title: CBS This Morning

text: The program emphasized general national and international news stories and in-depth reports throughout each edition, although it also included live in-studio and pre-taped interviews. The format was chosen as an alternative to the soft media and lifestyle-driven formats of competitors "Today" and "Good Morning America" following the first hour or half-hour of those broadcasts, in an attempt to give the program a competitive edge with its infotainment format. (CBS has historically placed a distant third in the ratings among the network weekday morning shows.)


title: CBS This Morning

text: On August 31, 2021, CBS announced that the weekday program would be replaced with the reformatted "CBS Mornings" effective September 7, while the Saturday edition of "CTM" was renamed "CBS Saturday Morning" on September 18, 2021, completing the transition.


title: CBS This Morning

text: The original incarnation of "CBS This Morning" made its debut on November 30, 1987, with hosts Harry Smith, former "Good Morning America" news anchor Kathleen Sullivan, and Mark McEwen, a holdover from the show's infotainment-intensive predecessor "The Morning Program" as weather caster and announcer. Sullivan was replaced by Paula Zahn on February 26, 1990.


title: CBS This Morning

text: Beginning on October 26, 1992, in an effort to prevent affiliates from dropping the program, CBS increased the amount of time available during the broadcast for local stations, most of which broadcast their own early morning news programs before the national news begins. Nevertheless, several CBS stations in top-ranking markets, like then-affiliates WJBK in Detroit, WAGA in Atlanta, WHDH in Boston and KDKA in Pittsburgh (as of 2022, still a CBS station) dropped the program in favor of either local or syndicated programming. Another station, KPIX in San Francisco, planned in 1994 to still broadcast "CBS This Morning", but from 4:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m. PST as the lead-in to its morning program.


title: CBS This Morning

text: Smith and Zahn left the program on June 14, 1996, with various CBS News correspondents Harold Dow, Erin Moriarty, John Roberts, Russ Mitchell, Hattie Kauffman, Mark McEwen and Jane Robelot anchoring "CBS This Morning" for seven weeks until a new format was in place. In August 1996, the program was revamped again, as simply "This Morning", with Mark McEwen and Jane Robelot as co-hosts, news anchor José Díaz-Balart (succeeded by Cynthia Bowers, then Thalia Assuras, and finally Julie Chen) and Craig Allen (of WCBS-TV and WCBS-AM in New York City) serving as weather anchor.


title: CBS This Morning

text: A new format allowed local stations to air their own newscasts from 7:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. local time, interspersed with inserts from the national broadcast; the second hour of the national broadcast would then air uninterrupted from 8:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Ratings went up slightly, and at one point in 1998 the program even moved ahead of "Good Morning America". But its ratings success was also brief, and CBS announced its decision to cancel the program in early 1999. Robelot left "This Morning" in June 1999 after it was revealed that the program would be replaced. Assuras served as co-anchor and Chen as newsreader for the show's remaining five months. McEwen left the show at the end of September 1999 to prepare for the launch of "The Early Show" and was replaced by Russ Mitchell, who formerly conducted sports segments.


title: CBS This Morning

text: "This Morning" ended on October 29, 1999 after twelve years. It was replaced by "The Early Show", which debuted the following Monday, November 1. Though it had occasional peaks in the ratings, "The Early Show" was a perennial third-place finisher behind NBC's "Today" and ABC's "Good Morning America". In its last year, "The Early Show" shied away from the news, features, light stories and "infotainment" approach used by the program since its debut, that it based on the formats of its two main competitors.


title: CBS This Morning

text: On November 15, 2011, CBS News announced that "The Early Show" would be cancelled, and that the news division would overhaul its morning news program effective January 9, 2012. The news division's chairman Jeff Fager and president David Rhodes revealed at the official announcement that day that the revamped and retitled program would "redefine the morning television landscape" – meaning that rather than replicate the relaxed lifestyle-driven styles of "Today" and "Good Morning America", the new format would feature a mix of "hard news" (a CBS News hallmark), analysis and discussion. On December 1, 2011, the title of the new show was revealed as "CBS This Morning", marking a return of the name to the morning newscast since 1999.


title: CBS This Morning

text: The founding executive producer of "CBS This Morning" was Chris Licht, who was hired by CBS in the spring of 2011 after serving as executive producer of MSNBC's morning news-discussion program "Morning Joe". Licht's move to CBS led to speculation that "Morning Joe" hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski would follow Licht to CBS, as their contracts with MSNBC were set to expire; though Scarborough and Brzezinski confirmed contemplating offers from CBS and other networks, they signed a new contract with MSNBC out of a belief that their interview-intensive approach could not be duplicated on broadcast television.


title: CBS This Morning

text: CBS instead tapped a trio of noted television veterans for the weekday edition of "CBS This Morning": "The Early Show" holdover Erica Hill, Gayle King and Charlie Rose. Licht described Rose, who had previously hosted CBS's former overnight news program "CBS News Nightwatch" (which was replaced by "Up to the Minute" and later "CBS Overnight News") in the 1980s, and had also served as a part-time correspondent for occasional segments since 2008 on the long-running newsmagazine "60 Minutes", as "an incredible interviewer."


title: CBS This Morning

text: Licht promised an "outside the box" approach to "CBS This Morning", insisting that the show would not include forced anchor banter, cooking segments, "comedic weather forecasters, [or] cheering fans on an outdoor plaza."


title: CBS This Morning

text: On July 26, 2012, CBS announced that its Chief White House Correspondent Norah O'Donnell would replace Hill starting in September 2012. Hill was pulled from the program immediately after the announcement (an absence which was not explained on the broadcast), and was eventually released from her CBS contract (Hill joined NBC in November 2012, becoming a co-host of weekend editions of "Today").


title: CBS This Morning

text: On November 20, 2017, Rose was fired by CBS following a report in "The Washington Post" in which eight women accused him of sexual harassment. King and O'Donnell addressed the issue on the show. In January 2018, it was announced that John Dickerson (moderator of "Face the Nation") would join the program as the third co-anchor. On October 3, 2018, it was announced that correspondent Bianna Golodryga would be joining the show as the fourth co-host. However, six months later, in April 2019, Golodryga chose to leave CBS News.


title: CBS This Morning

text: On May 6, 2019, it was announced that Dickerson and O'Donnell would leave "CBS This Morning", with Dickerson moving to "60 Minutes" and O'Donnell to "CBS Evening News". Anthony Mason and Tony Dokoupil were named as successors, and made their debuts on May 20, 2019, alongside King. O'Donnell's last day on the show was May 16, 2019, followed by Dickerson on May 17, 2019.


title: CBS This Morning

text: CBS announced several planned changes to the program in 2021, including a move to a new studio at One Astor Plaza in Times Square, and a new co-host in Nate Burleson with Mason moving to a role as reporter on culture. On August 31, the network announced that "CBS This Morning" would instead be succeeded by a new program, "CBS Mornings", starting September 7. The transition was complete on September 18, 2021 when "CBS This Morning Saturday" was rebranded as "CBS Saturday Morning".


title: CBS This Morning

text: Both hours began with the "EyeOpener," a fast-paced 90-second video montage of the day's top stories, ending with overnight sports highlights clips and quips from late-night talk shows. The first hour of the show was more news-intensive, with more original journalism and analysis than the second hour. The 8:00 hour began with the "EyeOpener @ 8," recaps the first hour's news, leads into a brief summary of the morning's news headlines, and then shifts its focus to interviews and discussion (à la "Morning Joe") and lighter fare.


title: CBS This Morning

text: True to Licht's "no comedic weather" promise, the show did not include any standalone national weather segments – this made "CBS This Morning" the only national morning news program on any of the "Big Three" networks not to include such a segment, although time was allotted for CBS affiliates to insert their own local weather forecasts (with national maps and forecasts or a text-only list of forecasts for individual cities nationwide provided for affiliates that do not insert their own weather updates, particularly those that do not have a news department).


title: CBS This Morning

text: However, the program would use local meteorologists from CBS stations to provide the forecast during major severe weather events (such as hurricanes, wildfires, and blizzards). Lonnie Quinn (former meteorologist for the program's Saturday edition) of flagship New York City O&O WCBS-TV - appears weekdays (as needed), and Jeff Berardelli, CBS News Weather and Climate Specialist, works the Saturday edition (when necessary).


title: CBS This Morning

text: For stations that do not make use of the local news cutaways at :26 and :56 past the hour (including CBS affiliates that do not have a news department), the program used a taped story introduced by that day's "CBS Morning News" anchor during that time; previously it contained a happy talk segment between the anchors and panelists. This was similar to what was done during the 1981-87 run of the CBS Morning News.


title: CBS This Morning

text: For the Pacific, Alaska and Hawaii–Aleutian Time Zones (along with most of Arizona during daylight saving time), an updated version of the broadcast incorporated an additional greeting to those viewers ("Good morning to our viewers in the West! and "As you are waking up in the West..."), along with updated reports previously denoted by the reporter specifically acknowledging the viewers in that part of the country (e.g., "Good morning and Good morning to our viewers watching us in the West") and if occurring, reports on major swings, high or low, involving the stock market.


title: CBS This Morning

text: "CBS This Morning" operates out of a set in Studio 57 at the CBS Broadcast Center (numbered for the street address in Manhattan, West 57th Street). The new set was originally planned for use by "The Early Show" before its cancellation; that program was based out of the windowed General Motors Building during its entire run, which was shared with the network's NFL pre-game show "The NFL Today" at times, though during the final year of "The Early Show" the windows were covered at all times due to the change to a hard-news focus. A section of the studio's exterior, covered in white walls and adorned with the CBS Eye logo (and also bearing the message shown at right), was featured in promos for the show that began airing in early December 2011. "CBS Evening News " has shared Studio 57 with "CBS This Morning" since December 2016, when the former program moved from its longtime home at Studio 47.


title: CBS This Morning

text: Bits and pieces of the "CBS This Morning" set were revealed in promos and web videos released prior to the program's debut, with the full set unveiled during the January 2012 premiere. Some of the set's features include:


title: CBS This Morning

text: Also included on the set, as reported by "TV Guide" reporter Stephen Battaglio, is an Oakland Athletics baseball cap; executive producer Chris Licht included it to remind his staff of the sports film "Moneyball", whose central character (team executive Billy Beane, played in the film by Brad Pitt) took an "outside-the-box" approach that Licht hopes "CBS This Morning" replicates (Licht has called the show "The "Moneyball" of TV" – a take-off on the methodology featured in the 2011 film – and screened the film prior to the premiere for "CBS This Morning" staff as a motivational tool).


title: CBS This Morning

text: In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States and the associated closure of the CBS Broadcast Center on March 11, 2020, "CBS This Morning" was briefly re-located to the Washington, D.C. studio of the "CBS Evening News" for two editions. After the facility was closed once more on March 18, the program began broadcasting from the Ed Sullivan Theater on the set of "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" (where Licht now serves as producer), before switching to a remote work format. On June 22, "CBS This Morning" returned to Studio 57 with a reduced crew.


title: CBS This Morning

text: The second incarnation of the program was originally hosted by Charlie Rose, Erica Hill and Gayle King. Hill left the show about six months following its debut, and was replaced by Norah O'Donnell. In November 2017, Rose was suspended and subsequently fired following sexual harassment accusations made against him becoming public knowledge. Upon Rose's firing, various anchors have filled the third spot on a rotating basis. On January 9, 2018, CBS News president David Rhodes announced that former "Face the Nation" host John Dickerson would join Gayle King and Norah O'Donnell as the third co-anchor of "CBS This Morning". It was announced on October 3, 2018, that correspondent Bianna Golodryga would be joining the show as the fourth co-host. However, six months later, in April 2019, Golodryga chose to leave CBS News. On May 6, 2019, it was announced that Dickerson and O'Donnell would leave "CBS This Morning", with Anthony Mason and Tony Dokoupil named as successors. O'Donnell's last day on the show was May 16, 2019, followed by Dickerson on May 17, 2019.


title: CBS This Morning

text: "CBS This Morning Saturday" is the Saturday edition of the program, which premiered under that title on January 14, 2012 and is currently anchored by Michelle Miller, Dana Jacobson and Jeff Glor.


title: CBS This Morning

text: Like the weekend editions of other network morning shows, the program has a greater focus on human-interest pieces than on weekdays, though it still concentrates primarily on the news of the day during the first half-hour. It also retains some of the common features of the morning show genre which were removed from the weekday show, such as musical performances and food segments.


title: CBS This Morning

text: An exception to the usual Saturday format occurred on February 2, 2013 (the day before Super Bowl XLVII), when the weekday anchor team hosted from New Orleans (where the game was held at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome), an edition that was branded as simply "CBS This Morning" (instead of "CBS This Morning Saturday") and was formatted similarly to the weekday program, including "EyeOpener" segments at the top of both hours.


title: CBS This Morning

text: "CBS This Morning" did not produce a Sunday edition as a result of the long-running "CBS News Sunday Morning", a newsmagazine that debuted in 1979 (and is a remnant of a short-lived reformatting of the original "CBS Morning News" broadcast that lasted until 1982). In contrast to "CBS This Morning", "CBS News Sunday Morning" has long led the ratings among the Sunday morning shows.


title: CBS This Morning

text: In the Southern Hemisphere, in the Commonwealth of Australia, a trimmed version (for 70 minutes excluding commercials) of the "CBS This Morning" weekday edition aired on CBS's sister network (since November 2017) Network 10, along with regional affiliates Southern Cross 10, and from July 2016 to July 2021 WIN, on Monday - Friday mornings from 4:30 a.m. until 6:00 a.m. AEST with the Friday edition held over to the following Monday. A national weather map of Australia was inserted during local affiliate station's cutaways for weather reports and forecasts. Commercial advertising was inserted instead of the usual cutaway to the local news programming , however, near-simultaneously with the other US's major "Big Three" television networks' breakfast / morning television programs, along with ABC-TV's longtime "Good Morning America" (broadcasting in U.S. since 1976) on the Nine Network from 3:30 a.m. and the NBC's "Today" longtime morning news/features show (since 1952, of NBC) airing on the Seven Network from 4:00 am. It was subject to preemption in regional areas for paid and religious programming. Until recent March 2020, the program was broadcast weekday mornings from 4:30 a.m. to 6:00 a.m., with the Friday edition usually held over to the following Monday. As a result of Network 10's plans to give local mid morning program "Studio 10" a natural lead in for watching by Australian viewers, the program would now air four days a week, in direct competition to rivals of Network Seven's "Sunrise" and Nine's "Today" (Australian version), with encores of CBS daytime soap opera dramas "The Bold and The Beautiful" to air for two hours on Monday mornings from 6 a.m. This programming move, however, was short-lived; as of July 2020, the program has been bumped back to 4:30 a.m. to 6:00 a.m. airing five days a week, with encores of fellow CBS programs including daytime talk show "The Talk", "Entertainment Tonight, Judge Judy, "and" The Bold and the Beautiful "following the program".


title: CBS This Morning

text: The format of "CBS This Morning" was praised by Associated Press critic Frazier Moore, noting the network was differentiating itself from its competitors with its focus on hard news: ""CBS This Morning" has, in effect, vowed to keep the silliness to a minimum, and its first week is promising." He noted the absence of tabloid news items, saying "[what] "CBS This Morning" didn't have – that, too, provides a good argument for watching." Gail Shister of "TVNewser" gave Charlie Rose "an A for effort" for stretching past his usual slate of hard news into pop-culture stories. Shister concluded, "CBS is not reinventing morning TV. But at least they're trying, and that, in itself, is good news."


title: CBS This Morning

text: "CBS This Morning" won a Peabody Award in 2014 for "its timely, meaningful look into the face and mind of a tyrant" in the feature story "One-on-One with Assad".


title: CBS This Morning

text: Upon the show's launch, CBS executives said that they expected it would take years for a ratings turnaround in the morning time period. The program debuted to an average of 2.72 million viewers (1.11 million in the key demographic of adults 25 to 54 years old) in its first week; its total viewership was 10% lower than "The Early Show"s during the same week in the previous year. As of August 2015, "CBS This Morning" continued to show the most growth, up to 12 percent in viewers and up to 14 percent in the A25-54 demo vs. the same week in 2014, with 3.196 million viewers.


title: CBS This Morning

text: In November 2016, "CBS This Morning" came within striking distance of "Today" and scored the best November sweeps month for a CBS morning show in 23 years, averaging 2.8 million viewers - only 800,000 viewers behind "Today."


title: Banknotes of the Australian dollar

text: The notes of the Australian dollar were first issued by the Reserve Bank of Australia on 14 February 1966, when Australia changed to decimal currency and replaced the pound with the dollar. This currency was a lot easier for calculating compared to the previous Australian pound worth 20 shillings or 240 pence.


title: Banknotes of the Australian dollar

text: The $1 (10/-), $2 (£1), $10 (£5), and $20 (£10) had exact exchange rates with pounds and were a similar colour to the notes they replaced, but the $5 (£2/10) did not, and was not introduced until May 1967 when the public had become more familiar with decimal currency. The original notes were designed by Gordon Andrews, who rejected traditional Australian clichés in favour of interesting and familiar subjects such as Aboriginal culture, women, the environment, architecture and aeronautics.


title: Banknotes of the Australian dollar

text: Notes issued between 1966 and 1973 bore the title "Commonwealth of Australia". Starting from 1974, the title on the new notes only read "Australia" and the legal tender phrase was also changed from "Legal Tender throughout the Commonwealth of Australia and the territories of the Commonwealth" to "This Australian Note is legal tender throughout Australia and its territories".


title: Banknotes of the Australian dollar

text: The $50 note was introduced in 1973 and the $100 note in 1984, in response to inflation requiring larger denominations for transactions. The $1 note was replaced by a $1 coin in 1984, while the $2 note was replaced by a smaller $2 coin in 1988. Although no longer printed, all previous notes of the Australian dollar are still considered legal tender.


title: Banknotes of the Australian dollar

text: In 1988, the Reserve Bank of Australia issued $10 notes in plastic. The polypropylene polymer banknotes were produced by Note Printing Australia, to commemorate the bicentenary of European settlement in Australia. These notes contained a transparent "window" with a diffractive optically variable device (DOVD) image of Captain James Cook as a security feature. Australian notes were the first in the world to use such features. All current Australian notes also contain microprinting for further security.


title: Banknotes of the Australian dollar

text: There were initial difficulties with the first polymer note issued; the $10 note had problems with the holographic security feature detaching from the note itself. However, the Reserve Bank saw potential in the issue of plastic notes and commenced preparations for an entirely new series made from polymer, commencing with the $5 note in 1992. Today all Australian notes are made of polymer.


title: Banknotes of the Australian dollar

text: In April 1995, the design of the $5 notes was updated to match the rest of the New Banknote Series, with additional slight changes in 1996. In 2001, a special commemorative 'Federation' $5 note was produced, but in 2002, the previous version's production commenced again. From 2002, the design of all notes (except for the $5 note picturing the Queen) was slightly changed to include the names of the people pictured on them under the portraits, and swapping the order of the signatures of officials on the notes.


title: Banknotes of the Australian dollar

text: On 13 February 2015 the Reserve Bank of Australia announced that the next series of Australia notes would have a tactile feature to help the visually impaired community to tell the value of the note after a successful campaign led by 15-year-old Connor McLeod, who is blind, to introduce the new feature. The notes retain the key aspects of the previous series' design such as the colour, size and people portrayed for ease of recognition and to minimise disruption to businesses.


title: Banknotes of the Australian dollar

text: The new $5 note includes the tactile feature and was issued on 1 September 2016, to coincide with Australia's National Wattle Day, followed by the new $10 banknote on 20 September 2017. The new $50 note was released for circulation on 18 October 2018, followed by the new $20 note on 9 October 2019, and the new $100 was released on the 29 October 2020. The Reserve Bank currently has no plans to release fourth series notes in denominations higher than $100, despite the amount of inflation that has occurred since the $100 note was introduced in 1984.


title: Banknotes of the Australian dollar

text: In May 2019 the Reserve Bank confirmed that the $50 note contained a misspelling of the word "responsibility" on the reverse design, a typo that would be corrected in future printings.


title: À rebours

text: À rebours (; translated Against Nature or Against the Grain) is an 1884 novel by the French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans. The narrative centers on a single character: Jean des Esseintes, an eccentric, reclusive, ailing aesthete. The last scion of an aristocratic family, Des Esseintes loathes nineteenth-century bourgeois society and tries to retreat into an ideal artistic world of his own creation. The narrative is almost entirely a catalogue of the neurotic Des Esseintes's aesthetic tastes, musings on literature, painting, and religion, and hyperaesthesic sensory experiences.


title: À rebours

text: "À rebours" contains many themes that became associated with the Symbolist aesthetic. In doing so, it broke from Naturalism and became the ultimate example of "Decadent" literature, inspiring works such as Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray" (1890). In his preface for the 1903 publication of the novel, Huysmans wrote that he had the idea to portray a man "soaring upwards into dream, seeking refuge in illusions of extravagant fantasy, living alone, far from his century, among memories of more congenial times, of less base surroundings ... each chapter became the sublimate of a specialism, the refinement of a different art; it became condensed into an essence of jewellery, perfumes, religious and secular literature, of profane music and plain-chant."


title: À rebours

text: "À rebours" marked a watershed in Huysmans' career. His early works had been Naturalist in style, being realistic depictions of the drudgery and squalor of working- and lower-middle-class life in Paris. However, by the early 1880s, Huysmans regarded this approach to fiction as a dead end. As he wrote in his preface to the 1903 reissue of "À rebours":It was the heyday of Naturalism, but this school, which should have rendered the inestimable service of giving us real characters in precisely described settings, had ended up harping on the same old themes and was treading water. It scarcely admitted—in theory at least—any exceptions to the rule; thus it limited itself to depicting common existence, and struggled, under the pretext of being true to life, to create characters who would be as close as possible to the average run of mankind.Huysmans decided to keep certain features of the Naturalist style, such as its use of minutely documented realistic detail, but apply them instead to a portrait of an exceptional individual: the protagonist Jean des Esseintes. In a letter of November 1882, Huysmans told Émile Zola, the leader of the Naturalist school of fiction, that he was changing his style of writing and had embarked on a "wild and gloomy fantasy". This "fantasy", originally entitled "Seul" ("Alone"), was to become "À rebours".


title: À rebours

text: The character of Des Esseintes is partly based on Huysmans himself, and the two share many of the same tastes, although Huysmans, on his modest civil-service salary, was hardly able to indulge them to the same extent as his upper-class hero. The writers and dandies Charles Baudelaire and Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly also had some influence, but the most important model was the notorious aristocratic aesthete Robert de Montesquiou, who was also the basis for Baron de Charlus in Marcel Proust's "À la recherche du temps perdu". Montesquiou's furnishings bear a strong resemblance to those in Des Esseintes's house:In 1883, to his eternal regret, Montesquiou admitted Stéphane Mallarmé [to his home]. It was late at night when the poet was shown over the house, and the only illumination came from a few scattered candelabra; yet in the flickering light Mallarmé observed that the door-bell was in fact a sacring-bell, that one room was furnished as a monastery cell and another as the cabin of a yacht, and that the third contained a Louis Quinze pulpit, three or four cathedral stalls and a strip of altar railing. He was shown, too, a sled picturesquely placed on a snow-white bearskin, a library of rare books in suitably-coloured bindings and the remains of an unfortunate tortoise whose shell had been coated with gold paint. According to Montesquiou writing many years later in his memoirs, the sight of these marvels left Mallarmé speechless with amazement. 'He went away', records Montesquiou, 'in a state of silent exaltation ... I do not doubt therefore that it was in the most admiring, sympathetic and sincere good faith that he retailed to Huysmans what he had seen during the few moments he spent in Ali Baba's cave.'


title: À rebours

text: The epigraph is a quotation from Jan van Ruysbroeck ('Ruysbroeck the Admirable'), the fourteenth-century Flemish mystic:I must rejoice beyond the bounds of time ... though the world may shudder at my joy, and in its coarseness know not what I mean.


title: À rebours

text: Jean des Esseintes is the last member of a powerful and once proud noble family. He has lived an extremely decadent life in Paris, which has left him disgusted with human society. Without telling anyone, he retreats to a house in the countryside, near Fontenay, and decides to spend the rest of his life in intellectual and aesthetic contemplation. In this sense, "À rebours" recalls Gustave Flaubert's "Bouvard et Pécuchet" (posthumously published in 1881), in which two Parisian copy-clerks decide to retire to the countryside and end up failing at various scientific and scholarly endeavors.


title: À rebours

text: Huysmans' novel is essentially plotless. The protagonist fills the house with his eclectic art collection, which notably consists of reprints of the paintings of Gustave Moreau (such as "Salome Dancing before Herod" and "L'Apparition"), drawings of Odilon Redon, and engravings of Jan Luyken. Throughout his intellectual experiments, Des Esseintes recalls various debauched events and love affairs of his past in Paris. He tries his hand at inventing perfumes and he creates a garden of poisonous tropical flowers. Illustrating his preference for artifice over nature (a characteristic Decadent theme), Des Esseintes chooses real flowers that apparently imitate artificial ones. In one of the book's most surrealistic episodes, he has gemstones set in the shell of a tortoise. The extra weight on the creature's back causes its death. In another episode, he decides to visit London after reading the novels of Charles Dickens. He dines at an English restaurant in Paris while waiting for his train and is delighted by the resemblance of the people to his notions derived from literature. He then cancels his trip and returns home, convinced that only disillusion would await him if he were to follow through with his plans.


title: À rebours

text: Des Esseintes conducts a survey of French and Latin literature, rejecting the works approved by the mainstream critics of his day. He rejects the academically respectable Latin authors of the "Golden Age" such as Virgil and Cicero, preferring later "Silver Age" writers such as Petronius (Des Esseintes praises the decadent "Satyricon") and Apuleius ("Metamorphoses", commonly known as "The Golden Ass") as well as works of early Christian literature, whose style was usually dismissed as the "barbarous" product of the Dark Ages. Among French authors, he shows nothing but contempt for the Romantics but adores the poetry of Baudelaire.


title: À rebours

text: Des Esseintes cares little for classic French authors like Rabelais, Molière, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot, preferring the works of Bourdaloue, Bossuet, Nicole, and Pascal. The nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, he exclaims, 'alone was in the right' with his philosophy of pessimism, and Des Esseintes connects Schopenhauer's pessimistic outlook with the resignation of "The Imitation of Christ," a fifteenth-century Christian devotional work by Thomas à Kempis. Des Esseintes' library includes authors of the nascent Symbolist movement, including Paul Verlaine, Tristan Corbière and Stéphane Mallarmé, as well as the decadent fiction of the unorthodox Catholic writers Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam and Barbey d'Aurevilly. Among Catholic literature, Des Esseintes expresses attraction for the work of Ernest Hello.


title: À rebours

text: Eventually, his late nights and idiosyncratic diet take their toll on his health, requiring him to return to Paris or to forfeit his life. In the last lines of the book, he compares his return to human society to that of a non-believer trying to embrace religion.


title: À rebours

text: Huysmans predicted his novel would be a failure with the public and critics: "It will be the biggest fiasco of the year—but I don't care a damn! It will be something nobody has ever done before, and I shall have said what I want to say..." However, when it appeared in May, 1884, the book created a storm of publicity. Though many critics were scandalised, it appealed to a young generation of aesthetes and writers.


title: À rebours

text: Richard Ellmann describes the effect of the book in his biography of Oscar Wilde:Whistler rushed to congratulate Huysmans the next day on his 'marvellous' book. Bourget, at that time a close friend of Huysmans as of Wilde, admired it greatly; Paul Valéry called it his 'Bible and his bedside book' and this is what it became for Wilde. He said to the "Morning News": 'This last book of Huysmans is one of the best I have ever seen'. It was being reviewed everywhere as the guidebook of decadence. At the very moment that Wilde was falling in with social patterns, he was confronted with a book which even in its title defied them.


title: À rebours

text: It is widely believed that "À rebours" is the "poisonous French novel" that leads to the downfall of Dorian Gray in Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray". The book's plot is said to have dominated the action of Dorian, causing him to live an amoral life of sin and hedonism. In Chapter 10, Dorian examines a book sent to him by the hedonistic aristocrat Lord Henry Wotton: It was the strangest book that he had ever read. It seemed to him that in exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before him ... It was a novel without a plot, and with only one character, being, indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian, who spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own ... The style in which it was written was that curious jewelled style, vivid and obscure at once, full of "argot" and of archaisms, of technical expressions and of elaborate paraphrases, that characterizes the work of some of the finest artists of the French school of "Symbolistes". There were in it metaphors as monstrous as orchids, and as subtle in colour. The life of the senses was described in the terms of mystical philosophy. One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some mediaeval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner. It was a poisonous book. The heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble the brain. The mere cadence of the sentences, the subtle monotony of their music, so full as it was of complex refrains and movements elaborately repeated, produced in the mind of the lad, as he passed from chapter to chapter, a form of reverie, a malady of dreaming ...


title: À rebours

text: On the question of Huysmans' novel as an inspiration for the book in "Dorian Gray," Ellmann writes:Wilde does not name the book but at his trial he conceded that it was, or almost, Huysmans's "À rebours"... To a correspondent he wrote that he had played a 'fantastic variation' upon "À rebours" and some day must write it down. The references in "Dorian Gray" to specific chapters are deliberately inaccurate.


title: À rebours

text: "À rebours" is now considered by some an important step in the formation of "gay literature". "À rebours" gained notoriety as an exhibit in the trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895. The prosecutor referred to it as a "sodomitical" book. The book appalled Zola, who felt it had dealt a "terrible blow" to Naturalism.


title: À rebours

text: Zola, Huysmans's former mentor, gave the book a lukewarm reception. Huysmans initially tried to placate him by claiming the book was still in the Naturalist style and that Des Esseintes's opinions and tastes were not his own. However, when they met in July, Zola told Huysmans that the book had been a "terrible blow to Naturalism" and accused him of "leading the school astray" and "burning [his] boats with such a book", claiming that "no type of literature was possible in this genre, exhausted by a single volume".


title: À rebours

text:
While he slowly drifted away from the Naturalists, Huysmans won new friends among the Symbolist and Catholic writers whose work he had praised in his novel. Stéphane Mallarmé responded with the tribute "Prose pour Des Esseintes", published in "La Revue indépendante" on January 1, 1885. This famous poem has been described as "perhaps the most enigmatic of Mallarmé's works". The opening stanza gives some of its flavour:"Hyperbole! de ma mémoire
Triomphalement ne sais-tu
Te lever, aujourd'hui grimoire
Dans un livre de fer vêtu..."

Hyperbole! Can't you arise
From memory, and triumph, grow
Today a form of conjuration
Robed in an iron folio?
(Translated by Donald Davie)


title: À rebours

text: The Catholic writer Léon Bloy praised the novel, describing Huysmans as "formerly a Naturalist, but now an Idealist capable of the most exalted mysticism, and as far removed from the crapulous [gluttonous or drunken] Zola as if all the interplanetary spaces had suddenly accumulated between them." In his review, Barbey d'Aurevilly compared Huysmans to Baudelaire, recalling: "After "Les Fleurs du mal" I told Baudelaire it only remains for you to choose between the muzzle of the pistol and the foot of the Cross. But will the author of "À rebours" make the same choice?" His prediction eventually proved true when Huysmans converted to Catholicism in the 1890s.


title: Alien (law)

text: In law, an alien is any person (including an organization) who is not a citizen or a national of a specific country, although definitions and terminology differ to some degree depending upon the continent or region. More generally, however, the term "alien" is perceived as synonymous with foreign national.


title: Alien (law)

text: The term "alien" is derived from the Latin "alienus", which in turn is derived from the Oscan "mancupatis", (a proto-Etruscan tribe), meaning a slave. The Latin later came to mean a stranger, a foreigner, or someone not related by blood. Similar terms to "alien" in this context include "foreigner" and "lander".


title: Alien (law)

text: Different countries around the world use varying terms for aliens. The following are several types of aliens:


title: Alien (law)

text: An "alien" in English law denoted any person born outside of the monarch's dominions and who did not owe allegiance to the monarch. Aliens were not allowed to own land and were subject to different taxes to subjects. This idea was passed on in the Commonwealth to other common law jurisdictions.


title: Alien (law)

text: In Australia, citizenship is defined in the Australian nationality law. Non-citizens in Australia are permanent residents, temporary residents, or illegal residents (technically called "unlawful non-citizens"). Most non-citizens (including those who lack citizenship documents) traveling to Australia must obtain a visa prior to travel. The only exceptions to the rule are holders of New Zealand passports and citizenship, who may apply for a visa on arrival according to the Trans-Tasman Travel Arrangement.


title: Alien (law)

text: In 2020, in "Love v Commonwealth", the High Court of Australia ruled that Aboriginal Australians (as defined in "Mabo v Queensland (No 2)") cannot be considered aliens under the Constitution of Australia, regardless of whether they were born in Australia or hold Australian citizenship.


title: Alien (law)

text: In Canada, the term "alien" is not used in federal statutes. Instead, the term "foreign national" serves as its equivalent and is found in legal documents. The Immigration and Refugee Protection Act defines "foreign national" as "a person who is not a Canadian citizen or a permanent resident, and includes a stateless person."


title: Alien (law)

text: In the United Kingdom, the British Nationality Act of 1981 defines an alien as a person who is not a British citizen, a citizen of Ireland, a Commonwealth citizen, or a British protected person. The Aliens Act of 1905, the British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act of 1914 and the Aliens Restriction (Amendment) Act of 1919 were all products of the turbulence in the early part of the 20th century.


title: Alien (law)

text: Under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) of the United States, "[t]he term 'alien' means any person not a citizen or national of the United States." People born in American Samoa or on Swains Island are statutorily "non-citizen nationals." Others, such as natives of Palau and the Marshall Islands, are legal immigrants and aliens for INA purposes.


title: Alien (law)

text: Every refugee that is admitted to the United States under automatically becomes an "immigrant" and then a "special immigrant" after receiving a green card.


title: Alien (law)

text: The usage of the term "alien" dates back to 1798, when it was used in the Alien and Sedition Acts. Although the INA provides no overarching explicit definition of the term "illegal alien", it is mentioned in a number of provisions under title 8 of the US code. Several provisions even mention the term "unauthorized alien". According to PolitiFact, the term "illegal alien" occurs in federal law, but does so scarcely. PolitiFact opines that, "where the term does appear, it's undefined or part of an introductory title or limited to apply to certain individuals convicted of felonies."


title: Alien (law)

text: Since the U.S. law says that a corporation is a person, the term alien is not limited to natural humans because what are colloquially called foreign corporations are technically called alien corporations. Because corporations are creations of local state law, a foreign corporation is an out-of-state corporation.


title: Alien (law)

text: There are a multitude of unique and highly complex U.S. domestic tax laws and regulations affecting the U.S. tax residency of foreign nationals, both nonresident aliens and resident aliens, in addition to income tax and social security tax treaties and Totalization Agreements.


title: Alien (law)

text: "Alienage," i.e., citizenship status, has been prohibited since 1989 in New York City from being considered for employment, under that town's Human Rights legislation.


title: Alien (law)

text: In the Gulf Cooperation Council (United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, and Qatar), many non-natives have lived in the region since birth. However, these Arab states do not easily grant citizenship to non-natives. Most stateless Bedoon in Kuwait belong to indigenous northern tribes.


title: Alien (law)

text: On Latvian passports, the mark "nepilsoņi" (alien) refers to non-citizens or former citizens of the Soviet Union (USSR) who do not have voting rights for the parliament of Latvia but have rights and privileges under Latvian law and international bilateral treaties, such as the right to travel without visas to both the European Union and Russia, where latter is not possible for Latvian citizens.


title: Alien (law)

text: "This article in most part is based on the law of the United States, including statutory and latest published case law."


title: USS Mount Whitney (LCC-20)

text: USS "Mount Whitney" (LCC/JCC 20) is one of two amphibious command ships of the United States Navy and is the flagship and command ship of the United States Sixth Fleet. USS "Mount Whitney" also serves as the Afloat Command Platform (ACP) of Naval Striking and Support Forces NATO (STRIKFORNATO). The ship had previously served for years as the COMSTRIKFLTLANT(NATO Designation) / US Second Fleet's command ship. She is one of only a few commissioned ships to be assigned to Military Sealift Command.


title: USS Mount Whitney (LCC-20)

text: "Mount Whitney" was classified as LCC-20 on 1 January 1969, and her keel was laid down on 8 January by Newport News Shipbuilding & Drydock Company, Newport News, Virginia.


title: USS Mount Whitney (LCC-20)

text: At the time of her commissioning, "Mount Whitney" joined her sister ship "Blue Ridge" as having the distinction of carrying the world's most sophisticated electronics suites. It was said to be some thirty percent larger than that of the aircraft carrier USS "John F. Kennedy", which had been the most complex. "Mount Whitney" was armed with a "main battery" of computers, communications gear, and other electronic facilities to fulfill her mission as a command ship. An extremely refined communications system was also an integral part of the ship's radical new design. Through an automated patch panel and computer-controlled switching matrix, her crew could use any combination of communication equipment desired. The clean topside area is the result of careful design intended to minimize the ship's interference with her own communications system. US Navy long-range communications were heavily reliant on high-frequency radio systems in the 1970s and have evolved to predominantly satellite communications in the 2000s. This is illustrated by the long wire antennas and the directional HF yagi or log-periodic antenna initially installed on "Mount Whitney" and later removed and replaced with a number of satellite communications antennas.


title: USS Mount Whitney (LCC-20)

text: The ship is named for Mount Whitney, a peak in the Sierra Nevada mountain range of California. Mount Whitney is the highest summit in the contiguous United States, with an elevation of .


title: USS Mount Whitney (LCC-20)

text: "Mount Whitney" is the most sophisticated Command, Control, Communications, Computer, and Intelligence (C4I) ship ever commissioned, She incorporates various elements of the most advanced C4I equipment and gives the embarked Joint Task Force Commander the capability to effectively command all units under their command.


title: USS Mount Whitney (LCC-20)

text: "Mount Whitney" can transmit and receive large amounts of secure data to and from any point on earth through HF, UHF, VHF, and SHF (satellite) communications channels. This electronic technology enables the Joint Intelligence Center and Joint Operations Center to provide the most timely intelligence and operational support available in the Navy.


title: USS Mount Whitney (LCC-20)

text: From 1971 to 2005, "Mount Whitney" served as the flagship for Commander Second Fleet/Commander Striking Fleet Atlantic.


title: USS Mount Whitney (LCC-20)

text: In 1994, during the FleetEx 2/94 "George Washington" war game exercise, the Argentine Navy, acting as the enemy and using the diesel submarine , went undetected, penetrated the destroyer defense and "sank" "Mount Whitney", which was acting as the command ship during the exercise.


title: USS Mount Whitney (LCC-20)

text: "Mount Whitney" deployed in 1994 to Haiti with Lieutenant General Hugh Shelton, the commander of the XVIII Airborne Corps, in command of the Joint Task Force that conducted Operation Uphold Democracy.


title: USS Mount Whitney (LCC-20)

text: On 12 November 2002, "Mount Whitney" deployed to the Central Command area of responsibility in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. She was acting as the initial command post for Combined Joint Task Force – Horn of Africa. During the deployment, the ship embarked elements of the 2nd Marine Division and II Marine Expeditionary Force (II MEF), based at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, under the command of Major General John F. Sattler and Captain Morton W. Kenyon.


title: USS Mount Whitney (LCC-20)

text: In 2004, Military Sealift Command civilian sailors were integrated into her crew. She remains a commissioned warship in the United States Navy, but the size of her crew was reduced from about 600 sailors to about 170 Navy officers and enlisted personnel and 155 civilians.


title: USS Mount Whitney (LCC-20)

text: In February 2005, "Mount Whitney" left Norfolk for Gaeta, Italy where she was redesignated (LCC/JCC 20) and assumed duties as the 6th Fleet flagship, officially relieving . She also assumed duties as the command ship for the Commander, Joint Command Lisbon and the Commander, Striking Force NATO.


title: USS Mount Whitney (LCC-20)

text: In August 2008, "Mount Whitney" was deployed to the Black Sea in support of Operation Assured Delivery to deliver humanitarian aid to those affected by the Russo-Georgian War and became the first NATO ship to deliver aid to port of Poti, Georgia.


title: USS Mount Whitney (LCC-20)

text: On 6 November 2008, "Mount Whitney" was unable to enter the port at Sevastopol. City authorities and representatives of the Ukrainian Navy refused to comment on the event. Individuals working for the city administration reported that the failure was due to issues with "Mount Whitney"s border crossing documents, while others suggested anti-NATO protests were the cause.


title: USS Mount Whitney (LCC-20)

text: From 19 March 2011, "Mount Whitney" served in the Mediterranean as the main command vessel for the enforcement of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 against Libya. She was the flagship for Admiral Samuel J. Locklear, who had tactical command of the Operation Odyssey Dawn joint task force. The vessel was serving as a command-and-control vessel for the United States' involvement in the coalition campaign aimed to enforce a Libya no-fly zone and prevent Muammar Gaddafi's forces from attacking the rebel stronghold of Benghazi.


title: USS Mount Whitney (LCC-20)

text: In February 2013, "Mount Whitney" transferred to the San Giorgio del Porto Shipyard in Genoa, Italy for a major 60-day overhaul and repair project. The ship returned to active duty in April 2013 at the end of the maintenance window.


title: USS Mount Whitney (LCC-20)

text: On 31 January 2014, "Mount Whitney" left her homeport of Gaeta, Italy. "Mount Whitney", along with , were the first two US Navy ships to operate in the Black Sea during the Sochi Olympics.


title: USS Mount Whitney (LCC-20)

text: On 31 July 2015, a fire broke out aboard "Mount Whitney" while she was in Viktor Lenac Shipyard, Rijeka, Croatia. There were no reported injuries, and the fire was extinguished within 45 minutes by ship's crew and shipyard fire brigade personnel. "Mount Whitney" had been in Viktor Lenac Shipyard since January 2015 undergoing a scheduled maintenance overhaul designed to extend the service life of the ship to 2039.


title: USS Mount Whitney (LCC-20)

text: On 30 June 2016, "Mount Whitney" visited Klaipėda, Lithuania, and in October 2016, she visited Souda Bay, Greece.


title: USS Mount Whitney (LCC-20)

text: From early 2017 through to October 2017, "Mount Whitney" was at the Viktor Lenac Shipyard; Rijeka, Croatia, for further upgrades to its information technology infrastructure, and various engineering refurbishments.


title: USS Mount Whitney (LCC-20)

text: In September 2018, "Mount Whitney" visited Thessaloniki, Greece, for the 83rd Thessaloniki International Fair, where the US was the country of honor.


title: USS Mount Whitney (LCC-20)

text: From 25 October to 7 November 2018, she served as the command vessel for the NATO exercise Trident Juncture.


title: USS Mount Whitney (LCC-20)

text: In April 2022, the Combined Maritime Forces command, a 34-nation organization based in Bahrain, has added a new task force led by "Mount Whitney". There are three task forces that handle piracy and security issues both inside and outside of the Persian Gulf. The new task force of two to eight ships at a time would target those smuggling coal, drugs, weapons, and people in the waterway. In late May 2022, "Mount Whitney" was operating in the Baltic Sea, ahead of naval exercise BALTOPS 2022.


title: William H. Webster

text: William Hedgcock Webster (born March 6, 1924) is an American attorney and jurist who most recently served as chair of the Homeland Security Advisory Council from 2005 until 2020. He was a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri and a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit before becoming director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from 1978 to 1987 and director of Central Intelligence (CIA) from 1987 to 1991. He is the only person to have held both positions.


title: William H. Webster

text: Webster was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and received his early education in Webster Groves, Missouri; and served as a lieutenant in the United States Navy during World War II. Following his service in the Navy, he received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1947. While at Amherst, he was a member of the Psi Upsilon fraternity. He received his from the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis in 1949. After law school, he served in the Navy again during the Korean War; later, he joined the St. Louis law firm Armstrong Teasdale, but left private practice soon after to begin a career in public service. He was the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri from 1960 to 1961, then a member of the Missouri Board of Law Examiners from 1964 to 1969.


title: William H. Webster

text: Webster was nominated by President Richard Nixon on December 8, 1970, to the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, to a new seat created by 84 Stat. 294. He was confirmed by the United States Senate on December 17, 1970, and received his commission on December 21, 1970. His service was terminated on August 10, 1973, due to elevation to the Eighth Circuit.


title: William H. Webster

text: Webster was nominated by President Nixon on June 13, 1973, to a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit vacated by Judge Marion Charles Matthes. He was confirmed by the Senate on July 13, 1973, and received his commission on July 18, 1973. His service was terminated on February 22, 1978, due to his resignation.


title: William H. Webster

text: In 1978, President Jimmy Carter appointed him as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. This was despite Webster being a registered Republican.


title: William H. Webster

text: Webster was portrayed by actor Sean Cullen in Season 2 of the Netflix show "Mindhunter", which took place during his tenure as director of the FBI.


title: William H. Webster

text: In 1987, President Ronald Reagan chose him to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He led the CIA until his retirement from public office in 1991. Since then, Webster has practiced law at the Washington, D.C., office of Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy, where he specializes in arbitration, mediation and internal investigation.


title: William H. Webster

text: In 2002, he was the first chairman of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB). However, his appointment was controversial, and another controversy erupted when newspapers reported that Webster had headed the board audit committee of U.S. Technologies, a high-tech company being investigated for accounting irregularities and accused of fraud. Webster resigned less than three weeks after the PCAOB was set up.


title: William H. Webster

text: In 2020, Webster, along with over 130 other former Republican national security officials, signed a statement that asserted that President Trump was unfit to serve another term, and "To that end, we are firmly convinced that it is in the best interest of our nation that Vice President Joe Biden be elected as the next President of the United States, and we will vote for him."


title: William H. Webster

text: Webster received numerous honors and awards for his service. Washington University granted him the Alumni Citation for contributions to the field of law in 1972 and in 1981 he received the William Greenleaf Eliot Award. In 1984, he received the U.S. Senator John Heinz Award for Greatest Public Service by an Elected or Appointed Official, an award given out annually by Jefferson Awards. In 1999 the School of Law created the Webster Society, an outstanding scholars program. Furthermore, he received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the university's law school in 1977. The "St. Louis Globe-Democrat" named him "Man of the Year". In 1978, he received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.


title: William H. Webster

text: Webster also received honorary degrees from several colleges and universities. In 1991, he was presented the Distinguished Intelligence Medal, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the National Security Medal. In June 2008 Webster received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree as well as honorary doctorates from The Institute of World Politics and National Intelligence University. He received the William J. Donovan Award from The OSS Society in 2005 and serves as an honorary chairman of this organization.


title: William H. Webster

text: Webster is a member of the American Bar Association, the Council of the American Law Institute, the Order of the Coif, The Missouri Bar, the Bar Association of Metropolitan St. Louis and the Psi Upsilon fraternity. Additionally, he served as chairman of the Corporation, Banking and Business Law Section of the American Bar Association. He is a fellow of the American Bar Foundation and an Honorary Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers. He served as co-chairman of the Homeland Security Advisory Council. In 2009, he was named to head an independent investigation of the FBI's actions surrounding the Fort Hood shooting.


title: William H. Webster

text: He was married for 34 years to Drusilla Lane until her death in 1984 and the couple had three children: Drusilla L. Busch, William H. Webster Jr. and Katherine H. Roessle.


title: William H. Webster

text: In 1990, he married Lynda Clugston. They reside in Washington, D.C. In 2015, William and Lynda Webster were targeted by a man who peddled a lottery scam over phone calls and emails. Over multiple phone calls, Keniel Aeon Thomas of Jamaica told the Websters he'd set their house ablaze or have a sniper shoot them in the back of the head if they didn't pay him thousands of dollars, according to prosecutors' filings. The Websters used their friendship with people at the FBI to help send the scammer to prison for nearly six years in early 2019.


title: William H. Webster

text: On March 3, 2002, the University of California, Santa Barbara, held a debate titled "National Security vs. Personal Liberty". The guest speakers were Webster and American Civil Liberties Union President Nadine Strossen. During the debate, Webster made the following statement, which has since gained some popularity: "Security is always seen as too much until the day it is not enough." He also stated: "Order protects liberty and liberty protects order."


title: Tim Samaras

text: Timothy Michael Samaras (November 12, 1957 – May 31, 2013) was an American engineer and storm chaser best known for his field research on tornadoes and time on the Discovery Channel show, "Storm Chasers". He died in the 2013 El Reno tornado.


title: Tim Samaras

text: Samaras was born November 12, 1957 in Lakewood, Colorado, to Paul T. and Margaret L. Samaras. Paul (1925–2005) was a photographer and model airplane distributor who was an Army projectionist in WWII. Tim assisted in the photography and shop work. Margaret was born in 1929 and died in 1996. His mother talked him into watching an annual television broadcast of "The Wizard of Oz" at age six. "When the tornado appeared," he recalled. "I was hooked!"


title: Tim Samaras

text: Samaras attended Lasley Elementary and O'Connell Junior High in Lakewood, before graduating from Alameda International Junior/Senior High School in 1976. In his twenties, he began to chase storms "not for the thrill, but the science." He would continue this pursuit until his untimely death in 2013.


title: Tim Samaras

text: Samaras was an autodidact who never received a college degree. He became an amateur radio operator at age 12 and built transmitters using old television sets. As an adult he held an Amateur Extra Class license, the highest amateur radio class issued in the United States, and was proficient in Morse code. He communicated by amateur radio when chasing storms and was also a storm spotter, reporting sightings of hazardous weather. At 16, he was a radio technician and was service shop foreman at 17. Immediately out of high school and without a résumé, he was hired as a walk-in at the University of Denver Research Institute. He obtained a Pentagon security clearance by 20, testing and building weapons systems.


title: Tim Samaras

text: Samaras became a prominent engineer at Applied Research Associates initially focusing on blast testing and airline crash investigations. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) recognized him for his investigations of the TWA Flight 800 crash. His research included high-speed photography, such as on ballistics. He also worked at National Technical Systems and Hyperion Technology Group.


title: Tim Samaras

text: In addition to tornadoes, he was interested in all aspects of convective storms with particular research focus on lightning, for which he utilized cameras shooting up to 1.4 million fps. An accomplished photographer and videographer, another research method was photogrammetry, with some footage derived from cameras in probes shooting from within tornadoes. Samaras also shot for art and for pleasure. He was an avid amateur astronomer and also interested in electronics and inventions.


title: Tim Samaras

text: Samaras was the founder of a field research team called Tactical Weather Instrumented Sampling in Tornadoes EXperiment (TWISTEX) which sought to better understand tornadoes. His work was funded in large part by the National Geographic Society (NGS) which awarded him 18 grants for his field work.


title: Tim Samaras

text: Samaras designed and built his own weather instruments, known as probes, and deployed them in the path of tornadoes in order to gain scientific insight into the inner workings of a tornado. With one such in-situ probe, he captured the largest drop in atmospheric pressure, 100 hPa (mb) in less than one minute, ever recorded when a F4 tornado struck one of several probes placed near Manchester, South Dakota on June 24, 2003. The accomplishment is listed in the "Guinness World Records" as "greatest pressure drop measured in a tornado". The probe was dropped in front of the oncoming tornado a mere 82 seconds before it hit. The measurement is also the lowest pressure, , ever recorded at Earth's surface when adjusted for elevation. Samaras later described the tornado as the most memorable of his career. Samaras' aerodynamic probes were a breakthrough design for survivability inside tornadoes. A patent was pending for instrumentation measuring winds in 3D. Samaras held a patent, "Thermal imaging system for internal combustion engines", with Jon M. Lesko.


title: Tim Samaras

text: Samaras and his team logged over of driving during the two peak months of tornado season each year. When asked, Samaras said that the most dangerous part about following tornadoes is not the actual storms themselves, but rather the road hazards encountered along the way. In total, he tracked down more than 125 tornadoes during his career. His colleagues considered him to be one of the most careful chasers in the business.


title: Tim Samaras

text: Beginning in 1998, Samaras founded and co-produced (with Roger Hill) the National Storm Chasers Convention, an annual event held near Denver and attended by hundreds of chasers from around the world. Samaras's widow, Kathy, revealed in her first news interview since his death that she will continue ChaserCon, which consistently attracts luminary scientists and chasers as speakers. In 2005, he was named an "Emerging Explorer" by the National Geographic Society. From 2009 until the show's cancellation in 2012, Samaras was a featured personality on the Discovery Channel's "Storm Chasers". He also worked for Boeing, doing field testing on hail-resistant skins for aircraft, and for the federal government during his career. According to Eileen O'Neill, president of the Discovery networks, Samaras' work was directly responsible for increased warning times ahead of tornadoes.


title: Tim Samaras

text: Samaras coauthored, along with Stefan Bechtel and Greg Forbes, "Tornado Hunter: Getting Inside the Most Violent Storms on Earth" (), in 2009. Samaras authored or coauthored around one dozen scientific papers. He also contributed to "Storm Track" magazine. He appeared in major pieces in "National Geographic" in April 2004, June 2005, August 2012, and November 2013. He was also widely interviewed by news stations, newspapers, and magazines and appeared in documentaries.


title: Tim Samaras

text: In the spring of 2013, TWISTEX was conducting lightning research (including with a high-speed camera) when active tornadic periods ensued in mid to late May, so Samaras decided to deploy atmospheric pressure probes and to test infrasound tornado sensors that were still under development. At 6:23 p.m. on May 31, 2013, Samaras, his 24-year-old son Paul (a photographer), and TWISTEX team member Carl Young (a meteorologist), 45, were killed by a violent wedge tornado with winds of near the Regional Airport of El Reno, Oklahoma. The TWISTEX vehicle was struck by a subvortex, which generate the highest winds and some of which were moving at within the parent tornado.


title: Tim Samaras

text: The tornado was sampled by University of Oklahoma RaXPol radar as wide, the widest tornado ever recorded. The true size of the multiple-vortex tornado confused onlookers by its mammoth proportions containing orbiting subvortices larger than average tornadoes and its expansive transparent to translucent outer circulation. The strong inflow and outer circulation winds in conjunction with rocky roads and a relatively underpowered vehicle also hampered driving away from the tornado. The tornado simultaneously took an unexpected sharp turn closing on their position as it rapidly accelerated within a few minutes from about to as much as in forward movement and swiftly expanded from about to wide in about 30 seconds, and was mostly obscured in heavy precipitation, all of which combined so that several other chasers were also hit or had near misses. It was the first known instance of a storm chaser or a meteorologist killed by a tornado.


title: Tim Samaras

text: Even before it was known that Samaras, his son, and Young had been killed, the event led many to question storm chasing tactics, particularly in close proximity to tornadoes. In addition to the three TWISTEX members, the tornado killed five other people, including local resident Richard Charles Henderson who decided to follow the storm.


title: Tim Samaras

text: Atmospheric scientists and storm chasers embarked on a major project to gather information and analyze what happened regarding chaser actions and meteorological occurrences. A makeshift memorial was established at the site soon after the incident and a crowdfunded permanent memorial is under development, spearheaded by Doug Gerten, the deputy who first found the vehicle wreckage. A permanent memorial was later established, although this monument was vandalized in late March 2016. The monument was struck by bullets and the American flag was cut away from the flagpole.


title: Tim Samaras

text: Meteorologists at the Storm Prediction Center (SPC) issued a statement saying they were very saddened by Tim's death. "Samaras was a respected tornado researcher and friend ... who brought to the field a unique portfolio of expertise in engineering, science, writing and videography," read the statement. Severe weather expert Greg Forbes called Samaras "a groundbreaker in terms of the kind of research he was doing on severe thunderstorms and tornadoes". Meteorologist Jim Cantore remarked "This is a very sad day for the meteorological community and the families of our friends lost. Tim Samaras was a pioneer and great man." "National Geographic" remarked "Tim was a courageous and brilliant scientist who fearlessly pursued tornadoes and lightning in the field in an effort to better understand these phenomena." On Facebook, Samaras' brother said he died "doing what [he] LOVED. Chasing Tornadoes". On June 2, Discovery dedicated "Mile Wide Tornado: Oklahoma," a special about the May 20 Moore, Oklahoma tornado, to the memory of Samaras and his TWISTEX colleagues.


title: Tim Samaras

text: Samaras was survived by his wife Kathy, two daughters, a son from a previous relationship, brothers Jim and Jack, and two grandchildren. His memorial service was held on June 6, 2013 at Mission Hills Church in Littleton, Colorado.


title: Tim Samaras

text: Samaras and his wife Kathy had three children — Paul (November 12, 1988 – May 31, 2013), Amy Gregg, and Jennifer Samaras. The family lived on 35 acres near Bennett, Colorado, at the time of his death. The open space enabled Tim to erect amateur radio and other towers and provided ample room for workshops. He learned of the property through real estate investment work that he did on the side and to which his brother Jim introduced him. Samaras had another son, Matt Winter, whom he had only learned about seven years before Samaras' death and who was welcomed into the family. Winter was also fascinated by weather and was informed by his mother that Tim was his father after he heard Samaras speak at the 2006 Severe Storms and Doppler Radar Conference in Des Moines, Iowa.


title: Tim Samaras

text: In 2011, Samaras took time off chasing to help build homes in Alabama for victims of tornadoes earlier that year. According to O'Neill he worked "from dawn to dusk" with "the same dedication and focus he brought to his meteorological work".


title: Edinburg, Texas

text: Edinburg ( ) is a city in and the county seat of Hidalgo County, Texas, United States. Its population was 74,569 as of the 2010 census, and in 2019, its estimated population was 101,170, making it the second-largest city in Hidalgo County, and the third-largest city in the larger Rio Grande Valley region.


title: Edinburg, Texas

text: In 1908, John Closner, William Briggs, Argyle McAllen, Plutarco de la Viña, and Dennis B. Chapin developed a new community at this site. The town square was located at the current crossroads of U.S. Highway 281 and State Highway 107. The town was named "Chapin" in honor of one of the developers. A local myth relates that Edinburg became the county seat of Hidalgo County in a dramatic, nighttime covert operation in which the county records were removed from the previous county seat. However, historical records show more practical reasons. The 1886 Hidalgo County Courthouse in the city of Hidalgo was under frequent danger of flooding because it stood just a few yards away from the banks the Rio Grande. Additionally, the county was over 80 miles long at this time, and state law required that the courthouse be close to the geographic center of a county. A wood-frame courthouse was designed and built beside the Chapin courthouse square in 1908; construction on a grand courthouse within the square began in 1910 under the supervision of San Antonio builders and a partnership of San Antonio architects. When Dennis Chapin was involved in the shooting death of Oscar J. Rountree at the Dan Breen Saloon in San Antonio, the community changed its name to "Edinburg" to honor John Young, a prominent businessman who was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. The town was officially renamed in 1911 and incorporated in 1919.


title: Edinburg, Texas

text: Edinburg is located in south-central Hidalgo County at (26.304225, –98.163751). It is bordered to the south by Pharr and to the southwest by McAllen, the largest city in the county. U.S. Route 281 (Interstate 69C) runs through the east side of Edinburg. US 281 leads north to Alice and to San Antonio. Downtown McAllen is to the south and west.


title: Edinburg, Texas

text: According to the United States Census Bureau, Edinburg has a total area of , of which , or 0.16%, is covered by water.


title: Edinburg, Texas

text: As of the 2020 United States census, 100,243 people, 29,899 households, and 21,635 families were residing in the city.


title: Edinburg, Texas

text: Population as of the census of 2000 was 48,465 people, 14,183 households, and 11,417 families in the city. The population density was 1,296.9 people per square mile (500.7/km). The 16,031 housing units had an average density of 429.0 per square mile (165.6/km). The racial makeup of the city was 73.32% White, 0.58% African American, 0.47% Native American, 0.65% Asian, 22.71% from other races, and 2.27% from two or more races. Hispanics or Latinos of any race were 88.68% of the population. About 95% of those who selected the "other race" were Hispanic or Latino.


title: Edinburg, Texas

text: Of the 14,183 households, 46.9% had children under 18 living with them, 56.9% were married couples living together, 19.0% had a female householder with no husband present, and 19.5% were not families. About 15.4% of all households were made up of individuals, and 5.5% had someone living alone who was 65 or older. The average household size was 3.29, and the average family size was 3.71.


title: Edinburg, Texas

text: In the city, the ag distribution was 33.0% under 18, 13.1% from 18 to 24, 29.8% from 25 to 44, 15.9% from 45 to 64, and 8.2% who were 65 or older. The median age was 27 years. For every 100 females, there were 95.3 males. For every 100 females 18 and over, there were 90.5 males.


title: Edinburg, Texas

text: The median income for a household in the city was $28,938, and for a family was $30,634. Males had a median income of $27,505 versus $21,010 for females. The per capita income for the city was $11,854. About 25.2% of families and 29.2% of the population were below the poverty line, including 37.2% of those under 18 and 23.0% of those 65 or over.


title: Edinburg, Texas

text: Several state agencies have offices in Edinburg. This includes the Thirteenth Court of Appeals, the Texas Attorney General's Child Support Unit, the Texas Departments of Health Services, Human Services, Protective and Regulatory Services, and Public Safety. The Texas Youth Commission has a facility near Edinburg. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice operates two facilities, the Lopez Unit and the Segovia Unit, in Edinburg.


title: Edinburg, Texas

text: Edinburg is home to the Museum of South Texas History, formerly the Hidalgo County Historical Museum.


title: Edinburg, Texas

text: The Edinburg Scenic Wetlands comprise one of nine sites of the World Birding Center, a native habitat site and wildlife refuge.


title: Edinburg, Texas

text: This city was the home of the Edinburg Roadrunners, an independent league baseball team in the North American League, but after numerous ownership changes, the team disbanded. Currently, UTRGV is the only major baseball team in Edinburg.


title: Edinburg, Texas

text: In 2013, the city of Edinburg and the Edinburg Economic Development Corporation announced plans for the construction of an events arena in which the NBA Development League champions, the Rio Grande Valley Vipers, would be the anchor tenants. It opened in 2018. The team also has its practice facility at the Edinburg Sports and Wellness Center. The city also opened a six-city-block stretch of green pedestrian walkway space known as the McIntyre Street Project in April 2014; it is expected to be the beginning of a proposed arts and restaurant district extending through the heart of Edinburg.


title: Edinburg, Texas

text: Since 2016, the city has been home to the Rio Grande Valley FC Toros soccer club in the USL Championship, who play at H-E-B Park. The city is also home to the Rio Grande Valley FC Toros Academy, the best youth soccer club in the area and a pioneer in youth development for the Rio Grande Valley. The Toros Academy plays in the MLS Next league against the best academies in the nation and provides fully funded programs for U-15, U-17, and U-19 boys.


title: Edinburg, Texas

text: Bert Ogden Arena was originally opened in August 2018, is the home for the Rio Grande Valley Vipers of the NBA G League. The capacity for basketball games is 7,688 and 9,000 for concerts. The construction cost was $88 million.


title: Edinburg, Texas

text: UTRGV Baseball Stadium, commonly known as Edinburg Stadium, had its groundbreaking take place in 2000., and it opened in 2001. The stadium's capacity is 4,000 people. It was the home for the Edinburg Roadrunners (2001 to 2013). The Edinburg Roadrunners were a member of the United League Baseball 2006 to 2010 and the North American League from 2011 to 2012. The land was owned by the City of Edinburg in years prior to 2014, was donated to the University of Texas System.


title: Edinburg, Texas

text: H-E-B Park is a 9,700-seat soccer-specific stadium home for the rio Grande Valley FC Toros of the USL Championship. The construction of the stadium was completed in 2016 and officially opened on March 22, 2017.


title: Edinburg, Texas

text: As Edinburg is the county seat of Hidalgo County, most major county offices are located there, including the Criminal District Attorney's Office, the District Courts and County Courts at Law of Hidalgo County, the Community Supervision and Corrections Department, the Hidalgo County Juvenile Probation Department, the Hidalgo County Sheriff's Office, and the offices of the County Judge, the Tax Assessor/Collector, the County Treasurer, County Auditor and Veterans Services. Hidalgo County Commissioner's Precinct Four represents Edinburg on the Hidalgo County County Commissioner's Court.


title: Edinburg, Texas

text: Edinburg City Council meetings are held on the first and third Tuesdays of every month starting at 6 pm in the Edinburg City Hall, Council Chambers. Anyone can attend the meetings and voice any concerns.


title: Edinburg, Texas

text: The United States Border Patrol Rio Grande Valley Sector Headquarters is at 4400 South Expressway 281, Edinburg, Texas.


title: Edinburg, Texas

text: In December 2012, officials announced the merger of the existing University of Texas-Pan American in Edinburg and the University of Texas at Brownsville into a regional institution. A year later, in December 2013, University of Texas System officials decided to name the new institution the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. UTRGV's creation garnered much media attention because of its expected economic, social, and health-care impact on the region. UTRGV is unique in that it is the first time the UT System has merged existing campuses in such a way. UTRGV was to also bring the first medical school to the Rio Grande Valley region. The first class of UTRGV students began courses in fall 2015.


title: Edinburg, Texas

text: Edinburg is also the home of the Rio Grande Bible Institute and is located in the South Texas College District.


title: Edinburg, Texas

text: Almost all of the city is served by the Edinburg Consolidated Independent School District, comprising four high schools, one alternative secondary school, six middle schools, and 20 elementary schools. A small portion is served by the McAllen Independent School District, including Memorial High School, Cathey Middle School, and McAllen's Gonzalez Elementary.


title: Edinburg, Texas

text: In addition, the South Texas Independent School District operates magnet schools that serve Edinburg. South Texas Business Education & Technology Academy is in Edinburg. Students from Edinburg also have the chance to attend other South Texas ISD schools in Mercedes -South Texas High School for the Medical Professions and the Science Academy of South Texas.


title: Edinburg, Texas

text: The Catholic Diocese of Brownsville operates St. Joseph Catholic School, an elementary and middle school.


title: Edinburg, Texas

text: McIntyre Street Project plans also include a bus transportation hub for Valley Metro, the regional transit service.


title: Edinburg, Texas

text: Two major commercial airports are near Edinburg: McAllen Miller International Airport (MFE) at McAllen, 20 minutes from Edinburg and Valley International Airport, (HRL) in Harlingen, 40 minutes from Edinburg. The South Texas International Airport at Edinburg (KEBG) is a public-use airport owned and operated by the City of Edinburg.


title: Best Friends (professional wrestling)

text: Best Friends are a professional wrestling stable, originally a tag team consisting of Chuck Taylor (also billed as Chuckie T) and Trent Beretta (also billed as Trent? or Beretta). The team is currently performing in All Elite Wrestling (AEW). They first formed in Pro Wrestling Guerilla (PWG), where they were the winners of the 2014 Dynamite Duumvirate Tag Team Title Tournament. The AEW incarnation sees the duo usually accompanied by Orange Cassidy with Kris Statlander and occasional appearances by Sue (Trent's real-life mother). The group is the AEW branch of the NJPW faction Chaos, as the two organizations have a working relationship.


title: Best Friends (professional wrestling)

text: The original team of Taylor and Trent are often seen as a comedy tag team, with Trent often acting as the straight man to the more eccentric Taylor as well as Sue's use of her Honda Odyssey.


title: Best Friends (professional wrestling)

text: Chuck Taylor and Trent? first teamed on August 31, 2013 at the Pro Wrestling Guerilla (PWG) 2013 Battle of Los Angeles - Night Two alongside Joey Ryan, where they defeated the team of B-Boy, Tommaso Ciampa, and Willie Mack. A string of victories followed, culminating in Taylor and Trent? defeating The Inner City Machine Guns to win the 2014 Dynamite Duumvirate Tag Team Title Tournament on January 31. They subsequently lost a match against The Young Bucks for the PWG World Tag Team Championship at PWG Mystery Vortex II on March 28, 2014.


title: Best Friends (professional wrestling)

text: Best Friends first appeared in Ring of Honor (ROH) on May 14, 2017, joined by Beretta's Roppongi Vice partner Rocky Romero, in a victory over Bullet Club's The Young Bucks and Adam Page. On October 10, Chuckie T and Beretta won a match against The Addiction to become number one contenders to the ROH World Tag Team Championship, but lost to defending champions The Motor City Machine Guns at Final Battle on December 15.


title: Best Friends (professional wrestling)

text: Best Friends made their debut for New Japan Pro-Wrestling (NJPW) on the second day of the 2017 World Tag League on November 19, representing the CHAOS stable. They went on to score four wins and three losses in the tournament, failing to advance to the finals. They competed in the 2018 World Tag League as well, scoring 14 points and thus failing to advance to the finals. During the tournament, Chuckie displayed a much more aggressive attitude, attacking his opponents with steel chairs which often caused a disqualification loss for the team and caused tension to built between him and Beretta.


title: Best Friends (professional wrestling)

text: Ultimately, this storyline never developed further, as they both left NJPW and signed with upstart All Elite Wrestling in the beginning of 2019. On February 7, 2019, their profiles were removed from NJPW website.


title: Best Friends (professional wrestling)

text: As a result of NJPW's partnership with All Elite Wrestling, Rocky Romero invited the entire Best Friends stable (now consisting of five members) to be part of CHAOS, which they accepted.


title: Best Friends (professional wrestling)

text: On February 7, 2019, Best Friends appeared at an All Elite Wrestling (AEW) rally in Las Vegas and announced that they were joining AEW. The duo participated in the AEW World Tag Team Title Tournament to crown the inaugural champions, but were eliminated in the first round. During this time they also became friends with and added Orange Cassidy to the team, including adding him to their trademark hug and zoom out. On the October 30, 2019, episode of "", Best Friends and their newfound ally Orange Cassidy dressed up as "Rick and Morty" before they won in a 6-man tag-team match against Alex Reynolds, John Silver, and Q. T. Marshall. At Bash at the Beach on January 15, 2020, Best Friends competed in a four-way tag team match to determine the number one contenders for the AEW World Tag Team Championship, which was won by "Hangman" Adam Page and Kenny Omega. At the Double or Nothing Buy-In, Best Friends defeated Private Party (Isiah Kassidy & Marq Quen) in a number one contender's match for the AEW World Tag Team Championship after delivering the "Strong Zero" on Quen. On the June 10th edition of "Dynamite", Best Friends and Orange Cassidy defeated The Inner Circle's Jake Hager and Santana and Ortiz in a 6-man tag team match, after which they suffered a beatdown from the rest of The Inner Circle, with Orange Cassidy suffering the worst beating after Chris Jericho hit him with a bag of blood oranges. Best Friends would seek revenge against Chris Jericho and Sammy Guevara (Le Sex Gods) while putting their tag team title #1 contendership on the line on the June 17th edition of "Dynamite". They emerged victorious after Guevara tripped over the cameraman's hand which enabled Trent to pick up the victory for the team. The cameraman who was at ringside turned out to be Orange Cassidy who then proceeded to beat down Jericho. Best Friends would receive their tag team title shot against Kenny Omega and "Hangman" Adam Page at Fyter Fest night 1, which they lost.


title: Best Friends (professional wrestling)

text: In late August, while Cassidy resumed his feud with Chris Jericho, Trent and Chuck started feuding with Santana and Ortiz after (Trent's Mom) Sue's van was destroyed by Santana and Ortiz, leading to a match on an episode of Dynamite.


title: Best Friends (professional wrestling)

text: In April 2021, Trent would take time off to receive spinal fusion surgery. In his absence, the group recruited Wheeler Yuta, taking him under their wing as a young lion, and later, Danhausen became an associate member of the group. Trent returned in December, and friction began to form between the two throughout early 2022, with Trent antagonizing Yuta in backstage segments and supplementary material. At the same time, Bryan Danielson, while floating the idea of a stable with Jon Moxley, made overtures towards Yuta by naming him as a potential understudy. On March 16, 2022, Yuta and Taylor lost a tag team match to Danielson and Moxley, now led and managed by William Regal, but after the match, a spurned Yuta would return to the ring and offer a handshake to Regal. Regal would instead slap him, causing Yuta to confront him immediately afterwards, impressing Regal. On the March 30 and April 8 episodes of Dynamite and Rampage respectively, Yuta would lose to the newly christened Blackpool Combat Club in increasingly competitive matches, with the latter match with Moxley finally resulting in Regal offering a bloodied Yuta a handshake, which he accepted, before painting "BCC" on his chest with his blood, signifying his departure from Best Friends and CHAOS and initiation into BCC.


title: Spider-Man (Ultimate Marvel character)

text: Spider-Man is a superhero appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. He is a modernized, alternate universe counterpart of Spider-Man who is in his youth, a character first created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko in 1962. The Ultimate version of the character originated in Ultimate Marvel, a line of comic books created in 2000 that is set in a parallel universe with a narrative continuity separate and independent from the main continuity of Marvel Comics stories that began in the 1960s. "Ultimate Spider-Man", the first and flagship title of the Ultimate line, was created by the writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Mark Bagley, and debuted in September 2000, which featured the first appearance of the Ultimate version of the character. The biggest difference is that this version of Parker is killed at the age of 16, being Spider-Man for a span of almost a year before being replaced by the 13-year-old Miles Morales. However following the "Secret Wars" storyline, Miles and his family were retconned into the history of the prime universe and Peter who had been resurrected had resumed his superhero role. To differentiate him from other incarnations, Peter Parker from this universe is commonly dubbed Ultimate Spider-Man.


title: Spider-Man (Ultimate Marvel character)

text: At around the age of six, Peter Parker was orphaned after the death of his parents in a plane crash and was raised by his father's brother, Ben Parker, and his wife May. Nine years later, Peter grew to be an exceptionally bright teen and a high school genius, being particularly skilled in physics and chemistry. However, he was also an introverted outcast among his peers and was frequently bullied and tormented by Eugene "Flash" Thompson and Kenny "King Kong" McFarlane. On a school field trip to the scientific corporation Oscorp, he was bitten by a genetically-mutated spider, which gave him spider-like superhuman abilities. The head of Oscorp, Norman Osborn, discovered this and experimented with the same mutagen injected within the spider's bloodstream on himself, but the experiment went awry, mutating him into a monstrous, green-coloured and hulking goblin-like creature later known as the Green Goblin.


title: Spider-Man (Ultimate Marvel character)

text: After discovering his new abilities, Peter used his powers for personal gain, like his standard counterpart, to financially support his family as a professional wrestler and to become popular by becoming the school's top basketball player thanks to his enhanced spider-powers. However, he began to selfishly utilise his abilities and started to act irresponsibly, which adversely affected his studies and behavior, all of which worried his aunt and uncle. Peter was later fired from his job as a wrestler under suspicions that he was responsible for a recent robbery, much to his chagrin and disappointment. Later that night, as he was walking to his house, he encountered an armed robber escaping from a nearby convenience store, but refused to stop him out of spite and continued to walk home. After returning home and having a heated argument with his aunt and uncle over his failing grades and increasingly reckless nature, Peter ran away from home out of anger. After regretting his argument with his aunt and uncle, he returned home intending to apologise and reveal his spider-powers to them, but upon arriving, he saw a police car and an ambulance parked outside his house, and to his horror, he discovered that Uncle Ben had been murdered by an armed thief. Fueled with rage and a thirst for vengeance, a masked Peter hunted down his uncle's killer. After cornering the criminal within an abandoned warehouse, Peter managed to subdue him and found out, to his shock, that the killer was the same robber whom he refused to stop earlier that night. He then handed over the killer to the arriving police. Guilt-ridden, Peter vowed to follow his uncle's motto, "with great power comes great responsibility", and became the masked vigilante Spider-Man in order to utilise his spider-powers for a noble purpose and to atone for his uncle's death.


title: Spider-Man (Ultimate Marvel character)

text: In his first year as Spider-Man, Peter encountered the Green Goblin, who later disappeared into the river below the Brooklyn Bridge, following his defeat. Peter Parker later got a job as a web designer for the "Daily Bugle" upon being hired by J. Jonah Jameson, the snarky and cynical editor of the "Daily Bugle", who disliked Spider-Man and constantly ran defamatory smear campaigns against the vigilante. Later, he confessed his identity to his classmate, crush and childhood friend: Mary Jane Watson and they formed a close romantic relationship. Peter Parker later met Gwen Stacy, which initially put pressure on Spider-Man's current relationship with Mary Jane Watson. This issue was later resolved and the three became good friends.


title: Spider-Man (Ultimate Marvel character)

text: After being defeated by Spider-Man in a sudden reappearance, the Green Goblin was apprehended and incarcerated in the Triskelion alongside Doctor Octopus, Electro, Kraven the Hunter, and Sandman. They escaped from the Triskelion and formed the Ultimate Six. When the Green Goblin threatened to harm Aunt May, Spider-Man reluctantly allied with the Ultimate Six and they attacked the White House. When Captain America confirmed that Aunt May is safe, Spider-Man assisted the Ultimates in fighting the Ultimate Six.


title: Spider-Man (Ultimate Marvel character)

text: In a later encounter with Nick Fury, Spider-Man learned that Nick Fury learned his secret identity upon finding evidence including footage of the spider that bit Peter Parker and the fact that Doctor Octopus was ranting in his cell about Peter Parker being Spider-Man.


title: Spider-Man (Ultimate Marvel character)

text: During the "Ultimatum" storyline, Peter and those in his life survived the Ultimatum Wave caused by Magneto where Peter became Spider-Man to help save the drowning civilians. While Spider-Man was doing heroic acts, J. Jonah Jameson started publishing his heroic acts. While working with the Hulk, Spider-Man found the body of Daredevil, who became one of the casualties of the Ultimatum Wave. When the two of them arrived at the ruins of the Sanctum Sanctorum, Spider-Man and the Hulk found a rift open where Dormammu and different demons were emerging at the time when Doctor Strange was possessed by Nightmare. When the Hulk caused an explosion during the fight, Spider-Man was caught in the explosion. Following the death of Magneto, the Ultimates found Spider-Man unconscious while searching for survivors.


title: Spider-Man (Ultimate Marvel character)

text: As Spider-Man was no longer having problems with the police following the Ultimatum Wave incident, Peter Parker had to take a temporary job at the Burger Frog when the Daily Bugle was temporarily shut down during the Ultimatum Wave incident.


title: Spider-Man (Ultimate Marvel character)

text: During "The Death of Spider-Man" storyline, Spider-Man found that Norman Osborn had reformed the Ultimate Six with Vulture replacing Spider-Man. While searching for them following Doctor Octopus' death, Spider-Man threw himself in front of Captain America when he was targeted by Punisher and got shot. Upon dressing the wound, Spider-Man fought the Ultimate Six where they injured him further. Before Electro could attack Spider-Man, Aunt May shot him enough for him to discharge energy that knocked out Kraven the Hunter, Sandman, and Vulture. Spider-Man and the Green Goblin continued their fight which led to them mortally wounding each other. Before dying, Peter was surrounded by Aunt May, Mary Jane, the Human Torch, and Gwen Stacy as he quoted that he saved them where he was unable to save Uncle Ben. While Mary Jane cradled Spider-Man's lifeless body, she, Aunt May, and the Human Torch cried uncontrollably while Norman Osborn's dead body was seen with a smirk where he died knowing that he won.


title: Spider-Man (Ultimate Marvel character)

text: During the "Ultimate Fallout" storyline, the public became aware of Peter Parker being Spider-Man as the Daily Bugle was the first to print the news about Spider-Man's death. When it came to his funeral, Tony Stark paid for the funeral while Captain America approached Aunt May, remorseful over the fact that he blamed himself for Spider-Man's death. Thor claimed that he saw Peter Parker's spirit in Valhalla. At the same time, an Afro-Latino boy named Miles Morales, who had developed powers before Peter even died and was now feeling guilty that he could have helped the latter, used a copy of the Spider-Man costume to defeat Kangaroo. Nick Fury even blamed himself for Spider-Man's death when he visited Mary Jane, who threatened to expose him.


title: Spider-Man (Ultimate Marvel character)

text: Sometime later, under unknown circumstances, Peter awoke in an abandoned laboratory and made his way back to New York City where he reunited with Mary Jane. To investigate if he was still dead, they went to his grave to find that somebody dug his body out of his grave. Not wanting to surprise Aunt May, Peter went to retrieve his web-shooters from Miles Morales' apartment, only for Miles to enter his room. Both of them fought over the part of telling Aunt May, which led to a short scuffle ending with Peter knocking Miles out and making off with his web-shooters. After the also-resurrected Green Goblin ambushed Miles in Queens, Peter came to his aid, finally clad in his old costume. Peter's intervention on Green Goblin attempting to kill Miles surprised those who witnessed his return. It was discovered that the OZ Formula that affected Peter and Osborn had apparently given them virtual immortality. After Green Goblin was defeated, Detective Maria Hill shot him and immolated his body for good measure. Peter officially retired as Spider-Man and gave his web-shooters to Miles, as well as his blessing to uphold the Spider-Man mantle. Bidding farewell to Aunt May and Gwen, Peter and Mary Jane left New York to find out how he came back to life.


title: Spider-Man (Ultimate Marvel character)

text: Following the "Secret Wars" storyline, the Ultimate Universe was restored and Peter Parker resumed the mantle of Spider-Man, as Miles now resided in the prime universe. After helping the Ultimates fight and detained the Green Goblin, Peter Parker attended a party that welcomed Kenny McFarland home from the army.


title: Spider-Man (Ultimate Marvel character)

text: After being bitten by a genetically-modified spider, the resulting aftermath led to the unseen side-effect of the spider-venom slowly killing Peter, before the effect eventually wore away and subsequently led him to develop arachnid-like superpowers.


title: Spider-Man (Ultimate Marvel character)

text: After being bitten by the spider, Peter Parker created mechanical devices named "web-shooters", which produced a strong, web-like adhesive substance (much like his mainstream counterpart), by using his father's scientific notes, since the bite did not give him the ability to spin any webs.