, and also appeared on the tracks "Open" and "Secret" on electronic musician Clark's album "Iradelphic". In 2013 contributed to a cover of the xx's "Crystalised" with Mark Lanegan and Warpaint, and also toured with Warpaint as a supporting act on their 2013 world tour. On 26 January 2015, she appeared as lead vocalist on title track "The Day is My Enemy", the second single of The Prodigy's, from their album "The Day Is My Enemy" (2015).


title: Martina Topley-Bird

text: In 2018 Martina Topley-Bird released the single "Solitude", which would subsequently appear on the four-track EP "MTB Continued".


title: Martina Topley-Bird

text: Topley-Bird cites Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday as vocal influences, as well as Tom Waits and Serge Gainsbourg as instrumental influences. She has cited Bollywood and Asian cinema as an influence on her album artwork as well, including the work of Park Chan-wook.


title: Martina Topley-Bird

text: Topley-Bird had one daughter with Tricky. Mina Mazy (19 March 1995 – 8 May 2019) was born one month after the release of "Maxinquaye".


title: Martina Topley-Bird

text: She has said that she doesn't consider herself religious, though she "believes in the need to have a healthy spiritual life".


title: Sook Ching

text: Sook Ching was a mass killing that occurred from 18 February to 4 March 1942 in Singapore after it fell to the Japanese. It was a systematic purge and massacre of 'anti-Japanese' elements in Singapore, with the Singaporean Chinese particularly targeted by the Japanese military during the occupation. However, Japanese soldiers engaged in indiscriminate killing, and did not try to identify who was 'anti-Japanese.' Singapore was a crucial strategic point in World War II. From 8 February to 15 February, the Japanese had fought for control of the city. The combined British and Commonwealth forces surrendered in a stunning defeat to the outnumbered Japanese on 15 February which led to its fall. The loss of Singapore was and still is Britain's largest surrender in history.


title: Sook Ching

text: Three days later after the fall on 18 February, the occupying Japanese military began mass killings of a wide range of "undesirables", who were mostly ethnic Chinese, influenced by the events of the Second Sino-Japanese War that was raging simultaneously as far back as 1937. The operation was overseen by the Imperial Japanese Army's Kempeitai, its secret police. Along with Singapore, Sook Ching was subsequently also extended to include the Chinese population in Malaya, which was also under occupation by the Japanese. Concurrently, non-Chinese individuals were also not completely spared in other parts of Asia under Japanese occupation; the Japanese had also killed at least 150,000 Tamil Indians as well as an additional 90,000 civilians in Burma and Thailand, many of which were also forced to work on the Siam–Burma Railway, infamously known as the Death Railway.


title: Sook Ching

text: The aim for such a purge was to intimidate the Chinese community, which was considered by the Japanese to be potentially the main centre of resistance to Japanese aims of territorial expansion throughout the Asia-Pacific. The Japanese had also thought of it as a "revenge" for their perceived anti-Japanese activity in the Sinophone regions, such as procuring financial aid for China after the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and during the Second Sino-Japanese War. As a consequence, Sook Ching was aimed primarily at Chinese political and social activists, volunteers fighting on the side of the Allies, as well as representatives of Chinese triads. In practice, however, the arrests and executions were carried out by the Japanese in a completely arbitrary manner, with many civilians randomly killed in summary executions even if they took no part in any organised resistance.


title: Sook Ching

text: After the war, the Japanese authorities acknowledged that the massacre took place, but disagreed about the number of deaths that Japan had caused. Japan alleged that no more "than 6,000 deaths" had occurred, while Singapore's first prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, who was himself almost a victim to Sook Ching, stated that verifiable numbers would put it at "about 70,000", including the figures in Malaya. When mass graves were discovered in 1962, Singaporeans heavily lobbied for their government to demand compensation as well as an official apology from the Japanese government.


title: Sook Ching

text: On 25 October 1966, the Japanese government ultimately agreed to reimburse S$50 million in reparations, half of which constituting as a grant and the rest as a loan. However, the wording used for this reimbursement were classified as a "gesture of atonement", with words such as "damages" or "reparations" being avoided by the Japanese. Furthermore, the Japanese government continued to refuse accepting legal responsibility for the massacre, which would include carrying out an official investigation or inquiry of the deaths. No official apology was also made.


title: Sook Ching

text: Remains of Sook Ching victims would subsequently continue to be unearthed by Singaporeans for decades after the massacre. In 1963, the Civilian War Memorial was constructed in memory of the civilians killed during the occupation, including Sook Ching. Remains belonging to some of the victims were also placed in a tomb under the memorial. In 1992, the various Sook Ching massacre sites around the country such as Changi Beach, Katong, Punggol Point, Tanah Merah and Sentosa were designated with historic plaque markers as heritage sites by the Singaporean government's National Heritage Board, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the occupation.


title: Sook Ching

text: The Japanese referred to the "Sook Ching" as the "Kakyō Shukusei" (, 'purging of Overseas Chinese') or as the "Shingapōru Daikenshō" (, 'great inspection of Singapore'). The current Japanese term for the massacre is "Shingapōru Kakyō Gyakusatsu Jiken" (, 'Singapore Overseas Chinese Massacre').


title: Sook Ching

text: According to postwar testimony taken from a war correspondent embedded with the 25th army, Colonel Hishakari Takafumi, an order to kill 50,000 Chinese, 20 percent of the total, was issued by senior officials on Yamashita's operations staff, either from Lieutenant Colonel Tsuji Masanobu, Chief of Planning and Operations, or Major Hayashi Tadahiko, Chief of Staff.


title: Sook Ching

text: Hirofumi Hayashi, a professor of politics at a university and the co-director of the Center for Research and Documentation on Japan's War Responsibility, writes that the massacre was premeditated, and that "the Chinese in Singapore were regarded as anti-Japanese even before the Japanese military landed". It is also clear from the passage below that the massacre was to be extended to the Chinese in Malaya as well.


title: Sook Ching

text: After the Japanese military occupied Singapore, they were aware that the local Chinese population was loyal to the Republic of China. Some Chinese had been financing the National Revolutionary Army in the Second Sino-Japanese War through a series of fund-raising propagandist events.


title: Sook Ching

text: After the fall of Singapore, Masayuki Oishi, commander of No. 2 Field Kenpeitai, set up his headquarters in the YMCA Building at Stamford Road as the Kenpeitai East District Branch. The Kenpeitai prison was in Outram with branches in Stamford Road, Chinatown and the Central Police Station. A residence at the intersection of Smith Street and New Bridge Road formed the Kenpeitai West District Branch.


title: Sook Ching

text: Under Oishi's command were 200 regular Kenpeitai officers and another 1000 auxiliaries, who were mostly young and rough peasant soldiers. Singapore was divided into sectors with each sector under the control of an officer. The Japanese set up designated "screening centres" all over Singapore to gather and "screen" Chinese males between the ages of 18 and 50. Those who were thought to be "anti-Japanese" would be eliminated. Sometimes, women and children were also sent for inspection as well.


title: Sook Ching

text: According to the "A Country Study: Singapore" published by the Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress:


title: Sook Ching

text: The ones who passed the "screening" received a piece of paper bearing the word "examined" or have a square ink mark stamped on their arms or shirts. Those who failed were stamped with triangular marks instead. They were separated from the others and packed into trucks near the centres and sent to the killing sites.


title: Sook Ching

text: There were several sites for the killings, the most notable ones being Changi Beach, Punggol Point and Sentosa (or Pulau Belakang Mati).


title: Sook Ching

text: In a quarterly newsletter, the National Heritage Board published the account of the life story of a survivor named Chia Chew Soo, whose father, uncles, aunts, brothers and sisters were bayoneted one by one by Japanese soldiers in Simpang Village.


title: Sook Ching

text: At the behest of Masanobu Tsuji, the Japanese High Command's Chief of Planning and Operations, Sook Ching was extended to the rest of Malaya. However, due to a far wider population distribution across urban centres and vast rural regions, the Chinese population in Malaya was less concentrated and more difficult to survey. Lacking sufficient time and manpower to organise a full "screening", the Japanese opted instead to conduct widespread and indiscriminate massacres of the Chinese population. The primary bulk of the killings were conducted between February to March, and were largely concentrated in the southern states of Malaya, closer to Singapore.


title: Sook Ching

text: Specific incidents were Kota Tinggi, Johore (28 February 1942) – 2,000 killed; Gelang Patah, Johor (4 March) – 300 killed; Benut, Johor (6 March) – number unknown; Johore Bahru, Senai, Kulai, Sedenak, Pulai, Renggam, Kluang, Yong Peng, Batu Pahat, Senggarang, Parit Bakau, and Muar (February–March) – estimated up to 25,000 Chinese were killed in Johor; Tanjung Kling, Malacca (16 March) – 142 killed; Kuala Pilah, Negeri Sembilan (15 March) – 76 killed; Parit Tinggi, Negeri Sembilan (16 March) – more than 100 killed (the entire village); Joo Loong Loong (near the present village of Titi) on 18 March (1474 killed, entire village eliminated by Major Yokokoji Kyomi and his troops); and Penang (April) – several thousand killed by Major Higashigawa Yoshimura. Further massacres were instigated as a result of increased guerilla activity in Malaya, most notably at Sungei Lui, a village of 400 in Jempol District, Negeri Sembilan, which was wiped out on 31 July 1942 by troops under a Corporal Hashimoto.


title: Sook Ching

text: The Japanese also killed about 150,000 Tamil Indians in Thailand and Myanmar during the war, although it is believed that the true number of deaths is much higher for the Tamil Indians. It excludes the death toll of the Malayali Indians. The Indians came from Singapore or Malaya under Japanese supervision.


title: Sook Ching

text: Japanese camp guards frequently killed entire Indian families or the entire Indian population of whole camps. They also killed Indian families or camps that were infected with typhus, sometimes for sadistic reasons. Aside from killing the Indians, Japanese soldiers often gang raped Tamil women after which they would force other Indian coolies to rape the Indian women.


title: Sook Ching

text: Due to the lack of concrete written records by the Japanese when orchestrating the massacre as well as many of the deaths being the result of random summary executions, the official death toll remains unknown. Japan acknowledged the massacre after the war, but alleged a death toll of about 6,000, whereas the Singaporean Chinese community as well as prime minister Lee Kuan Yew alleged a death toll of about 70,000 to 100,000. Retrospective analysis by historians as well as the scale of mass graves that was discovered decades after the massacre ranges the death toll at about 25,000 to 50,000.


title: Sook Ching

text: According to Lieutenant Colonel Hishakari Takafumi, a newspaper correspondent at the time, the plan was to ultimately kill about 50,000 Chinese, and half that (25,000) had already been achieved when the order was received to scale down the operation. He said Major Hayashi Tadahiko told him that "it had been found to be impossible to kill the whole of the 50,000 people, as after half that number had been killed an order was received 'to stop the massacre.'"


title: Sook Ching

text: Japanese historian Hirofumi Hayashi wrote in another paper that the death toll "needs further investigation":


title: Sook Ching

text: Chinese film pioneer Hou Yao had emigrated to Singapore in 1940 to work for the Shaw brothers as well as to largely avoid the Japanese invasion of China. Because Hou had directed and written a number of patriotic Chinese "national defence" films against that invasion, he was targeted by the Japanese immediately after Singapore fell and killed at the beginning of the massacre.


title: Sook Ching

text: In 1947, after the Japanese surrender, British authorities in Singapore held a war crimes trial for the perpetrators of the Sook Ching. Seven Japanese officers: Takuma Nishimura, Saburo Kawamura, Masayuki Oishi, Yoshitaka Yokata, Tomotatsu Jo, Satoru Onishi, and Haruji Hisamatsu, were charged with conducting the massacre. Staff officer Masanobu Tsuji was the mastermind behind the massacre, and personally planned and carried it out, but at the time of the war crimes trials he had not been arrested. As soon as the war ended, Tsuji escaped from Thailand to China. The accused seven persons who followed Tsuji's commands were on trial.


title: Sook Ching

text: During the trial, one major problem was that the Japanese commanders did not pass down any formal written orders for the massacre. Documentation of the screening process or disposal procedures had also been destroyed. Besides, the Japanese military headquarters' order for the speedy execution of the operation, combined with ambiguous instructions from the commanders, led to suspicions being cast on the accused, and it became difficult to accurately establish their culpability.


title: Sook Ching

text: Saburo Kawamura and Masayuki Oishi received the death penalty while the other five received life sentences, though Takuma Nishimura was later executed in 1951 following conviction by an Australian military court for his role in the Parit Sulong Massacre. The court accepted the defence statement of "just following orders" by those put on trial. The condemned were hanged on 26 June 1947. The British authorities allowed only six members of the victims' families to witness the executions of Kawamura and Oishi, despite calls for the hangings to be made public.


title: Sook Ching

text: The mastermind behind the massacre, Masanobu Tsuji, escaped. Tsuji, later after the trial and the execution, appeared in Japan and became a politician there. Tsuji evaded trial, but later disappeared, presumedly killed in Laos in 1961. Tomoyuki Yamashita, the general from whose headquarters the order seems to have been issued, was put on another trial in the Philippines and executed in 1946. Other staff officers, who planned the massacre, were Shigeharu Asaeda and Sōsaku Suzuki. But, as Shigeharu was captured in Russia after the war, and Suzuki killed in action in 1945 before the end of the war, they were not put on trial.


title: Sook Ching

text: The reminiscences of Saburo Kawamura were published in 1952 (after his death) and, in the book, he expressed his condolences to the victims of Singapore and prayed for the repose of their souls.


title: Sook Ching

text: Mamoru Shinozaki (February 1908 – 1991), a former Japanese diplomat, has been described as instrumental as key prosecution witness during the Singapore War Crimes Trial between 1946 and 1948. Shinozaki remains a controversial figure, with some blaming him for saying positive things about the accused (despite being a prosecuting witness); views on him continue to vary, with opinions ranging from calling him the "wire-puller" of the massacre or criticizing him for "self-praise" in his autobiography to calling him a life-saving "Schindler" of Singapore.


title: Sook Ching

text: When Singapore gained full self-government from the British colonial government in 1959, waves of anti-Japanese sentiments arose within the Chinese community and they demanded reparations and an apology from Japan. Prior to self-governance, the British colonial government had only demanded war reparations for damage caused to British property during the war, but not the ones suffered by the Chinese, Malays, and Indians. Actions such as these, among others, was what resulted in many of the local populace of all ethnic groups feeling that the British were no longer competent in Singapore's administration and defence after the war.


title: Sook Ching

text: The Japanese Foreign Ministry declined Singapore's request for an apology and reparations in 1963, stating that the issue of war reparations with the British had already been settled in the San Francisco Treaty in 1951 and hence with Singapore as well, which was then still a British colony. Singapore's first prime minister Lee Kuan Yew responded by saying that the British colonial government did not represent the voice of Singaporeans. In September 1963, the Chinese community staged a boycott of Japanese imports by refusing to unload aircraft and ships from Japan, which lasted for a week.


title: Sook Ching

text: Lee, however, was also a pragmatist, and was actually somewhat concerned by the boycott. He felt that the tenacious emphasis on the martyrdom of the Sook Ching victims would disrupt the fragile ethnic balance and destroy his efforts to build a united Singaporean national identity, in addition to obstructing Singapore's "laissez-faire" economic policy at the Port of Singapore. As a result, he took the position that the commemoration activities must be aimed at paying tribute to all civilian victims of the Japanese occupation, irrespective of their ethnic origin. After all, he added that the Japanese were brutal to all ethnic groups. Lee also wanted Japan's compensation to the families of Sook Ching victims to also complement contributing to the development of Singapore.


title: Sook Ching

text: According to Hirofumi Hayashi, the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs "accepted that the Japanese military had carried out mass killings in Singapore ... During negotiations with Singapore, the Japanese government rejected demands for reparations but agreed to make a 'gesture of atonement' by providing funds in other ways."


title: Sook Ching

text: Nevertheless, the Japanese government was motivated to provide compensation to Singapore because of the potential economic damage to Japan as a result of a boycott or sabotage by the local Chinese should Singapore's demands be rejected. They also saw the potential for Singapore's post-war ensuing success and was keen on repairing their relations.


title: Sook Ching

text: With Singapore's full independence from Malaysia on 9 August 1965, the Singapore government made another request to Japan for reparations and an apology. On 25 October 1966, Japan agreed to pay S$50 million in compensation, half of which was a grant and the rest as a loan. However, Japan did not make an official apology. These payments were also classified as a "gesture of atonement", and not "damages" or "reparations".


title: Sook Ching

text: Due to the fact that only a few remains of Sook Ching victims were found during the occupation and in the first post-war years, the families of the murdered did not have the opportunity to commemorate their relatives while respecting Chinese traditions. For this reason, a Taoist ceremony was held in early 1948 in the neighbourhood of Siglap in the eastern part of Singapore, in what is known as the "Valley Of Tears" – where mass graves from the Japanese occupation period were suspected to be, a Taoist ceremony was held to "soothe hungry ghosts."


title: Sook Ching

text: Thousands of Singaporean Chinese – mostly family members of the victims – took part in it. In the same year, a special committee was established, chaired by local businessman Tay Koh Yat. His task was to find the remains of Sook Ching victims. For the first dozen or so years, the effects of the committee's work were, however, extremely modest.


title: Sook Ching

text: It was not until 1962 that the mass graves of Sook Ching victims were accidentally discovered at the "Valley Of Tears" in Siglap. On the initiative of the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Industry, search and exhumation work began – also in other alleged Japanese crime scenes. In the years 1962 to 1966, nearly 100 graves were discovered. The Chinese community called for the construction of a cemetery in Siglap and a monument to the victims of the massacre.


title: Sook Ching

text: The remains of the victims of the Sook Ching would continue to be unearthed by locals for decades after the massacre. The most recent finding was as late as 1997 – when a man looking for earthworms to use as fishing bait found a skull, two gold teeth, an arm and a leg.


title: Sook Ching

text: A memorial to the victims of the Japanese occupation, known as the Civilian War Memorial, was erected at Beach Road in central Singapore. It was unveiled on 15 February 1967, 25 years after the fall, during a ceremony attended by prime minister Lee Kuan Yew. The monument consists of four pillars, 67.4 meters high, symbolizing the four largest ethnic groups in the country. The pedestal of the memorial also has inscriptions written in Singapore's four official languages, English, Chinese, Malay, and Tamil. Under the monument, there is a tomb containing the remains of Sook Ching victims, which were found from 1962 to 1966. Every year on 15 February, on the anniversary of Singapore's surrender, ceremonies are held at the Civilian War Memorial in honor of the victims of the war.


title: Sook Ching

text: The massacre sites of Changi Beach, Katong, Punggol Point, Tanah Merah and Sentosa were marked as heritage sites in 1992 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the end of the Japanese occupation.


title: Sook Ching

text: Among other sites, this specific war monument plaque was erected at the Changi Beach Park (near Camp Site 2) in the eastern part of Singapore. The inscription on the monument plaque, which was also repeated in Singapore's three other official languages of Chinese, Malay and Tamil, as well as in Japanese, reads:


title: Sook Ching

text: The massacre and its post-war judicial handling by the colonial British administration incensed the Chinese community. The Discovery Channel programme commented about its historic impact on local Chinese: "They felt the Japanese spilling of so much Chinese blood on Singapore soil has given them the moral claim to the island that hasn't existed before the war". Lee Kuan Yew said on the Discovery Channel programme, "It was the catastrophic consequences of the war that changed the mindset, that my generation decided that, 'No ... this doesn't make sense. We should be able to run this [island] as well as the British did, if not better.'" "The Asiatics had looked to them for leadership, and they had failed them."


title: Sook Ching

text: The memories of those who lived through that period have been captured at exhibition galleries in the Old Ford Motor Factory at Bukit Timah, the site of the factory where the British surrendered to the Japanese on 15 February 1942.


title: Sook Ching

text: A published undergraduate thesis from the University of Oregon in 2020 argued that the circumstances surrounding Sook Ching should be defined as a genocide instead of a massacre. It is argued that since the crime was racially motivated, targeting primarily Chinese men of working age, the crime fits the classification of genocide as the pursuit of destroying and/or reducing that group's population.


title: London Borough of Hounslow

text: The London Borough of Hounslow () is a London borough in West London, England, forming part of Outer London. It was created in 1965 when three smaller borough councils (forming part of the former Middlesex County Council area) amalgamated under the London Government Act 1963. It is governed by Hounslow London Borough Council.


title: London Borough of Hounslow

text: The borough stretches from near Central London in the east (Chiswick) to the border with Surrey in the west (Feltham and Bedfont), covering five major towns: Chiswick (W4), Brentford (TW8), Isleworth (TW7), Hounslow (TW3, TW4, TW5) and Feltham (TW13, TW14); it borders the boroughs of Richmond upon Thames, Hammersmith and Fulham, Ealing and Hillingdon, in addition to the Spelthorne district of Surrey.


title: London Borough of Hounslow

text: The Borough is home to the London Museum of Water & Steam and the attractions of Osterley Park, Gunnersbury Park, Syon House, and Chiswick House. Moreover, landmarks straddling the border of Hounslow include; Twickenham Stadium and London Heathrow Airport in the London Boroughs of Richmond-upon-Thames and Hillingdon respectively.


title: London Borough of Hounslow

text: Although the majority of these towns are situated in the borough, many smaller settlements that comprise them are located in adjacent boroughs. Approximately a third of Chiswick – north of the London Underground (District/Piccadilly line) railway line – falls within the London Borough of Ealing. A few roads in Brentford (around Claypond Hospital) and Isleworth (south of the River Crane and around Whitton) lay within the London Boroughs of Ealing and Richmond upon Thames respectively. A significant minority of Hounslow – south of the railway and southeast of Hounslow Heath – fall within the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames, whilst some of Hounslow – west of the River Crane – falls within the London Borough of Hillingdon. Minor parts of Feltham fall within the Borough of Spelthorne in Surrey, meaning that these parts of the town are situated outside Greater London.


title: London Borough of Hounslow

text: The borough's area is approximately quarter parkland. Large areas of London's open space fall within its boundaries, including Chiswick House and Gardens, Gunnersbury Park, Syon Park, Osterley Park, Hounslow Heath, Avenue Park in Cranford, and Hanworth Park. The borough's predominant land use is mainly residential, with a large, commercial town centre of Hounslow. Other large town centres include Chiswick, Feltham and Brentford. Business is mainly focused on retail and aviation (due to the proximity of Heathrow Airport), especially in the west of the borough (Hounslow and Feltham). Parts of the Borough, including Chiswick, Turnham Green, Osterley and Old Isleworth are some of the most expensive parts of Outer London, with other areas such as Hounslow, Feltham and Heston being more affordable.


title: London Borough of Hounslow

text: Major parks and recreational spaces include; Chiswick Gardens, Chiswick common, Turnham Green, Gunnersbury Park, Gunnersbury Triangle Nature reserve, Carville Hall Parks, Claypond Garden, Boston Manor Park, London Playing field, Syon Park, Osterley Park, Thornbury Park, Lampton Park, Inwood Park, Heston Sports Ground, Hounslow Heath, Avenue Park, Crane Park, Letrim Park, Hanworth Park and Bedfont Lakes Country Park. Parks that are a short distance from Hounslow's border are; Ravenscourt Park (London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham), Acton Green common, Acton Park, Ealing common, Elthorne Parkin the London Borough of Ealing, Cranford Park in the London Borough of Hillingdon, Hampton common, Fulwell Golf club, Crane Park (Whitton), Murray Park, Kew Gardens, Old Deer Park, Marble Hill Park, Richmond Park, Ham Lands, Bushy Park and Hampton Court in the London Borough of Richmond-upon-Thames.


title: London Borough of Hounslow

text: The River Thames forms the natural boundary between Hounslow and Richmond-upon-Thames. It runs through the borough at Chiswick, Brentford and Isleworth. Various tributaries and dis tributaries of the Thames flow through the borough, including; The River Crane, River Brent/Grand Union Canal, Duke of Northumberland's River, Longford River and the Feltham Hill Brook to name a few.


title: London Borough of Hounslow

text: Hounslow abuts the perimeter of Heathrow Airport in the London Borough of Hillingdon. Plans for the expansion of Heathrow Airport are vigorously opposed by Hounslow if such plans increase or widen noise and pollution, weighed against arguments of greater employment and spending.


title: London Borough of Hounslow

text: Four bridges join Hounslow to London Borough of Richmond upon Thames on the south side of the Thames:


title: London Borough of Hounslow

text: Previously, the Borough also encompassed part of Richmond Lock and Twickenham Bridge. This changed in 1994 when the adjacent areas surrounding these bridges were transferred to the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames.


title: London Borough of Hounslow

text: There are several bridges crossing the River Brent, Grand Union Canal, River Crane and Duke of Northumberland's River.


title: London Borough of Hounslow

text: River services between Westminster Pier and Hampton Court depart from Kew Gardens Pier just across the River Thames from Hounslow.


title: London Borough of Hounslow

text: The borough is well connected to Central London, Heathrow Airport, other London boroughs and Southeast England as a whole through various National Rail and London Underground stations. The South Western Railway serves the borough's five main towns (with additional stops at Kew Bridge and Syon Lane). London Underground District and Piccadilly lines enter the borough from Central London in the east heading either to other West and Southwest London suburbs (with the London Overground's North London Line) or towards Heathrow.


title: London Borough of Hounslow

text: <nowiki>*</nowiki>"Chiswick Park, Acton Town and Hatton Cross omit the borough boundaries and are in the London Boroughs of Ealing and Hillingdon."


title: London Borough of Hounslow

text: In March 2011, the main forms of transport that residents used to travel to work were (of all residents aged 16–74):


title: London Borough of Hounslow

text: The borough is home to the headquarters of GlaxoSmithKline and Sky plc, both based in Brentford's 'Golden Mile' stretch of the A4 Great West Road, and several supermarket outlets once known across the globe for its cluster of factories and offices, and is currently going under extensive re developments in the form of new apartment blocks and offices. Fuller's Griffin Brewery is also in the borough, in Chiswick. Aston Martin were based in Feltham for several years before moving to Newport Pagnell, Buckinghamshire.


title: London Borough of Hounslow

text: Air France-KLM's head office for United Kingdom and Ireland operations, which includes facilities for Air France and KLM, is located in Plesman House in Hatton Cross in the borough. The Plesman House, outside of Terminal 4 of London Heathrow Airport, has the UK commercial team, sales team, and support team. Sega Europe has its head office in Brentford. Menzies Aviation has its head office by the airport in Feltham. JCDecaux UK has its head office in Brentford.


title: London Borough of Hounslow

text: Before winding-up British Mediterranean Airways was headquartered at Hetherington House near London Heathrow Airport


title: London Borough of Hounslow

text: A 2017 study by Trust for London and New Policy Institute found that pay inequality in Hounslow is the second largest of any London borough. It also found that 25% people in Hounslow live in poverty, which is slightly lower than the London-wide poverty rate of 27%.


title: London Borough of Hounslow

text: 53.3% of the borough's population is White, 34.4% is Asian, and 6.6% is Black. The most noticeable South Asian populations in the borough are in Hounslow, Heston and Cranford, all of which also have considerable Eastern European populations. The majority of Afro-Caribbean, West African, and East African populations are situated around the Brentford, Isleworth and Feltham areas. The majority of the White British population reside in the eastern and western parts of the borough (Chiswick, Brentford, Isleworth, Osterley, Hounslow East, Hanworth, Feltham and Bedfont), with this population being most prominent in the affluent areas of Chiswick and Osterley.


title: London Borough of Hounslow

text: In terms of religion, 42% identify themselves as Christian, 14% Muslim, 10.3% Hindu, 9% Sikh, 1.4% Buddhist and 0.3% Jewish; 18% of the population is not religious. At 9%, Hounslow has the largest proportion of Sikhs in London, and the third-highest in England after Slough and Wolverhampton.


title: London Borough of Hounslow

text: Elections across the London boroughs are currently held every four years. Since the Hounslow borough was formed, it has been controlled by the Labour Party on all but two elections: in 1968 the Conservatives formed a majority until they lost control to Labour in 1971, while the 2006 local elections produced a no overall control result. Although Labour was the largest party on the Council, the Conservatives formed a coalition with the six Councillors from the independent Isleworth Community Group (ICG) which administered the area until the 2010 local elections when Labour regained control.


title: London Borough of Hounslow

text: Reflecting how votes were cast in the national elections, in separate polls held the same day, for the 2010-2014 period, the Conservatives and Labour won fifteen seats each from the Brentford and Isleworth constituency. Overall, control was held by the Council's Labour administration as 20 Labour Party Councillors and 10 Conservative Party Councillors were elected for wards in the Feltham and Heston half of the borough.


title: London Borough of Hounslow

text: Between 1998 and 2006 Independents were elected to the London Borough of Hounslow from the area. The first Independent Community Group (ICG) Councillor was elected in 1998 as Isleworth Community Group in Isleworth. In 2002 three ICG Councillors were elected in Isleworth. In 2006 six ICG Councillors were elected (Syon and Isleworth wards), and former Labour Leader of the Council John Connelly was re-elected as an Independent in Hounslow Heath ward. All seven of the Independents were defeated in the local elections held on 6 May 2010 by, in their respective wards, Labour Party candidates. Since then one Conservative councillor has become an Independent and four Conservative Councillors have defected to UKIP. Since 2019, the council has been based at Hounslow House in Bath Road.


title: London Borough of Hounslow

text: The town of Hounslow, which has existed since the 13th century, is located at the centre of the Borough of Hounslow. The name Hounslow means 'Hund's mound'; the personal name Hund is followed by the Old English "hlaew" meaning mound or barrow. (The mound may have been his burial place.) It was recorded in the Domesday Book as "Honeslaw".


title: London Borough of Hounslow

text: The borough was formed in 1965, under the London Government Act 1963, by the merger of the area of the Municipal Borough of Brentford and Chiswick, The Municipal Borough of Heston and Isleworth and Feltham Urban District of Middlesex.


title: London Borough of Hounslow

text: The Borough is an outer borough of Greater London and lies on the Middlesex bank of the River Thames. It is the site of the first stop on an important coach route to Southampton, Bath, Bristol and Exeter. The A30 Great South West Road, which runs down to Penzance in Cornwall, starts in the borough. Hounslow town developed on either side of the main Great West Road (now the A3006/A4 Bath Road ) from London to the West of England, causing a large number of inns to be built to serve the travellers. A few, such as "The Bell" retain their names, although the buildings have largely been replaced. The Bell marks the former junction of the coaching routes of the A314 Hanworth Road, A315 Staines Road, A3005 Lampton Road and the A3006 Bath Road. Historic milestones are preserved on the Staines Road (now re-numbered as the A315 but joining the "old" A30 again just inside the borough's western boundary)


title: London Borough of Hounslow

text: Hounslow grew rapidly in the latter half of the 20th century due to other travel, a connection to the largest of London's airports since the 1940s, Heathrow Airport which is in the Hounslow post town. Little known is that aviation dates to the early 1900s here when one of London's earliest airfields was situated on Hounslow Heath because of the extremely flat terrain. The Great West Road, which crosses the borough from Chiswick to Heathrow, at one time served nationally and globally famous manufacturers including Firestone, Gillette and Coty. As a result, the area became known as the "Golden Mile". A few of these factory sites remain today, such as Gillette Corner, and the Great West Road is still home to many prestigious names (see "famous companies" below), providing them with easy non-motorway access between Slough, London Heathrow Airport and Central London.


title: London Borough of Hounslow

text: The borough is also home to Premiership Rugby side London Irish who share the Gtech Community Stadium with Brentford.


title: London Borough of Hounslow

text: Ian Gillan, vocalist for Deep Purple, and formerly of Black Sabbath and Gillan, is a native of Hounslow. Alistair Overeem a UFC Champion was also born here.


title: Perry Ellis

text: Perry Edwin Ellis (March 3, 1940 – May 30, 1986) was an American fashion designer who founded his eponymous sportswear house in the mid-1970s. Ellis' influence on the fashion industry has been called "a huge turning point" because he introduced new patterns and proportions to a market which was dominated by more traditional men's clothing.


title: Perry Ellis

text: Ellis was born in Portsmouth, Virginia, on March 3, 1940, the only child of Edwin and Winifred Rountree Ellis. His father owned a coal and home heating oil company, which enabled the family to live a comfortable middle-class life. Ellis graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School in Portsmouth, Virginia, in 1957. He then studied at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, and graduated with a degree in business administration in 1961. To avoid the draft, Ellis enlisted in the United States Coast Guard Reserve with service that included six months of active duty with the Coast Guard. He graduated from New York University with a master's degree in retailing in 1963.


title: Perry Ellis

text: Ellis started out in department store retailing in the Richmond, Virginia, area to gain experience in the fashion industry as a buyer and merchandiser at the department store Miller & Rhoads. While there, he was co-founder of Richmond retail shop "A Sunny Day". He later joined the sportswear company John Meyer of Norwich in Manhattan.


title: Perry Ellis

text: In the mid-1970s, he was approached by his then employer, The Vera Companies, famous for their polyester double-knit pantsuits, to design a fashion collection for them. In November 1976, Ellis presented his first women's sportswear line, called Portfolio. Although he was not a skilled sketcher, he knew exactly how the industry worked and proved a master of innovative ideas who created "new classics" that American women longed for at the time. He was initially known for his versions of the oversized, unconstructed, layered, natural-fiber, mid-1970s Big Look or Soft Look that was the leading fashion trend of the time, for which he was compared favorably to Kenzo, the 1973 originator of the look. Ellis enhanced this trend by creating substantial, hand-knit-looking sweaters in rough-hewn textures that combined well with the earthtones and loose shapes of the period. He would be known for his sweaters for the rest of his career.


title: Perry Ellis

text: Together with The Vera Companies' parent company, Manhattan Industries, he founded his own fashion house, Perry Ellis International, in 1978, opening his showroom on New York's Seventh Avenue. That same year, he interpreted the new big shoulders of the fall in a way that proved more popular with the US public than the extreme forties-revival looks emanating from Europe, adding large but soft shoulder pads to his familiar earthy textures in new, slimmed down, but still casual shapes. He can also be credited in this fall 1978 collection with introducing the trend for layering one set of shoulder pads on top of another, which would become common in the 1980s, as would the flounced miniskirts, called rah-rah skirts in the UK, that he and Norma Kamali introduced the following year. His cropped pants, cropped sweaters, and dimpled sleeves of the end of the seventies were also influential.


title: Perry Ellis

text: As the company's chairman and head designer he later developed Perry Ellis Menswear Collection – marked by Step by step, he added shoes, accessories, furs and perfume that all bear his name. Throughout the 1980s, the Perry Ellis company continued to expand and include various labels, such as Perry Ellis Collection and Perry Ellis Portfolio.


title: Perry Ellis

text: During the first half of the 1980s, Perry Ellis was as prominent a US fashion name as Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren. He continued to be known for the sweaters, cropped trousers, and silhouette experimentation that he had begun at the end of the seventies, including the flippy miniskirts that he and Norma Kamali introduced in 1979. He was also known for the very high quality of his fabrics, most of which he imported from Europe.


title: Perry Ellis

text: In 1980, Ellis explored handmade knitwear, enlarged patterns, and enlarged Argyle and launched his first male collection. He also began that year to provide alternatives to the prominent shoulder-padding he became known for in 1978, adding width instead with capelet collars and top-of-sleeve tucks and pleats. For spring of 1981, he presented soft corsets and hip-padded versions of the short skirts he had begun showing in 1979, and he began using a few more substantial fabrics for shaping. This former leader of the mid-seventies Big Look joined Fall 1981's brief return to that style with relish, showing longer lengths, loose layers, and harem pants with Cossack-inspired hats and capes, though the look this time was more structured, via cummerbunds, extended shoulders, and tulle petticoats.


title: Perry Ellis

text: In 1982, Perry Ellis won the Council of Fashion Designers of America's Designer of the year award, at a time when his company had more than 75 staff. He released his "Chariots of Fire" collection for spring of that year, continuing to show the longer lengths he had favored the previous fall, though never exclusively. For his fall 1982 collection, he tried his hand at some of the highly tailored suit styles that had dominated fashion since 1978, to a cooler-than-usual critical reception. In 1983, he showed high-waisted fit-and-flare skirts and slim trousers with short jackets.


title: Perry Ellis

text: He reduced the rise of the previous year's high waistband somewhat for Spring of 1984, when he presented a collection intended to suggest an idyllic Australia, replete with his well-loved cropped trousers, cropped jackets, and focus on long skirts. In 1984, Perry Ellis America was created in cooperation with Levi Strauss and he revived his lesser-priced Portfolio product line, filling it with the kind of soft, unlined, comfortable clothes he had shown in the mid-seventies, now updated with broader shoulders. His Fall 1984 collection for both men and women was an homage to artist Sonia Delaunay and focused on Ellis's trademark sweaters in Delaunay colors. Prints and slimmer, more minimal shapes were a focus for his Spring 1985 collection, with large florals, revealing cuts, and tunic sweaters prominent. These closer-to-the-body cuts would continue through the end of the year, enlivened by prints and colors inspired by Chinese porcelains.


title: Perry Ellis

text: In the early 1980s, wholesale revenues had figured at about $60 million. By 1986 that number had risen to about $260 million.


title: Perry Ellis

text: Highly praised professionally and personally, Ellis believed that "fashion dies when you take it too seriously." Of Perry Ellis's fashion design, Michael Bastian remarked that "no one did it better...He was able to be modern and yet not come off antiseptic." "New York Times" fashion columnist Bernadine Morris praised Ellis's tweeds and sweaters as "comfortable and forever-looking," with the "insouciant feeling of a college woman slipping into her boyfriend's jacket that is a size or so too big for her, or putting together a jacket and a pair of pants in patterns that don't quite match, but look quite appealing," while Steven Kolb, CEO of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, described Ellis' fashion as "my way to step forward in fashion, but to still have a comfort level. It helped define my personality."


title: Perry Ellis

text: In 1981, Ellis began a relationship with attorney Laughlin Barker. Later that year, Ellis appointed Barker the President of the licensing division of Perry Ellis International. They remained together until Barker's death in January 1986.


title: Perry Ellis

text: In February 1984, Ellis and his long-time friend, television producer and writer Barbara Gallagher, conceived a child together via artificial insemination. Their daughter, Tyler Alexandra Gallagher Ellis, was born in November 1984. Ellis bought a home for Gallagher and their daughter in Brentwood, Los Angeles, and would visit frequently. In 2011, Tyler released her first line of handbags using the name Tyler Alexandra.


title: Perry Ellis

text: In October 1985, rumors that Ellis had contracted AIDS began to surface when he appeared on the runway at the end of his Fall fashion show. By that time, Ellis had lost a considerable amount of weight and looked much older. Around the same time, Ellis' partner Laughlin Barker was undergoing chemotherapy for Kaposi's sarcoma, an AIDS-related cancer that later metastasized to his lungs. Ellis continued to deny that he was sick, but rumors of his illness persisted after he passed out in the receiving line at a party at the Costume Institute in December 1985. On January 2, 1986, Barker died of lung cancer at the couple's home in Manhattan. After Barker's death, Ellis' health rapidly declined. By May 1986, Ellis had contracted viral encephalitis which caused paralysis on one side of his face. Despite his appearance, he insisted on appearing at his Fall fashion show held in New York City on May 8. At the end of the show, Ellis attempted to walk the runway for his final bow but was so weak, he had to be supported by two assistants. It was his final public appearance. Ellis was hospitalized soon after and slipped into a coma. He died of viral encephalitis on May 30, 1986. A spokesperson for Ellis' company would not comment on whether the designer's death was AIDS-related stating, "Those were Perry's wishes."


title: Perry Ellis

text: Most newspapers omitted the AIDS rumors from Ellis' obituary and simply attributed his death to encephalitis. In August 1986, "New York" magazine writer Patricia Morrisroe wrote a story about Ellis where she concluded that, "...many people believe Ellis had AIDS, and given the evidence, it seems likely." A 1993 article from the Associated Press included Ellis among its list of better known AIDS victims.


title: Perry Ellis

text: Steven Kolb defined Perry Ellis legacy with the following words: "In terms of men's fashion, he was the first to bring the idea of dressing up in a casual way to the American man". In 1986, the annual Perry Ellis Award—now known as the Swarovski Emerging Talent Award—was created to honor emerging talents in the world of men's and women's fashion designers. The first designer to receive it was David Cameron.


title: Perry Ellis

text: Though he worked as a designer for less than a decade, over 25 years after his death his work is "still seen as incredibly influential."


title: Perry Ellis

text: In 1999, Miami-based textile company Supreme International purchased the Perry Ellis brand from Salant, a licensee of Perry Ellis that acquired it from Manhattan Industries in 1986. Supreme renamed itself Perry Ellis International and the company became traded on the NASDAQ under PERY. Perry Ellis International also owns and licenses other notable fashion brands, such as Original Penguin by Munsingwear, Cubavera, C&C California, Rafaella, Laundry by Shelli Segal, Ben Hogan, Jantzen, Nike Swim and Callaway, among others.


title: Perry Ellis

text: In the twenty-first century, the Perry Ellis brand has continued to expand. Building upon styles set forth by Ellis, the brand has successfully continued to expand, collaborate with other designers, such as Duckie Brown, and hold critical acclaim.


title: Huntz Hall

text: Henry Richard "Huntz" Hall (August 15, 1920 – January 30, 1999) was an American radio, stage, and movie performer who appeared in the popular "Dead End Kids" movies, including "Angels with Dirty Faces" (1938), and in the later "Bowery Boys" movies, during the late 1930s to the late 1950s.


title: Huntz Hall

text: Hall was born in 1920 in New York City to Joseph Patrick Hall, an engineer from Ireland, and his wife, Mary Ellen ( Mullen) Hall. The fourteenth of sixteen children, he was nicknamed "Huntz" because of his ostensibly Teutonic nose. He attended Catholic schools and started performing on radio at five years of age.


title: Huntz Hall

text: He appeared on Broadway in the 1935 production of "Dead End", a play written and directed by Sidney Kingsley. Hall was then cast along with the other Dead End Kids in the 1937 film "Dead End", directed by William Wyler and starring Humphrey Bogart.


title: Huntz Hall

text: Hall served in the United States Army during World War II. In 1943, he appeared in the USN training film "Don't Kill Your Friends" as moronic Ensign Dilbert the Pilot, who carelessly causes the death of a civilian and three servicemen.


title: Huntz Hall

text: In 1948, Hall was arrested for possession of marijuana. His trial, held in 1949, resulted in a hung jury.


title: Huntz Hall

text: Hall later played the increasingly buffoonish Horace DeBussy "Sach" Jones in 48 of "The Bowery Boys" films, gaining top billing when his longtime partner, Leo Gorcey, left the series in 1956. Hall and Gorcey reunited in "Second Fiddle to a Steel Guitar" (1966) and "The Phynx" (1969).


title: Huntz Hall

text: He also appeared in such films as "The Return of Doctor X" (1939), "A Walk in the Sun" (1945), "Gentle Giant" (1967), "Herbie Rides Again" (1974), and "The Manchu Eagle Murder Caper Mystery" (1975) opposite Gabriel Dell, another former Bowery Boy.


title: Huntz Hall

text: He was one of the celebrities featured on the cover of The Beatles' 1967 album, "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band". In 1971, he co-starred with Art Metrano and Jamie Farr in the CBS situation comedy "The Chicago Teddy Bears". His plans to produce a movie series, "The Ghetto Boys" (a take on the "Bowery Boys"), fell through. In 1973, Hall took part in Princess Grace of Monaco's Council for Drug Abuse, part of the Catholic Office of Drug Education.


title: Huntz Hall

text: In 1976, he appeared in "Won Ton Ton, the Dog Who Saved Hollywood," and in 1977 he played movie mogul Jesse Lasky in Ken Russell's film "Valentino." His later films included "Gas Pump Girls" (1979) and "The Escape Artist" (1982), the latter reuniting him with Gabriel Dell. His final film appearance was in "Auntie Lee's Meat Pies" in 1993. He performed in dinner theater productions and then retired in 1994.


title: Huntz Hall

text: "Behind Sach: The Huntz Hall Story" by Jim Manago, published by BearManor Media in 2015, is the first biography of Hall.


title: Huntz Hall

text: Hall died from congestive heart failure on January 30, 1999, at the age of 78 in North Hollywood, California. He was interred in a niche at All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, California.


title: Audrey Wells

text: Audrey Ann Wells ("née" Lederer; January 25, 1960 – October 4, 2018) was an American screenwriter, film director, and producer. Her 1999 film "Guinevere" won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award.


title: Audrey Wells

text: Wells was born in San Francisco, California, to Austrian-American psychiatrist Wolfgang Lederer and Romanian-American psychologist Alexandra Botwin Lederer; her parents fled World War II-era Europe. She had Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jewish ancestry.


title: Audrey Wells

text: Wells worked as a disc jockey at San Francisco jazz radio station KJAZ FM. She graduated from U.C. Berkeley and UCLA.


title: Audrey Wells

text: She wrote a number of successful screenplays and directed three for which she had created the script. Her works were primarily comedies and romance films. Among her films are "The Truth About Cats & Dogs" (1996) and "Under the Tuscan Sun" (2003), both of which she also produced. Her 1999 film "Guinevere" won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at the Sundance Film Festival. Wells also co-wrote the script for the comedy "The Game Plan".


title: Audrey Wells

text: Wells died of cancer on October 4, 2018. The film "The Hate U Give", for which she wrote the screenplay, was released the next day. She is survived by her husband and daughter.


title: Audrey Wells

text: She also wrote the screenplay for the 2020 Netflix/Pearl Studio animated feature "Over the Moon", which was dedicated to her memory.


title: Opioid use disorder

text: Opioid use disorder (OUD) is a substance use disorder characterized by cravings for opioids, continued use despite physical and/or psychological deterioration, increased tolerance with use, and withdrawal symptoms after discontinuing opioids. Opioid withdrawal symptoms include nausea, muscle aches, diarrhea, trouble sleeping, agitation, and a low mood. Addiction and dependence are important components of OUD.


title: Opioid use disorder

text: Risk factors for OUD include a history of opioid misuse, current opioid misuse, young age, socioeconomic status, race, untreated psychiatric disorders, and environments that promote misuse (social, family, professional, etc.). Complications may include opioid overdose, suicide, HIV/AIDS, hepatitis C, and problems meeting social or professional responsibilities. Diagnosis may be based on criteria by the American Psychiatric Association in the DSM-5. If more than two of 11 criteria are present during a year, the diagnosis is said to be present.


title: Opioid use disorder

text: Opioids include substances such as heroin, morphine, fentanyl, codeine, dihydrocodeine, oxycodone, and hydrocodone. A useful standard for the relative strength of different opioids is morphine milligram equivalents (MME). It is recommended for clinicians to refer to daily MMEs when prescribing opioids to decrease the risk of misuse and adverse effects.


title: Opioid use disorder

text: Long-term opioid use occurs in about 4% of people following their use for trauma or surgery-related pain. In the United States, most heroin users begin by using prescription opioids that may also be bought illegally.


title: Opioid use disorder

text: People with an opioid use disorder are often treated with opioid replacement therapy using methadone or buprenorphine. Such treatment reduces the risk of death. Additionally, they may benefit from cognitive behavioral therapy, other forms of support from mental health professionals such as individual or group therapy, twelve-step programs, and other peer support programs. The medication naltrexone may also be useful to prevent relapse. Naloxone is useful for treating an opioid overdose and giving those at risk naloxone to take home is beneficial. In 2020, the CDC estimated that nearly 3 million people in the U.S. were living with OUD and more than 65,000 people died by opioid overdose, of whom more than 15,000 were heroin overdoses. Recent estimates of the number of people living with OUD and annual opioid overdoses worldwide are 16 million and 120,000, respectively.


title: Opioid use disorder

text: The DSM-5 guidelines for the diagnosis of opioid use disorder require that the individual has a significant impairment or distress related to opioid uses. To make the diagnosis two or more of 11 criteria must be present in a given year:


title: Opioid use disorder

text: The severity can be classified as mild, moderate, or severe based on the number of criteria present. Addiction and dependence are components of a substance use disorder; addiction is the more severe form.


title: Opioid use disorder

text: Opioid withdrawal can occur with a sudden decrease in, or cessation of, opioids after prolonged use. Onset of withdrawal depends on the half-life of the opioid that was used last. With heroin this typically occurs five hours after use; with methadone, it may take two days. The length of time that major symptoms occur also depends on the opioid used. For heroin withdrawal, symptoms are typically greatest at two to four days and can last up to two weeks. Less significant symptoms may remain for an even longer period, in which case the withdrawal is known as post-acute-withdrawal syndrome.


title: Opioid use disorder

text: Treatment of withdrawal may include methadone and buprenorphine. Medications for nausea or diarrhea may also be used.


title: Opioid use disorder

text: Opioid use disorder can develop as a result of self-medication. Scoring systems have been derived to assess the likelihood of opiate addiction in chronic pain patients. Healthcare practitioners have long been aware that despite the effective use of opioids for managing pain, empirical evidence supporting long-term opioid use is minimal. Many studies of patients with chronic pain have failed to show any sustained improvement in their pain or ability to function with long-term opioid use.


title: Opioid use disorder

text: According to position papers on the treatment of opioid dependence published by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and the World Health Organization, care providers should not treat opioid use disorder as the result of a weak moral character or will but as a medical condition. Some evidence suggests the possibility that opioid use disorders occur due to genetic or other chemical mechanisms that may be difficult to identify or change, such as dysregulation of brain circuitry involving reward and volition. But the exact mechanisms involved are unclear, leading to debate over the influence of biology and free will.


title: Opioid use disorder

text: Addiction is a brain disorder characterized by compulsive drug use despite adverse consequences. It is a component of substance use disorder and its most severe form.


title: Opioid use disorder

text: Overexpression of the gene transcription factor ΔFosB in the nucleus accumbens plays a crucial role in the development of an addiction to opioids and other addictive drugs by sensitizing drug reward and amplifying compulsive drug-seeking behavior. Like other addictive drugs, overuse of opioids leads to increased ΔFosB expression in the nucleus accumbens. Opioids affect dopamine neurotransmission in the nucleus accumbens via the disinhibition of dopaminergic pathways as a result of inhibiting the GABA-based projections to the ventral tegmental area (VTA) from the rostromedial tegmental nucleus (RMTg), which negatively modulate dopamine neurotransmission. In other words, opioids inhibit the projections from the RMTg to the VTA, which in turn disinhibits the dopaminergic pathways that project from the VTA to the nucleus accumbens and elsewhere in the brain.


title: Opioid use disorder

text: The differences in the genetic regions encoding the dopamine receptors for each individual may help to elucidate part of the risk for opioid addiction and general substance abuse. Studies of the D2 Dopamine Receptor, in particular, have shown some promising results. One specific SNP is at the TaqI RFLP (rs1800497). In a study of 530 Han Chinese heroin-addicted individuals from a Methadone Maintenance Treatment Program, those with the specific genetic variation showed higher mean heroin consumption by around double those without the SNP. This study helps to show the contribution of dopamine receptors to substance addiction and more specifically to opioid abuse.


title: Opioid use disorder

text: Neuroimaging has shown functional and structural alterations in the brain. A 2017 study showed that chronic intake of opioids such as heroin may cause long-term effects in the orbitofrontal area (OFC), which is essential for regulating reward-related behaviors, emotional responses, and anxiety. Moreover, neuroimaging and neuropsychological studies demonstrate dysregulation of circuits associated with emotion, stress and high impulsivity.


title: Opioid use disorder

text: Opioid dependence can occur as physical dependence, psychological dependence, or both. Drug dependence is an adaptive state associated with a withdrawal syndrome upon cessation of repeated exposure to a stimulus (e.g., drug intake). Dependence is a component of a substance use disorder. Opioid dependence can manifest as physical dependence, psychological dependence, or both.


title: Opioid use disorder

text: Increased brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) signaling in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) has been shown to mediate opioid-induced withdrawal symptoms via downregulation of insulin receptor substrate 2 (IRS2), protein kinase B (AKT), and mechanistic target of rapamycin complex 2 (mTORC2). As a result of downregulated signaling through these proteins, opiates cause VTA neuronal hyperexcitability and shrinkage (specifically, the size of the neuronal soma is reduced). It has been shown that when an opiate-naive person begins using opiates in concentrations that induce euphoria, BDNF signaling increases in the VTA.


title: Opioid use disorder

text: Upregulation of the cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP) signal transduction pathway by cAMP response element binding protein (CREB), a gene transcription factor, in the nucleus accumbens is a common mechanism of psychological dependence among several classes of drugs of abuse. Upregulation of the same pathway in the locus coeruleus is also a mechanism responsible for certain aspects of opioid-induced physical dependence.


title: Opioid use disorder

text: A study compared the harm and dependence liability of 20 drugs, using a scale from zero to three for physical dependence, psychological dependence, and pleasure to create a mean score for dependence. Selected results can be seen in the chart below. Diacetylmorphine and morphine both scored highest, at 3.0.