title: U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission

text: Because of concerns raised by David P. Weber, former SEC Chief Investigator, regarding conduct by SEC Inspector General H. David Kotz, Inspector General David C. Williams of the U.S. Postal Service was brought in to conduct an independent, outside review of Kotz's alleged improper conduct in 2012. Williams concluded in his 66-page Report that Kotz violated ethics rules by overseeing probes that involved people with whom he had conflicts of interest due to "personal relationships". The report questioned Kotz's work on the Madoff investigation, among others, because Kotz was a "very good friend" with Markopolos. It concluded that while it was unclear when Kotz and Markopolos became friends, it would have violated U.S. ethics rules if their relationship began before or during Kotz's Madoff investigation. The report also found that Kotz himself "appeared to have a conflict of interest" and should not have opened his Standford investigation, because he was friends with a female attorney who represented victims of the fraud.


title: U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission

text: According to former SEC employee and whistleblower Darcy Flynn, also reported by Taibbi, the agency routinely destroyed thousands of documents related to preliminary investigations of alleged crimes committed by Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, SAC Capital, and other financial companies involved in the Great Recession that the SEC was supposed to have been regulating. The documents included those relating to "Matters Under Inquiry", or MUI, the name the SEC gives to the first stages of the investigation process. The tradition of destruction began as early as the 1990s. This SEC activity eventually caused a conflict with the National Archives and Records Administration when it was revealed to them in 2010 by Flynn. Flynn also described a meeting at the SEC in which top staff discussed "refusing to admit the destruction had taken place, because it was possibly illegal".


title: U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission

text: Iowa Republican Senator Charles Grassley, among others, took note of Flynn's call for protection as a whistleblower, and the story of the agency's document-handling procedures. The SEC issued a statement defending its procedures. NPR quoted University of Denver Sturm College of Law professor Jay Brown as saying: "My initial take on this is it's a tempest in a teapot," and Jacob Frenkel, a securities lawyer in the Washington, D.C., area, as saying in effect "there's no allegation the SEC tossed sensitive documents from banks it got under subpoena in high-profile cases that investors and lawmakers care about". NPR concluded its report:


title: U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission

text: The debate boils down to this: What does an investigative record mean to Congress? And the courts? Under the law, those investigative records must be kept for 25 years. But federal officials say no judge has ruled that papers related to early-stage SEC inquiries are investigative records. The SEC's inspector general says he's conducting a thorough investigation into the allegations. [Kotz] tells NPR that he'll issue a report by the end of September.


title: U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission

text: The SEC runs a Whistleblower Rewards Program which rewards individuals who report violations of Securities Laws to the SEC. The program began in 2011 with the passage of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act and allows whistleblowers to be given 10-30% of the penalties collected by the SEC and other agencies as a result of the whistleblower's information. As of 2021, the SEC had recovered $4.8 billion in monetary remedies as a result of information obtained through the whistleblower program and had paid out over $1 billion to whistleblowers. As part of the program, the SEC issues a report to Congress each year and the 2021 report is available here.


title: U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission

text: In addition to working with various self-regulatory organizations such as the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC), and Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board (MSRB), the SEC also works with federal agencies, state securities regulators, international securities agencies and law enforcement agencies.


title: U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission

text: In 1988 Executive Order 12631 established the President's Working Group on Financial Markets. The Working Group is chaired by the Secretary of the Treasury and includes the Chairman of the SEC, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve and the Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The goal of the Working Group is to enhance the integrity, efficiency, orderliness, and competitiveness of the financial markets while maintaining investor confidence. m


title: U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission

text: The Securities Act of 1933 was originally administered by the Federal Trade Commission. The Securities Exchange Act of 1934 transferred this responsibility from the FTC to the SEC. The Securities Exchange Act of 1934 also gave the SEC the power to regulate the solicitation of proxies, though some of the rules the SEC has since proposed (like the universal proxy) have been controversial.'' The main mission of the FTC is to promote consumer protection and to eradicate anti-competitive business practices. The FTC regulates general business practices, while the SEC focuses on the securities markets.


title: U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission

text: The Temporary National Economic Committee was established by joint resolution of Congress 52 Stat. 705 on June 16, 1938. It was in charge of reporting to Congress on abuses of monopoly power. The committee was defunded in 1941, but its records are still under seal by order of the SEC.


title: U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission

text: The Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board (MSRB) was established in 1975 by Congress to develop rules for companies involved in underwriting and trading municipal securities. The MSRB is monitored by the SEC, but the MSRB does not have the authority to enforce its rules.


title: U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission

text: The Asset Management Advisory Committee (AMAC) was formally established on 1 November 2019, to provide the SEC with "diverse perspectives on asset management and related advice and recommendations". Topics the committee may address include trends and developments affecting investors and market participants, the effects of globalization, and changes in the role of technology and service providers. The committee is composed of outside experts, including individuals representing the views of retail and institutional investors, small and large funds, intermediaries, and other market participants.


title: U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission

text: While most violations of securities laws are enforced by the SEC and the various SROs it monitors, state securities regulators can also enforce statewide securities blue sky laws. States may require securities to be registered in the state before they can be sold there. National Securities Markets Improvement Act of 1996 (NSMIA) addressed this dual system of federal-state regulation by amending Section 18 of the 1933 Act to exempt nationally traded securities from state registration, thereby pre-empting state law in this area. However, NSMIA preserves the states' anti-fraud authority over all securities traded in the state.


title: U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission

text: The SEC also works with federal and state law enforcement agencies to carry out actions against actors alleged to be in violation of the securities laws.


title: U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission

text: The SEC is a member of International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO), and uses the IOSCO Multilateral Memorandum of Understanding as well as direct bilateral agreements with other countries' securities commissions to deal with cross-border misconduct in securities markets.


The 1876 United States presidential election was the 23rd quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 7, 1876, in which Republican nominee Rutherford B. Hayes faced Democrat Samuel J. Tilden. It was one of the most contentious presidential elections in American history. Its resolution involved negotiations between the Republicans and Democrats, resulting in the Compromise of 1877, and on March 2, 1877, the counting of electoral votes by the House and Senate occurred, confirming Hayes as President. It was the second of five U.S. presidential elections in which the winner did not win a plurality of the national popular vote. This is the only time both major party nominees were incumbent US governors.


title: 1876 United States presidential election

text: After U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant declined to seek a third term despite previously being expected to do so, U.S. Representative James G. Blaine emerged as the frontrunner for the Republican nomination. However, Blaine was unable to win a majority at the 1876 Republican National Convention, which settled on Governor Hayes of Ohio as a compromise candidate. The 1876 Democratic National Convention nominated Governor Tilden of New York on the second ballot.


text: The results of the election remain among the most disputed ever. Although it is not disputed that Tilden outpolled Hayes in the popular vote, there were wide allegations of electoral fraud, election violence, and other disfranchisement of predominantly Republican Black voters. After a first count of votes, Tilden had won 184 electoral votes to Hayes's 165, with 20 votes from four states unresolved. In Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina, both parties reported their candidate to have won the state. In Oregon, one elector was replaced after being declared illegal for having been an "elected or appointed official." The question of who should have been awarded those electoral votes is the source of the continued controversy.


text: An informal, "back-room" deal was struck to resolve the votes: the Compromise of 1877. In the deal, the Democrats conceded the 20 contested electoral votes to Hayes, resulting in a 185-184 victory; in return, the Republicans agreed to withdraw federal troops from the South, marking the end of Reconstruction.


text: To date, it remains the election that yielded the highest voter turnout of the eligible voting-age population in American history, at 81.8%. Tilden's 50.9% is the largest share of the popular vote received by a candidate that was not elected to the presidency. This was the only presidential election in US history in which a candidate who received more than 50% of the popular vote did not win the election.


text: It was widely assumed during the year 1875 that incumbent President Ulysses S. Grant would run for a third term as president despite the poor economic conditions, the numerous political scandals that had developed since he assumed office in 1869, and a longstanding tradition set by George Washington not to stay in office for more than two terms. Grant's inner circle advised him to go for a third term and he almost did so, but on December 15, 1875, the House, by a sweeping 233-18 vote, passed a resolution declaring that the two-term tradition was to prevent a dictatorship. Later that year, Grant ruled himself out of running in 1876. He instead tried to persuade Secretary of State Hamilton Fish to run for the presidency, but the 67-year-old Fish declined since he believed himself too old for that role. Grant nonetheless sent a letter to the convention imploring them to nominate Fish, but the letter was misplaced and never read to the convention. Fish later confirmed that he would have declined the presidential nomination even if it had been offered to him.


text: When the Sixth Republican National Convention assembled in Cincinnati, Ohio, on June 14, 1876, James G. Blaine appeared to be the presidential nominee. On the first ballot, Blaine was just 100 votes short of a majority. His vote began to slide after the second ballot, however, as many Republicans feared that Blaine could not win the general election. Anti-Blaine delegates could not agree on a candidate until his total rose to 41% on the sixth ballot. Leaders of the reform Republicans met privately and considered alternatives. They chose the reforming Ohio Governor Rutherford B. Hayes, who had been gradually building support during the convention until he finished second on the sixth ballot. On the seventh ballot, Hayes was nominated for president with 384 votes, compared to 351 for Blaine and 21 for Benjamin Bristow. New York Representative William A. Wheeler was nominated for vice president by a much larger margin (366–89) over his chief rival, Frederick Theodore Frelinghuysen, who later served as a member of the Electoral Commission, which awarded the election to Hayes.


text: The Democratic Party's failure to nominate its own ticket in the previous presidential election, in which they had instead endorsed the Liberal Republican candidacy of Horace Greeley, had resulted in much debate about the party's viability. Any doubts about the party's future were dispelled firstly by the collapse of the Liberal Republicans in the aftermath of that election, and secondly by significant Democratic gains in the 1874 mid-term elections, which saw them take control of the House of Representatives for the first time in sixteen years.


text: The 12th Democratic National Convention assembled in St. Louis, Missouri, in June 1876, which was the first political convention ever held by one of the major American parties west of the Mississippi River. There were 5000 people jammed the auditorium in St. Louis and hopes for the Democratic Party's first presidential victory in 20 years. The platform called for immediate and sweeping reforms in response to the scandals that had plagued the Grant administration. Tilden won more than 400 votes on the first ballot and the presidential nomination by a landslide on the second.


text: Tilden defeated Thomas A. Hendricks, Winfield Scott Hancock, William Allen, Thomas F. Bayard, and Joel Parker for the presidential nomination. Tilden overcame strong opposition from "Honest John" Kelly, the leader of New York's Tammany Hall, to obtain the presidential nomination. Thomas Hendricks was nominated for vice president since he was the only person to put forward for that position.


text: The Democratic platform pledged to replace the corruption of the Grant administration with honest, efficient government and to end "the rapacity of carpetbag tyrannies" in the South. It also called for treaty protection for naturalized United States citizens visiting their homelands, restrictions on Asian immigration, tariff reform, and opposition to land grants for railroads. It has been claimed that the voting Democrats received Tilden's presidential nomination with more enthusiasm than any leader since Andrew Jackson.


text: Source: "Official proceedings of the National Democratic convention, held in St. Louis, Mo., June 27th, 28th and 29th, 1876". (September 3, 2012).


text: Source: "Official proceedings of the National Democratic convention, held in St. Louis, Mo., June 27th, 28th and 29th, 1876" (September 3, 2012).


text: The Greenback Party had been organized by agricultural interests in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1874 to urge the federal government to inflate the economy through the mass issuance of paper money called greenbacks. Its first national nominating convention was held in Indianapolis in the spring of 1876. Peter Cooper was nominated for president with 352 votes to 119 for three other contenders. The convention nominated Anti-Monopolist Senator Newton Booth of California for vice president. After Booth declined to run, the national committee chose Samuel Fenton Cary as his replacement on the ticket.


text: The Prohibition Party, in its second national convention in Cleveland, nominated Green Clay Smith as its presidential candidate and Gideon T. Stewart as its vice presidential candidate.


text: This small political party used several different names, often with different names in different states. It was a continuation of the Anti-Masonic Party that met in 1872 and nominated Charles Francis Adams, Sr., for president. When Adams declined to run, the party did not contest the 1872 election.


text: The convention was held from June 8 to 10, 1875 in Liberty Hall, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. B.T. Roberts of New York served as chairman, and Jonathan Blanchard was the keynote speaker.


text: The platform supported the Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution, international arbitration, the reading of the scriptures in public schools, specie payments, justice for Native Americans, abolition of the Electoral College, and prohibition of the sale of alcoholic beverages. It declared the first day of the week to be a day of rest for the United States. The platform opposed secret societies and monopolies.


text: The convention considered three potential presidential candidates: Charles F. Adams, Jonathan Blanchard, and James B. Walker. When Blanchard declined to run, Walker was unanimously nominated for president. The convention then nominated Donald Kirkpatrick of New York unanimously for vice president.


text: Tilden, who had prosecuted machine politicians in New York and sent the legendary political boss William M. Tweed to jail, ran as a reform candidate against the background of the corruption of the Grant administration. Both parties backed civil service reform. Both sides mounted mudslinging campaigns, with Democratic attacks on Republican corruption being countered by Republicans raising the Civil War issue, a tactic that was ridiculed by Democrats, who called it "waving the bloody shirt." Republicans chanted, "Not every Democrat was a rebel, but every rebel was a Democrat."


text: Hayes was a virtual unknown outside his home state of Ohio, where he had served two terms as a representative and then two terms as governor. Henry Adams called Hayes "a third-rate nonentity whose only recommendations are that he is obnoxious to no one." Hayes had served in the Civil War with distinction as colonel of the 23rd Ohio Regiment and was wounded several times, which made him marketable to veterans. He had later been brevetted as a major-general. His most important asset was his help to the Republican ticket in carrying Ohio, a crucial swing state. On the other side, the newspaperman John D. Defrees described Tilden as "a very nice, prim, little, withered-up, fidgety old bachelor, about one-hundred and twenty-pounds avoirdupois, who never had a genuine impulse for many nor any affection for woman."


text: The Democratic strategy for victory in the South was highly reliant on paramilitary groups such as the Red Shirts and the White League. Using the strategy of the Mississippi Plan, the groups actively suppressed both Black and White Republican voter turnouts by disrupting meetings and rallies and even using violence and intimidation. They saw themselves as the military wing of the Democratic Party.


text: Because it was considered improper for a candidate to pursue the presidency actively, neither Tilden nor Hayes actively stumped as part of the campaign and left that duty to their surrogates.


text: Colorado was admitted to the Union as the 38th state on August 1, 1876; this was the first presidential election in which the state sent electors. There was insufficient time or money to organize a presidential election in the new state. Therefore, Colorado's state legislature selected the state's three Electoral College electors. The Republican Party held a slim majority in the state legislature following a closely contested election on October 3, 1876. Many of the seats in that election had been decided by only a few hundred votes. On November 7, 1876, in a 50 to 24 vote, the state legislature chose Otto Mears, William Hadley, and Herman Beckurts to serve as the state's electors for president. All three of the state electors cast their votes for Hayes. This was the last election in which any state chose electors through its state legislature, rather than by popular vote.


text: Florida (with 4 electoral votes), Louisiana (with 8), and South Carolina (with 7) reported returns that favored Tilden, but the elections in each state were marked by electoral fraud and threats of violence against Republican voters. The most extreme case was in South Carolina, where an impossible 101 percent of all eligible voters in the state had their votes counted, and an estimated 150 Black Republicans were murdered. One of the points of contention revolved around the design of ballots. At the time, parties would print ballots or "tickets" to enable voters to support them in the open ballots. To aid illiterate voters, the parties would print symbols on the tickets, and in this election, many Democratic ballots were printed with the Republican symbol of Abraham Lincoln on them. The Republican-dominated state electoral commissions subsequently rejected enough Democratic votes to award their electoral votes to Hayes.


text: In two Southern states, the governor recognized by the United States had signed the Republican certificates; the Democratic certificates from Florida were signed by the state attorney-general and the newly-elected Democratic governor. Those from Louisiana were signed by the Democratic gubernatorial candidate and those from South Carolina by no state official. The Tilden electors in South Carolina claimed that they had been chosen by the popular vote although they were rejected by the state election board.


text: Meanwhile, in Oregon, the vote of a single elector was disputed. The statewide result clearly favored Hayes, but the state's Democratic governor, La Fayette Grover, claimed that one of the Republican electors, Ex-Postmaster John Watts, was ineligible under Article II, Section 1, of the United States Constitution since he had been a "person holding an office of trust or profit under the United States." Grover substituted a Democratic elector in Watts's place.


text: The two Republican electors dismissed Grover's action and reported three votes for Hayes. However, the Democratic elector, C. A. Cronin, reported one vote for Tilden and two votes for Hayes. The two Republican electors presented a certificate signed by the secretary of state of Oregon, and Cronin and the two electors whom he appointed (Cronin voted for Tilden while his associates voted for Hayes) presented a certificate signed by the governor and attested by the secretary of state.


text: Ultimately, all three of Oregon's votes were awarded to Hayes, who had a majority of one in the Electoral College. The Democrats claimed fraud, and suppressed excitement pervaded the country. Threats were even muttered that Hayes would never be inaugurated. In Columbus, Ohio, a shot was fired at Hayes's residence as he sat down to dinner. After supporters marched to his home to call for the President, Hayes urged the crowd that "it is impossible, at so early a time, to obtain the result." Grant quietly strengthened the military force in and around Washington.


text: The Constitution provides that "the President of the Senate shall, in presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the [electoral] certificates, and the votes shall then be counted." The Republicans held that the power to count the votes lay with the President of the Senate, with the House and Senate being mere spectators. The Democrats objected to that construction, since the President Pro Tempore of the Senate, the Republican Thomas W. Ferry, could then count the votes of the disputed states for Hayes.


text: The Democrats insisted that Congress should continue the practice followed since 1865: no vote objected to should be counted except by the concurrence of both houses. Since the House had a solid Democratic majority, rejecting the vote of one state, however, would elect Tilden.


text: Facing an unprecedented constitutional crisis, the Congress passed a law on January 29, 1877, to form a 15-member Electoral Commission, which would settle the result. Five members were selected from each house of Congress, and they were joined by five members of the United States Supreme Court, with William M. Evarts serving as counsel for the Republican Party.


text: The majority party in each house named three members and the minority party two members. As the Republicans controlled the Senate and the Democrats controlled the House of Representatives, that yielded five Democratic and five Republican members of the commission. Of the Supreme Court justices, two Republicans and two Democrats were chosen, with the fifth to be selected by those four.


text: The justices first selected the independent Justice David Davis. According to one historian, "No one, perhaps not even Davis himself, knew which presidential candidate he preferred." Just as the Electoral Commission Bill was passing Congress, the Illinois Legislature elected Davis to the Senate, and Democrats in the legislature believed that they had purchased Davis's support by voting for him. However, they had miscalculated, as Davis promptly excused himself from the commission and resigned as a Justice to take his Senate seat. Since all of the remaining available Justices were Republicans, they had already selected Justice Joseph P. Bradley, who was considered the most impartial remaining member of the court. That selection proved decisive.


text: Since it was drawing perilously near to Inauguration Day, the commission met on January 31. Each of the disputed state election cases (Florida, Louisiana, Oregon, and South Carolina) was respectively submitted to the commission by Congress. Eminent counsel appeared for each side, and there were double sets of returns from every one of the states named.


text: The commission first decided not to question any returns that were "prima facie" lawful. Bradley then joined the other seven Republican committee members in a series of 8–7 votes that gave all 20 disputed electoral votes to Hayes, which gave Hayes a 185–184 electoral vote victory. The commission adjourned on March 2. Hayes privately took the oath of office the next day and was publicly sworn into office on March 5, 1877, and Hayes was inaugurated without disturbance.


text: The Compromise of 1877 might be a reason for the Democrats accepting the Electoral Commission. During intense closed-door meetings, Democratic leaders agreed reluctantly to accept Hayes as President in return for the withdrawal of federal troops from the last two Southern states that were still occupied: South Carolina and Louisiana. Republican leaders in return agreed on a number of handouts and entitlements, including federal subsidies for a transcontinental railroad line through the South. Although some of the promises were not kept, particularly the railroad proposal, that was enough for the time being to avert a dangerous standoff.


text: The returns accepted by the Commission put Hayes's margin of victory in South Carolina at 889 votes, the second-closest popular vote margin in a decisive state in U.S. history, after the election of 2000, which was decided by 537 votes in Florida. In 2000, the margin of victory in the Electoral College for George W. Bush was five votes, as opposed to Hayes' one vote.


text: Upon his defeat, Tilden said, "I can retire to public life with the consciousness that I shall receive from posterity the credit of having been elected to the highest position in the gift of the people, without any of the cares and responsibilities of the office."


text: Congress would eventually enact the Electoral Count Act in 1887 to provide more detailed rules for the counting of electoral votes, especially in cases of multiple slates of electors being received from a single state.


text: According to the commission's rulings, of the 2,249 counties and independent cities making returns, Tilden won in 1,301 (57.85%), and Hayes carried only 947 (42.11%). One county (0.04%) in Nevada split evenly between Tilden and Hayes.


text: The Greenback ticket did not have a major impact on the election's outcome by attracting slightly under one percent of the popular vote, Cooper nonetheless had the strongest performance of any third-party presidential candidate since John Bell in 1860. The Greenbacks' best showings were in Kansas, where Cooper earned just over six percent of the vote, and in Indiana, where he earned 17,207 votes, which far exceeded Tilden's margin of victory of roughly 5,500 votes over Hayes in that state.


text: The election of 1876 was the last one held before the end of the Reconstruction era, which sought to protect the rights of African Americans in the South, who usually voted for Republican presidential candidates. No antebellum slave state would be carried by a Republican again until the 1896 realignment, which saw William McKinley carry Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, and Kentucky.


text: No Republican presidential candidate until Warren G. Harding in 1920 would carry any states that seceded and joined the Confederacy. That year, he carried Tennessee, which had never experienced a long period of occupation by federal troops and had been completely "reconstructed" well before the first presidential election of the Reconstruction period (1868). None of the Southern states that experienced long periods of occupation by federal troops was carried by a Republican again until Herbert Hoover in 1928, when he won Texas, Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia, and that proved the last election in which the Republican candidate won Louisiana until 1956, when it was carried by Dwight D. Eisenhower, and the last in which the Republican candidate won South Carolina until 1964, when Barry Goldwater did.


text: The next time those two states voted against the Democrats was their support of the "Dixiecrat" candidate Strom Thurmond in 1948.


text: Although 1876 marked the last competitive two-party election in the South before the Democratic dominance of the South until 1948 and that to of the Border States until 1896, it was also the last presidential election (as of 2020) in which the Democrats won the wartime Unionist Mitchell County, North Carolina; Wayne County, Tennessee; Henderson County, Tennessee; and Lewis County, Kentucky. Hayes was also the only Republican president ever to be elected who failed to carry Indiana.


text: Source: Data from Walter Dean Burnham, "Presidential ballots, 1836–1892" (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1955) pp 247–57.


title: Vicky McClure

text: Victoria Lee McClure (born 8 May 1983) is an English actress, model and presenter. She is known for her roles as Detective Inspector Kate Fleming in the BBC series "Line of Duty" (2012–present) and Lol Jenkins in Shane Meadows' film "This Is England" (2006) and its Channel 4 sequel mini-series "This Is England '86" (2010), "This Is England '88" (2011), and "This Is England '90" (2015). Before "This is England", she appeared in another of Meadows' films, "A Room for Romeo Brass" (1999), where she played Ladine. She won the RTS Award and British Academy Television Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of Lol in "This is England '86" in 2011.


title: Vicky McClure

text: McClure is also well-known for her role as Karen White in ITV's "Broadchurch", and other roles such as in "Filth and Wisdom" (2008), "Hummingbird" (2013), "Svengali" (2013), and "The Replacement" (2017).


title: Vicky McClure

text: Vicky Lee McClure was born on 8 May 1983 in the Wollaton area of Nottingham. Her father was a joiner and her mother was a hairdresser. She has an elder sister, Jenny. McClure was educated at Fernwood School. From the age of three she took dance lessons, and auditioned for the Central Junior Television Workshop when she was 11. Unsuccessful on her first attempt, she was recalled a week later after another child dropped out. While there, she was coached and mentored by fellow Nottingham-born actress Samantha Morton. McClure successfully auditioned for entry to the Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts aged 16, but her family could not afford the tuition fees, and she remained at the Workshop.


title: Vicky McClure

text: At 15, she was asked to audition for a part in Shane Meadows's independent film "A Room for Romeo Brass". The youngest to audition, she was called back, and gained the role of Ladine Brass. She secured an agent, but achieved no parts for four years. After starting a drama foundation course at the local college on leaving school, she left to work in retail, initially for H. Samuel and then Dorothy Perkins. Aged 19 she gave up her acting ambitions for 12 months, but then took a part-time office job in Nottingham to allow her to audition for parts, mostly in London.


title: Vicky McClure

text: After an 18-month period of taking walk-on parts in soaps and daytime TV, McClure then worked on the "This is England" film and mini-series from 2006 until 2015, portraying the role of Lorraine "Lol" Jenkins. In an April 2007 interview with "Time Out", McClure spoke of Meadows approaching her for the role while she was in a pub with Andrew Shim. She described the making of the film, which was highly improvised, as "constant laughing and jokes". In 2011, her performance as Lorraine "Lol" Jenkins in "This is England '86" won her the British Academy Television Award for Best Actress and the Royal Television Society Award for Best Actress.


title: Vicky McClure

text: McClure co-starred in the London-based comedy film "Filth and Wisdom", the first feature film directed by Madonna. She admitted to being slightly star-struck upon first meeting Madonna, "I tried to act as cool as possible but inside I'm like, "Oh my God; there's Madonna!" You can't help it". The film premièred at the Berlin International Film Festival on 13 February 2008.


title: Vicky McClure

text: McClure was approached and auditioned for a role in ITV soap "Emmerdale", but decided to turn it down. She later joined the cast of the British police procedural television series, "Line of Duty" in 2012 as DC Kate Fleming, continuing in the role in Series 2 (2014), Series 3 (2016), Series 4 (2017) and Series 5 (2019) and Series 6 (2021). In 2013, McClure appeared in the British action-thriller film "Hummingbird" opposite Jason Statham.


title: Vicky McClure

text: In July 2016, McClure appeared as Winnie Verloc in "The Secret Agent", based on the novel of the same name by Joseph Conrad.


title: Vicky McClure

text: McClure starred in the BBC TV thriller "The Replacement" in 2017. In February 2017, McClure made her professional stage début at Nottingham Playhouse in the fortieth anniversary production of "Touched" by Stephen Lowe. McClure did voiceover work for the More4 show "A Year on the Farm" in August 2017.


title: Vicky McClure

text: In 2019, McClure starred as Nicola in the channel 4 drama "I Am..." with "This is England" and "Line of Duty" co-star and friend, Perry Fitzpatrick. She received praise for her portrayal of a woman trapped in an emotionally abusive relationship. Also in 2019, McClure was cast in the TV adaptation of Alex Rider, a series of young adult books by Anthony Horowitz. As of 2020, she plays Mrs. Jones, the deputy head of Mi6 in the show. In December 2019, McClure made a brief appearance as herself in the popular internet comedy series on YouTube, "Charity Shop Sue", based in Bulwell, Nottinghamshire.


title: Vicky McClure

text: McClure was also featured alongside Kaya Scodelario, Abbey Butler, Andy Crane and Paul Young in Plan B's music video "She Said". In 2010, McClure appeared in a number of promotional short films for the English cosmetics brand Illamasqua. In 2012, McClure appeared in the video for Jake Bugg's song "Two Fingers" along with "Line of Duty" co-star Craig Parkinson. On 18 March 2014, McClure appeared on BBC Radio 1's Innuendo Bingo.


title: Vicky McClure

text: McClure formed the Our Dementia Choir in 2019, after her late grandmother’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s taught her the healing power of music. McClure worked on a documentary to raise awareness of the disease, which culminated in a performance in front of 2,000 people at Nottingham’s Royal Concert Hall. She revisited them in 2020, exploring how the pandemic had affected them. She is also an Alzheimer’s Society Ambassador as of 2018, and has taken part in the Alzheimer's Society Memory Walks for many years.


title: Vicky McClure

text: In 2022, McClure made a further BBC documentary featuring other Dementia gatherings and musical support groups from elsewhere in the UK, and brought her own Dementia Choir to perform with Tom Grennan before 20,000 spectators at the Splendour Festival held in Nottingham's Wollaton Hall grounds.


title: Vicky McClure

text: McClure lives in Nottingham with Welsh director Jonny Owen. On 28 December 2017, they announced their engagement.


title: Vicky McClure

text: In 2013, she opened the Hogarth Teenage Cancer Trust unit at Nottingham City Hospital, and has remained an avid supporter of the Teenage Cancer Trust since.


title: Vicky McClure

text: McClure is close friends with "Line of Duty" stars Martin Compston, Adrian Dunbar, and writer Jed Mercurio. She has also remained close with her "This is England" co-stars, with many attending Thomas Turgoose's wedding in 2019. She is also friends with Perry Fitzpatrick, having worked with him on many projects over the last 20 years.


title: Vicky McClure

text: In 2015, Nottingham Express Transit (NET) named tram 224 after her. On her maiden trip she was asked to leave the tram for fare evasion – having been offered a free ride, she did not have a ticket. As of March 2022, NET had named 37 trams after people with connections local to the Nottingham area.


title: Vicky McClure

text: In August 2022, McClure was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Letters by the University of Nottingham for her work with "Our Dementia Choir", including a TV documentary. She was previously awarded an honorary Doctorate of Arts by Nottingham Trent University during 2015, in recognition of her contributions to the acting profession and charitable work in Nottingham.


title: Dissociation (psychology)

text: Dissociation, as a concept that has been developed over time, is a wide array of experiences, ranging from a mild emotional detachment from the immediate surroundings, to a more severe disconnection from physical and emotional experiences. The major characteristic of all dissociative phenomena involves a detachment from reality, rather than a loss of reality as in psychosis.


title: Dissociation (psychology)

text: The phenomena are diagnosable under the "DSM-5" as a group of disorders as well as a symptom of other disorders through various diagnostic tools. Its cause is believed to be related to neurobiological mechanisms, trauma, anxiety, and psychoactive drugs. Research has further related it to suggestibility and hypnosis, and it is inversely related to mindfulness, which is a potential treatment.


title: Dissociation (psychology)

text: French philosopher and psychologist Pierre Janet (1859–1947) is considered to be the author of the concept of dissociation. Contrary to some conceptions of dissociation, Janet did not believe that dissociation was a psychological defense.


title: Dissociation (psychology)

text: Psychological defense mechanisms belong to Sigmund Freud's theory of psychoanalysis, not to Janetian psychology. Janet claimed that dissociation occurred only in persons who had a constitutional weakness of mental functioning that led to hysteria when they were stressed. Although it is true that many of Janet's case histories described traumatic experiences, he never considered dissociation to be a defense against those experiences. Quite the opposite: Janet insisted that dissociation was a mental or cognitive deficit. Accordingly, he considered trauma to be one of many stressors that could worsen the already-impaired "mental deficiency" of a hysteric, thereby generating a cascade of hysterical (in today's language, "dissociative") symptoms.


title: Dissociation (psychology)

text: Although there was great interest in dissociation during the last two decades of the nineteenth century (especially in France and England), this interest rapidly waned with the coming of the new century. Even Janet largely turned his attention to other matters.


title: Dissociation (psychology)

text: There was a sharp peak in interest in dissociation in America from 1890 to 1910, especially in Boston as reflected in the work of William James, Boris Sidis, Morton Prince, and William McDougall. Nevertheless, even in America, interest in dissociation rapidly succumbed to the surging academic interest in psychoanalysis and behaviorism.


title: Dissociation (psychology)

text: For most of the twentieth century, there was little interest in dissociation. Despite this, a review of 76 previously published cases from the 1790s to 1942 was published in 1944, describing clinical phenomena consistent with that seen by Janet and by therapists today. In 1971, Bowers and her colleagues presented a detailed, and still quite valid, treatment article. The authors of this article included leading thinkers of their time – John G. Watkins (who developed ego-state therapy) and Zygmunt A. Piotrowski (famed for his work on the Rorschach test). Further interest in dissociation was evoked when Ernest Hilgard (1977) published his neodissociation theory in the 1970s. During the 1970s and 1980s an increasing number of clinicians and researchers wrote about dissociation, particularly multiple personality disorder.


title: Dissociation (psychology)

text: Carl Jung described pathological manifestations of dissociation as special or extreme cases of the normal operation of the psyche. This structural dissociation, opposing tension, and hierarchy of basic attitudes and functions in normal individual consciousness is the basis of Jung's "Psychological Types". He theorized that dissociation is a natural necessity for consciousness as well.


title: Dissociation (psychology)

text: Attention to dissociation as a clinical feature has been growing in recent years as knowledge of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) increased, due to interest in dissociative identity disorder (DID), and as neuroimaging research and population studies show its relevance.


title: Dissociation (psychology)

text: Historically the psychopathological concept of dissociation has also another different root: the conceptualization of Eugen Bleuler that looks into dissociation related to schizophrenia.


title: Dissociation (psychology)

text: Dissociation is commonly displayed on a continuum. In mild cases, dissociation can be regarded as a coping mechanism or defense mechanism in seeking to master, minimize or tolerate stress – including boredom or conflict. At the non-pathological end of the continuum, dissociation describes common events such as daydreaming. Further along the continuum are non-pathological altered states of consciousness.


title: Dissociation (psychology)

text: More pathological dissociation involves dissociative disorders, including dissociative fugue and depersonalization disorder with or without alterations in personal identity or sense of self. These alterations can include: a sense that self or the world is unreal (depersonalization and derealization), a loss of memory (amnesia), forgetting identity or assuming a new self (fugue), and separate streams of consciousness, identity and self (dissociative identity disorder, formerly termed multiple personality disorder) and complex post-traumatic stress disorder. Although some dissociative disruptions involve amnesia, other dissociative events do not. Dissociative disorders are typically experienced as startling, autonomous intrusions into the person's usual ways of responding or functioning. Due to their unexpected and largely inexplicable nature, they tend to be quite unsettling.


title: Dissociation (psychology)

text: Dissociative disorders are sometimes triggered by trauma, but may be preceded only by stress, psychoactive substances, or no identifiable trigger at all. The ICD-10 classifies conversion disorder as a dissociative disorder. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders groups all dissociative disorders into a single category and recognizes dissociation as a symptom of acute stress disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder, and borderline personality disorder.


title: Dissociation (psychology)

text: Misdiagnosis is common among people who display symptoms of dissociative disorders, with an average of seven years to receive proper diagnosis and treatment. Research is ongoing into etiologies, symptomology, and valid and reliable diagnostic tools. In the general population, dissociative experiences that are not clinically significant are highly prevalent with 60% to 65% of the respondents indicating that they have had some dissociative experiences.


title: Dissociation (psychology)

text: Diagnoses listed under the "DSM-5" are dissociative identity disorder, dissociative amnesia, depersonalization/derealization disorder, other specified dissociative disorder and unspecified dissociative disorder. The list of available dissociative disorders listed in the "DSM-5" changed from the "DSM-IV-TR", as the authors removed the diagnosis of dissociative fugue, classifying it instead as a subtype of dissociative amnesia. Furthermore, the authors recognized derealization on the same diagnostic level of depersonalization with the opportunity of differentiating between the two.


title: Dissociation (psychology)

text: The "DSM-IV-TR" considers symptoms such as depersonalization, derealization and psychogenic amnesia to be core features of dissociative disorders. The DSM-5 carried these symptoms over and described symptoms as positive and negative. Positive symptoms include unwanted intrusions that alter continuity of subjective experiences, which account for the first two symptoms listed earlier with the addition of fragmentation of identity. Negative symptoms include loss of access to information and mental functions that are normally readily accessible, which describes amnesia.


title: Dissociation (psychology)

text: Peritraumatic dissociation is considered to be dissociation that is experienced during and immediately following a traumatic event. Some of the symptoms include but are not limited to depersonalization, derealization, dissociative amnesia, out-of-body experiences, emotional numbness, and altered time perception. This specific disorder has been related to self preservation and the body's natural instinct to protect itself. Research is on-going related to its development, its importance, and its relationship to trauma, dissociative disorders, and predicting the development of PTSD.


title: Dissociation (psychology)

text: Two of the most commonly used screening tools in the community are the Dissociative Experiences Scale and the Multiscale Dissociation Inventory. Meanwhile, the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV – Dissociative Disorders (SCID-D) and its second iteration, the SCID-D-R, are both semi-structured interviews and are considered psychometrically strong diagnostic tools.


title: Dissociation (psychology)

text: Other tools include the Office Mental Status Examination (OMSE), which is used clinically due to inherent subjectivity and lack of quantitative use. There is also the Dissociative Disorders Interview Schedule (DDSI), which lacks substantive clarity for differential diagnostics.


title: Dissociation (psychology)

text: Preliminary research suggests that dissociation-inducing events, drugs like ketamine, and seizures generate slow rhythmic activity (1–3 Hz) in layer 5 neurons of the posteromedial cortex in humans (retrosplenial cortex in mice). These slow oscillations disconnect other brain regions from interacting with the posteromedial cortex, which may explain the overall experience of dissociation.


title: Dissociation (psychology)

text: Dissociation has been described as one of a constellation of symptoms experienced by some victims of multiple forms of childhood trauma, including physical, psychological, and sexual abuse. This is supported by studies which suggest that dissociation is correlated with a history of trauma.


title: Dissociation (psychology)

text: Dissociation appears to have a high specificity and a low sensitivity to having a self-reported history of trauma, which means that dissociation is much more common among those who are traumatized, yet at the same time there are many people who have suffered from trauma but who do not show dissociative symptoms.


title: Dissociation (psychology)

text: Adult dissociation when combined with a history of child abuse and otherwise interpersonal violence-related posttraumatic stress disorder has been shown to contribute to disturbances in parenting behavior, such as exposure of young children to violent media. Such behavior may contribute to cycles of familial violence and trauma.


title: Dissociation (psychology)

text: Symptoms of dissociation resulting from trauma may include depersonalization, psychological numbing, disengagement, or amnesia regarding the events of the abuse. It has been hypothesized that dissociation may provide a temporarily effective defense mechanism in cases of severe trauma; however, in the long term, dissociation is associated with decreased psychological functioning and adjustment.


title: Dissociation (psychology)

text: Other symptoms sometimes found along with dissociation in victims of traumatic abuse (often referred to as "sequelae to abuse") include anxiety, PTSD, low self-esteem, somatization, depression, chronic pain, interpersonal dysfunction, substance abuse, self-harm and suicidal ideation or actions. These symptoms may lead the victim to present the symptoms as the source of the problem.


title: Dissociation (psychology)

text: Child abuse, especially chronic abuse starting at early ages, has been related to high levels of dissociative symptoms in a clinical sample, including amnesia for abuse memories. It has also been seen that girls who suffered abuse during their childhood had higher reported dissociation scores than did boys who reported dissociation during their childhood. A non-clinical sample of adult women linked increased levels of dissociation to sexual abuse by a significantly older person prior to age 15, and dissociation has also been correlated with a history of childhood physical and sexual abuse. When sexual abuse is examined, the levels of dissociation were found to increase along with the severity of the abuse.


title: Dissociation (psychology)

text: A 2012 review article supports the hypothesis that current or recent trauma may affect an individual's assessment of the more distant past, changing the experience of the past and resulting in dissociative states.


title: Dissociation (psychology)

text: Psychoactive drugs can often induce a state of temporary dissociation. Substances with dissociative properties include ketamine, nitrous oxide, alcohol, tiletamine, amphetamine, dextromethorphan, MK-801, PCP, methoxetamine, salvia, muscimol, atropine, ibogaine, and minocycline.


title: Dissociation (psychology)

text: There is evidence to suggest that dissociation is correlated with hypnotic suggestibility, specifically with dissociative symptoms related to trauma. However, the relationship between dissociation and hypnotic suggestibility appears to be complex and indicates further research is necessary.


title: Dissociation (psychology)

text: Aspects of hypnosis include absorption, dissociation, suggestibility, and willingness to receive behavioral instruction from others. Both hypnotic suggestibility and dissociation tend to be less mindful, and hypnosis is used as a treatment modality for dissociation, anxiety, chronic pain, trauma, and more. Difference between hypnosis and dissociation: one is suggested, imposed by self or other, meaning dissociation is generally more spontaneous altering of awareness.


title: Dissociation (psychology)

text: Mindfulness and meditation have shown an inverse relationship specifically with dissociation related to re-experiencing trauma due to the lack of present awareness inherent with dissociation. The re-experiencing episodes can include anything between illusions, distortions in perceived reality, and disconnectedness from the present moment. It is believed that the nature of dissociation as an avoidance coping or defense mechanism related to trauma inhibits resolution and integration.


title: Dissociation (psychology)

text: Mindfulness and meditation also can alter the state of awareness to the present moment; however, unlike dissociation, it is clinically used to bring greater awareness to an individual's present state of being. It achieves this through increased abilities to self-regulate attention, emotion, and physiological arousal, maintain continuity of consciousness, and adopt an approach to the present experience that is open and curious. In practice, non-judgmental awareness has displayed a positive relationship with lower symptoms of PTSD avoidance, which can relate to greater opportunities for success with exposure therapy and lowering PTSD symptoms of hypervigilance, re-experiencing, and overgeneralization of fears.


title: Dissociation (psychology)

text: When using mindfulness and meditation with people expressing trauma symptoms, it is crucial to be aware of potential trauma triggers, such as the focus on the breath. Often, a meditation session will begin with focused attention and move into open monitoring. With severe trauma symptoms, it may be important to start the meditation training and an individual session at the peripheral awareness, such as the limbs. Moreover, trauma survivors often report feeling numb as a protection against trauma triggers and reminders, which are often painful, making it good practice to start all trainings at the limbs as a gradual exposure to body sensations. Doing so will also increase physical attachment to the present moment and the sense of grounding, thereby increasing tolerance to trauma reminders and decreasing the need and use of dissociation.


title: Dissociation (psychology)

text: When receiving treatment, patients are assessed to discover their level of functioning. Some patients might be higher functioning than others. This is taken into account when creating a patient's potential treatment targets. To start off treatment, time is dedicated to increasing a patient's mental level and adaptive actions in order to gain a balance in both their mental and behavioral action. Once this is achieved, the next goal is to work on removing or minimizing the phobia made by traumatic memories, which is causing the patient to dissociate. The final step of treatment includes helping patients work through their grief in order to move forward and be able to engage in their own lives. This is done with the use of new coping skills attained through treatment. One coping skill that can improve dissociation is mindfulness due to the introduction of staying in present awareness while observing non-judgmentally and increasing the ability to regulate emotions. Specifically in adolescents, mindfulness has been shown to reduce dissociation after practicing mindfulness for three weeks.


title: Hollywood Sign

text: The Hollywood Sign is an American landmark and cultural icon overlooking Hollywood, Los Angeles, California. Originally the Hollywoodland Sign, it is situated on Mount Lee, in the Beachwood Canyon area of the Santa Monica Mountains. Spelling out the word "Hollywood" in white uppercase letters and 350 feet (106.7 m) long, it was originally created in 1923 as a temporary advertisement for a local real estate development, but due to increasing recognition the sign was left up, and replaced in 1978 with a more durable all-steel structure.


title: Hollywood Sign

text: Among the best-known landmarks in both California and the United States, the sign makes frequent appearances in popular culture, particularly in establishing shots for films and television programs set in or around Hollywood. Signs of similar style, but spelling different words, are frequently seen as parodies. The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce holds trademark rights to the Hollywood Sign but only for certain uses.


title: Hollywood Sign

text: Because of its widespread recognizability and its visibility from many points across the Los Angeles Basin, the sign has been a frequent target of pranks and vandalism across the decades. It has since undergone restoration, including the installation of a security system to deter mischief. The sign is protected and promoted by nonprofit The Hollywood Sign Trust, while its site and the surrounding land are part of Griffith Park.


title: Hollywood Sign

text: Visitors can hike to the sign from the Bronson Canyon entrance to Griffith Park or from Griffith Observatory. There is also a trailhead near the Lake Hollywood Reservoir outside of Griffith Park, and although not an access point in itself, there is a popular scenic vista point around Lake Hollywood Park near the trailhead.


title: Hollywood Sign

text: The original sign was erected in 1923 and originally read "HOLLYWOODLAND" to promote the name of a new housing development in the hills above the Hollywood district of Los Angeles.


title: Hollywood Sign

text: Real estate developers Woodruff and Shoults called their development "Hollywoodland" and advertised it as a "superb environment without excessive cost on the Hollywood side of the hills."


title: Hollywood Sign

text: They contracted the Crescent Sign Company to erect thirteen south-facing letters on the hillside. Crescent owner Thomas Fisk Goff (1890–1984) designed the wooden sign in and white block letters. Studded with around 4,000 light bulbs, the completed sign alternated between flashing in successive segments "HOLLY," "WOOD," and "LAND" and as a whole. Below the sign was a searchlight to attract more attention. The poles that supported the sign were hauled to the site by mules. The project cost $21,000, .


title: Hollywood Sign

text: The sign was officially dedicated in 1923, intended to last only a year and a half. The rise of American cinema in Los Angeles during the Golden Age of Hollywood gave it widespread visibility, causing it to be left beyond that, for over a quarter century still spelling "Hollywoodland".


title: Hollywood Sign

text: In time, the sign deteriorated. The letter "H" was destroyed in the 1940s. A United Press report in 1949 indicated that winds were to blame, while the "Los Angeles Times" said that the H was destroyed by "vandals or windstorms."


title: Hollywood Sign

text: In 1949, the sign drew complaints from local residents, who called it an "eyesore and detriment to the community" and advocated its demolition. The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce protested against the sign's removal and offered to repair it. The Chamber entered into a contract with the City of Los Angeles Parks Department to repair and rebuild the sign. The contract stipulated that "LAND" be removed to spell "Hollywood" and reflect the district, not the "Hollywoodland" housing development. The restoration and removal of the "land" portion of the sign was conducted in September 1949.


title: Hollywood Sign

text: The sign's unprotected wood-and-sheet-metal structure deteriorated over the years. By the 1970s, the first "O" had splintered and broken, resembling a lowercase "u", and the third "O" had fallen down completely, leaving the severely dilapidated sign reading "HuLLYWO D."


title: Hollywood Sign

text: In 1978, in large part because of the public campaign to restore the landmark by Hugh Hefner, founder of "Playboy" magazine, the Chamber set out to replace the severely deteriorated sign with a more permanent structure. Nine donors gave US$27,778 each (totaling US$250,000, ) to sponsor replacement letters, made of steel supported by steel columns on a concrete foundation (see Donors section below).


title: Hollywood Sign

text: The new letters were tall and ranged from wide. The new version of the sign was unveiled on November 11, 1978, as the culmination of a live CBS television special commemorating the 75th anniversary of Hollywood's incorporation as a city.


title: Hollywood Sign

text: Refurbishment, donated by Bay Cal Commercial Painting, began in November 2005 as workers stripped the letters back to their metal base and repainted them white.


title: Hollywood Sign

text: Following the 1978 public campaign to restore the sign, the following nine donors gave $27,778 each (which totaled $250,002):


title: Hollywood Sign

text: The original 1923 sign was presumed to have been destroyed until 2005, when it was put up for sale on eBay by producer/entrepreneur Dan Bliss. It was sold to artist Bill Mack, who used the sheet metal as a medium to paint the likenesses of stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood. In August 2012, Mack constructed an exact replica of the letter "H" from the metal. On August 9, 2012, Herb Wesson and Tom LaBonge of the Los Angeles City Council presented Mack with a Certificate of Recognition for his restoration efforts and preservation of the sign.


title: Hollywood Sign

text: Considerable public concern has arisen over certain access points to the trails leading to the sign that are in residential areas. Some residents of the neighborhoods adjoining the sign, such as Beachwood Canyon and Lake Hollywood Estates, have expressed concerns about the congestion and traffic caused by tourists and sightseers attracted to the sign. The "Los Angeles Times" reported in 2013 that "there are more than 40 tour companies running buses and vans in and out of the canyon..." and residents "...are most concerned about safety issues because the curving hillside roads were not designed for so many cars and pedestrians." The Los Angeles Fire Department identifies Griffith Park, where the sign resides, as a high fire risk area due to the brush and dry climate. Local residents have created fake 'no access' and other misleading signs to discourage people from visiting the sign.


title: Hollywood Sign

text: In 2012, at the behest of residents of the Hollywood Hills, Los Angeles City Councilman Tom LaBonge petitioned GPS manufacturers Garmin and Google Maps to redirect traffic away from residential streets, which lack the infrastructure (e.g. parking, restrooms, potable water) to deal with the large influx of tourists, towards two designated viewing areas, Griffith Observatory and the Hollywood and Highland Center. The Hollywood Sign Trust, the nonprofit that maintains the sign, also endorses these two viewing platforms. Other mapping services, such as Apple Maps and Bing Maps, have subsequently followed suit. This was considered deceptive by some as the hike from Griffith Observatory could take up to two hours one way, and both locations are considerably farther away from other viewing locations or trails.


title: Hollywood Sign

text: In 2015, the city made the northern parts of Beachwood Canyon into preferential parking districts, restricting parking on most of the streets in the neighborhood only to its homeowners.


title: Hollywood Sign

text: In 2017, Beachwood Drive gate, an access point to the popular Hollyridge Trail, was closed to the public by city officials, though it remains accessible as an exit. The closure came as a response to a lawsuit by Sunset Ranch Hollywood Stables against the city for advertising a gate at the bottom of the trail, which directed tourists towards the Ranch's "exclusive easement (right of way) road". The Los Angeles County Superior Court ruled that although the path was open to the public, the proliferation of its access by the city had interfered with the Ranch's business, thus the city was ordered either to provide access near the start of the easement or reopen a previously closed trail. A spokesperson from the office of Councilman David Ryu, who succeeded Tom Labonge, stated that it was uncertain that the city could have kept the gate open while still complying with court orders.


title: Hollywood Sign

text: The Friends of Griffith Park, Los Feliz Oaks Homeowners Association, and the Griffith J. Griffith Charitable Trust filed a suit together to reverse the closing of the Beachwood Gate following its closure in 2017. The court ruled in favor of Los Angeles and denied their 2018 appeal.


title: Hollywood Sign

text: An aerial tramway to the top of Mount Lee and the sign has been proposed numerous times. In June 2018, Warner Bros. proposed to fund an estimated $100 million tramway that would run from its Burbank studio lot and up the north face of Mount Lee to a new visitors' area near the sign. Other proposals stakeholders have set forth include establishing an official visitors' center for the sign, public shuttle service to lead tourists to the sign or trails, or even erecting a duplicate sign on the opposite side of Mount Lee.


title: Hollywood Sign

text: In September 1932, 24-year-old actress Peg Entwistle died by suicide by climbing a workman's ladder up to the top of the 'H' and jumping to her death.


title: Hollywood Sign

text: The sign is on the southern side of Mount Lee in Griffith Park, north of the Mulholland Highway, and to the south of the Forest Lawn Memorial Park (Hollywood Hills) cemetery.


title: Hollywood Sign

text: The sign is on rough, steep terrain, and there are barriers to prevent unauthorized access. In 2000, the Los Angeles Police Department installed a security system featuring motion detection and closed-circuit cameras. Any movement in the marked restricted areas triggers an alarm that notifies the police.


title: Hollywood Sign

text: The building and tower just behind and to the right of the sign is the City of Los Angeles Central Communications Facility, which supports all cellphone, microwave, and radio towers used by the Los Angeles Police Department, the Fire Department, the Los Angeles Unified School District, and other municipal agencies. The building has no name and is a large maintenance building for the antennae. From 1939 to 1947, this site was the location of the studios and transmitter of the first television station in Los Angeles, W6XAO (now KCBS-TV), founded by The Don Lee Network, hence the name Mount Lee. The TV studio left this location in 1948, and the transmission facility left in 1951, moving to the higher Mount Wilson.


title: Hollywood Sign

text: Land in the vicinity of the sign was purchased by Howard Hughes in 1940, who planned to build a hilltop mansion at Cahuenga Peak for actress Ginger Rogers. Before long, Rogers broke off their engagement and the lot remained empty. Hughes' estate sold the property that lies to the left and above the sign for $1.7 million in 2002 to Fox River Financial Resources, a Chicago developer that planned to build luxury mansions along the ridgeline. It put the property on the market in 2008 for $22 million. As a result, the City of Los Angeles considered buying it, possibly by raising money from celebrities as was done for the 1978 restoration.


title: Hollywood Sign

text: Environmentalists and preservationists were concerned about the possibility of real estate development in the area. In April 2009 The Trust for Public Land (TPL) signed an option to buy the property for a discounted price of $12.5 million. On February 11, 2010, as part of a campaign to help raise money and with the full support of both the city and the Hollywood Sign Trust, the organization covered each letter of the sign with large banners reading "SAVE THE PEAK". On April 26, 2010, the Trust for Public Land announced it had raised enough money, with "Playboy" magazine founder Hugh Hefner stepping forward to donate the final $900,000. Hefner later gave an additional $100,000 donation. After the purchase, the parcel became an extension of nearby Griffith Park.


title: Hollywood Sign

text: In 1987, promotion for the prime time launch of Fox Television had the sign read "FOX" for five days.


title: Hollywood Sign

text: A -tall cutout of Holli Would, main character from the film "Cool World" (1992), which appeared to sit on the sign, was added as part of a promotion for the film. The alteration angered local residents, who said the cartoon character was "appalling" and an insult to women.


title: Hollywood Sign

text: As part of the Los Angeles County millennium celebrations, the Hollywood sign was illuminated and hosted a laser show for a television broadcast for the arrival of the year 2000. The event was produced by Carl Bendix. The sign was illuminated in various colors, one of the rare times the sign became lit; an alternative to the firework displays at several of the other world icons due to concerns about fire in the dry conditions.


title: Hollywood Sign

text: Between February 14 and 16, 2022, the sign read "RAMS HOUSE" to celebrate the Los Angeles Rams' Super Bowl LVI victory. The changes were made by the Rams in collaboration with the City of Los Angeles, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce and the Hollywood Sign Trust. Inclement weather delayed its completion, leading to the sign reading "RALLYOUSE" for much of Tuesday, and was only completed just before the Rams' victory parade the following day. The sign was criticized for being unreadable, eliciting negative reactions on Twitter, but was nonetheless praised by some for being reflective of the team's performance in the run-up to the Super Bowl.


title: Hollywood Sign

text: In 2022, the sign was lit for the first time in 22 years. Using laser projections, rainbow colors were cast onto the sign to commemorate Pride Month. A few days later, digital projections were beamed onto the sign on the weekend of June 25 and 26 for 2022's BET Awards.


title: Hollywood Sign

text: The sign has been unofficially altered a number of times, often eliciting a great deal of attention. The modifications have included:


title: Hollywood Sign

text: Disney filed to put spots on the sign as a means of promoting its film "101 Dalmatians" (1996); however, the request was later rescinded.


title: Hollywood Sign

text: In films and television shows, the Hollywood Sign is often used as an establishing shot for Los Angeles and Hollywood. The sign is also shown getting damaged or destroyed from the events of a particular scene; period pieces may show just the "LAND" portion of the original sign being destroyed. It is an example of national landmarks being destroyed, a common feature seen in many disaster movies to increase the drama and tension. It is frequently a shorthand device to indicate the destruction of all of Los Angeles or the state of California. The sign has been depicted getting destroyed in the movies "Earthquake" (1974), "Independence Day" (1996), "The Day After Tomorrow" (2004), "10.5" (2004), "Terminator Salvation" (2009), "Sharknado" (2013), "San Andreas" (2015), "Despicable Me 3" (2017), and countless other films.


title: Cusco

text: Cusco, often spelled Cuzco (; ()), is a city in Southeastern Peru near the Urubamba Valley of the Andes mountain range. It is the capital of the Cusco Region and of the Cusco Province. The city is the seventh most populous in Peru; in 2017, it had a population of 428,450. Its elevation is around .


title: Cusco

text: The city was the capital of the Inca Empire from the 13th century until the 16th-century Spanish conquest. In 1983, Cusco was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO with the title "City of Cuzco". It has become a major tourist destination, hosting nearly 2 million visitors a year. The Constitution of Peru (1993) designates it as the Historical Capital of Peru.


title: Cusco

text: The indigenous name of this city is . Although the name was used in Southern Quechua, its origin is found in the Aymara language. The word is derived from the phrase ('rock of the owl'), related to the city's foundation myth of the Ayar siblings. According to this legend, Ayar Awqa () acquired wings and flew to the site of the future city; there he was transformed into a rock to mark the possession of the land by his ("lineage"):


title: Cusco

text: The Spanish conquistadors (Spanish soldiers) adopted the local name, transcribing it according to Spanish phonetics as or, less often, . was the standard spelling on official documents and chronicles in colonial times, though was also used. , pronounced as in 16th-century Spanish, seems to have been a close approximation to the Cusco Quechua pronunciation of the name at the time.


title: Cusco

text: As both Spanish and Quechua pronunciation have evolved since then, the Spanish pronunciation of 'z' is no longer universally close to the Quechua pronunciation. In 1976, the city mayor signed an ordinance banning the traditional spelling and ordering the use of a new spelling, , in municipality publications. Nineteen years later, on 23 June 1990, the local authorities formalized a new spelling more closely related to Quechua, "Qosqo", but later administrations have not followed suit.


title: Cusco

text: There is no international, official spelling of the city's name. In English-language publications both "s" and "z" can be found. The "Oxford Dictionary of English" and "Merriam-Webster Dictionary" prefer "Cuzco", and in scholarly writings "Cuzco" is used more often than "Cusco". The city's international airport code is CUZ, reflecting the earlier Spanish spelling.


title: Cusco

text: The Killke people occupied the region from 900 to 1200 CE, prior to the arrival of the Inca in the 13th century. Carbon-14 dating of Saksaywaman, the walled complex outside Cusco, established that Killke constructed the fortress about 1100 CE. The Inca later expanded and occupied the complex in the 13th century. In March 2008, archeologists discovered the ruins of an ancient temple, roadway and aqueduct system at Saksaywaman. The temple covers some and contains 11 rooms thought to have held idols and mummies, establishing its religious purpose. Together with the results of excavations in 2007, when another temple was found at the edge of the fortress, this indicates a longtime religious as well as military use of the facility.


title: Cusco

text: Cusco was long an important center of indigenous people. It was the capital of the Inca Empire (13th century – 1532). Many believe that the city was planned as an effigy in the shape of a puma, a sacred animal. How Cusco was specifically built, or how its large stones were quarried and transported to the site remain undetermined. Under the Inca, the city had two sectors: the "urin" and "hanan". Each was divided to encompass two of the four provinces, Chinchasuyu (NW), Antisuyu (NE), Kuntisuyu (SW) and Qullasuyu (SE). A road led from each quarter to the corresponding quarter of the empire.


title: Cusco

text: Each local leader was required to build a house in the city and live part of the year in Cusco, restricted to the quarter that corresponded to the quarter in which he held territory. After the rule of Pachacuti, when an Inca died, his title went to one son and his property was given to a corporation controlled by his other relatives (split inheritance). Each title holder had to build a new house and add new lands to the empire in order to own land for his family to keep after his death.


title: Cusco

text: According to Inca legend, the city was rebuilt by Sapa Inca Pachacuti, the man who transformed the Kingdom of Cuzco from a sleepy city-state into the vast empire of "Tawantinsuyu". Archeological evidence, however, points to a slower, more organic growth of the city beginning before Pachacuti. The city was constructed according to a definite plan in which two rivers were channeled around the city. Archeologists have suggested that this city plan was replicated at other sites.


title: Cusco

text: The city fell to the sphere of Huáscar during the Inca Civil War after the death of Huayna Capac in 1528. It was captured by the generals of Atahualpa in April 1532 in the Battle of Quipaipan. Nineteen months later, Spanish explorers invaded the city after kidnapping and murdering Atahualpa (see Battle of Cuzco), and gained control because of their arms and horses, employing superior military technology.


title: Cusco

text: The first three Spaniards arrived in the city in May 1533, after the Battle of Cajamarca, collecting for Atahualpa's Ransom Room. On 15 November 1533 Francisco Pizarro officially arrived in Cusco. "The capital of the Incas ... astonished the Spaniards by the beauty of its edifices, the length and regularity of its streets." The great square was surrounded by several palaces, since "each sovereign built a new palace for himself." "The delicacy of the stone work excelled" that of the Spaniards'. The fortress had three parapets and was composed of "heavy masses of rock". "Through the heart of the capital ran a river ... faced with stone. ... The most sumptuous edifice in Cuzco ... was undoubtedly the great temple dedicated to the Sun ... studded with gold plates ... surrounded by convents and dormitories for the priests. ... The palaces were numerous and the troops lost no time in plundering them of their contents, as well as despoiling the religious edifices," including the royal mummies in the Coricancha.


title: Cusco

text: Pizarro ceremoniously gave Manco Inca the Incan fringe as the new Peruvian leader. Pizarro encouraged some of his men to stay and settle in the city, giving out repartimientos, or land grants to do so. Alcaldes were established and regidores on 24 March 1534, which included the brothers Gonzalo Pizarro and Juan Pizarro. Pizarro left a garrison of 90 men and departed for Jauja with Manco Inca.


title: Cusco

text: Pizarro renamed it as the "very noble and great city of Cuzco". Buildings often constructed after the Spanish invasion have a mixture of Spanish influence and Inca indigenous architecture, including the Santa Clara and San Blas neighborhoods. The Spanish destroyed many Inca buildings, temples and palaces. They used the remaining walls as bases for the construction of a new city, and this stone masonry is still visible.


title: Cusco

text: Father Vincente de Valverde became the Bishop of Cusco and built his cathedral facing the plaza. He supported construction of the Dominican Order monastery (Santo Domingo Convent) on the ruins of the Corichanca, House of the Sun, and a convent at the former site of the House of the Virgins of the Sun.


title: Cusco

text: During the Siege of Cuzco of 1536 by Manco Inca Yupanqui, a leader of the Sapa Inca, he took control of the city from the Spanish. Although the siege lasted 10 months, it was ultimately unsuccessful. Manco's forces were able to reclaim the city for only a few days. He eventually retreated to Vilcabamba, the capital of the newly established small Neo-Inca State. There his state survived another 36 years but he was never able to return to Cuzco. Throughout the conflict and years of the Spanish colonization of the Americas, many Incas died of smallpox epidemics, as they had no acquired immunity to a disease by then endemic among Europeans.


title: Cusco

text: Cusco was built on layers of cultures. The Tawantinsuyu (former Inca Empire) was built on Killke structures. The Spanish replaced indigenous temples with Catholic churches, and Inca palaces with mansions for the invaders.


title: Cusco

text: Cusco was the center for the Spanish colonization and spread of Christianity in the Andean world. It became very prosperous thanks to agriculture, cattle raising and mining, as well as its trade with Spain. The Spanish colonists constructed many churches and convents, as well as a cathedral, university and archdiocese.


title: Cusco

text: A major earthquake on 21 May hit in 1950, and caused damage in more than one third of the city's structures. The Dominican Priory and Church of Santo Domingo, which were built on top of the impressive "Qurikancha" (Temple of the Sun), were among the affected colonial era buildings. Inca architecture withstood the earthquake. Many of the old Inca walls were at first thought to have been lost after the earthquake, but the granite retaining walls of the "Qurikancha" were exposed, as well as those of other ancient structures throughout the city. Restoration work at the Santo Domingo complex exposed the Inca masonry formerly obscured by the superstructure without compromising the integrity of the colonial heritage. Many of the buildings damaged in 1950 had been impacted by an earthquake only nine years previously.


title: Cusco

text: Since the 1990s, tourism has increased. Currently, Cusco is the most important tourist destination in Peru. Under the administration of mayor Daniel Estrada Pérez, a staunch supporter of the "Academia Mayor de la Lengua Quechua", between 1983 and 1995 the Quechua name "Qosqo" was officially adopted for the city.


title: Cusco

text: Cusco extends throughout the Huatanay (or Watanay) river valley. Located on the eastern end of the Knot of Cusco, its elevation is around . To its north is the Vilcabamba mountain range with mountains. The highest peak is Salcantay () about northwest of Cusco.


title: Cusco

text: Cusco has a subtropical highland climate (Köppen "Cwb"). It is generally dry and temperate, with two defined seasons. Winter occurs from May through September, with abundant sunshine and occasional nighttime freezes; July is the coldest month with an average of . Summer occurs from October through April, with warm temperatures and abundant rainfall; November is the warmest month, averaging . Although frost and hail are common, the last reported snowfall was in June 1911. Temperatures usually range from , but the all-time temperature range is between . Sunshine hours peak in July, the equivalent of January in the Northern Hemisphere. In contrast, February, the equivalent of August in the Northern Hemisphere, has the least sunshine.


title: Cusco

text: Tourism has been the backbone to the economy since the early 2000s, bringing in more than 1.2 million tourists per year. In 2002, the income Cusco received from tourism was US$837 million. In 2009, that number increased to US$2.47 billion. Unfortunately, due to the COVID-19 pandemic tourism has dropped by a significant amount.


title: Cusco

text: The indigenous Killke culture built the walled complex of Sacsayhuamán about 1100. The Killke built a major temple near Saksaywaman, as well as an aqueduct (Pukyus) and roadway connecting prehistoric structures. Sacsayhuamán was expanded by the Inca.


title: Cusco

text: The Spanish explorer Pizarro sacked much of the Inca city in 1535. Remains of the palace of the Incas, Qurikancha (the Temple of the Sun), and the Temple of the Virgins of the Sun still stand. Inca buildings and foundations in some cases proved to be stronger during earthquakes than foundations built in present-day Peru. Among the most noteworthy Spanish colonial buildings of the city is the Cathedral of Santo Domingo.


title: Cusco

text: The major nearby Inca sites are Pachacuti's presumed winter home, Machu Picchu, which can be reached on foot by the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu or by train; and the "fortress" at Ollantaytambo.


title: Cusco

text: Less-visited ruins include: Incahuasi, the highest of all Inca sites at ; Vilcabamba, the capital of the Inca after the Spanish capture of Cusco; the sculpture garden at Ñusta Hisp'ana (aka Chuqip'allta, Yuraq Rumi); Tipón, with working water channels in wide terraces; as well as Willkaraqay, Patallaqta, Chuqik'iraw, Moray, Vitcos and many others.


title: Cusco

text: The surrounding area, located in the Watanay Valley, is strong in gold mining and agriculture, including corn, barley, quinoa, tea and coffee.


title: Cusco

text: Cusco's main stadium Estadio Garcilaso de la Vega was one of seven stadiums used when Peru hosted South America's continental soccer championship, the Copa América, in 2004. The stadium is home to one of the country's most successful soccer clubs, "Cienciano".


title: Cusco

text: Because of its antiquity and importance, the city center retains many buildings, plazas, streets and churches from colonial times, and even some pre-Columbian structures, which led to its declaration as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1983. Among the main sights of the city are:


title: Cusco

text: This neighborhood houses artisans, workshops and craft shops. It is one of the most picturesque sites in the city. Its streets are steep and narrow with old houses built by the Spanish over important Inca foundations. It has an attractive square and the oldest parish church in Cusco, built in 1563, which has a carved wooden pulpit considered the epitome of Colonial era woodwork in Cusco.


title: Cusco

text: This street is the most visited by tourists. On the street Hatun Rumiyoq ("the one with the big stone") was the palace of Inca Roca, which was converted to the Archbishop's residence.


title: Cusco

text: Along this street that runs from the Plaza de Armas to the Barrio de San Blas, one can see the Stone of Twelve Angles, which is viewed as a marvel of ancient stonework and has become emblematic of the city's history.


title: Cusco

text: Its foundation dates from 1536. The first complex was destroyed by the earthquake of 1650. Its rebuilding was completed in 1675.


title: Cusco

text: Its cloisters of Baroque Renaissance style, choir stalls, colonial paintings and wood carvings are highlights, now a popular museum.


title: Cusco

text: The first cathedral built in Cusco is the "Iglesia del Triunfo", built in 1539 on the foundations of the Palace of Viracocha Inca. Today, this church is an auxiliary chapel of the cathedral.


title: Cusco

text: The main basilica cathedral of the city was built between 1560 and 1664. The main material used was stone, which was extracted from nearby quarries, although some blocks of red granite were taken from the fortress of Saksaywaman.


title: Cusco

text: This great cathedral presents late-Gothic, Baroque and plateresque interiors and has one of the most outstanding examples of colonial goldwork. Its carved wooden altars are also important.


title: Cusco

text: The city developed a distinctive style of painting known as the "Cuzco School" and the cathedral houses a major collection of local artists of the time. The cathedral is known for a Cusco School painting of the Last Supper depicting Jesus and the twelve apostles feasting on guinea pig, a traditional Andean delicacy.


title: Cusco

text: Known as the "Square of the warrior" in the Inca era, this plaza has been the scene of several important events, such as the proclamation by Francisco Pizarro in the conquest of Cuzco.Similarly, the Plaza de Armas was the scene of the death of Túpac Amaru II, considered the indigenous leader of the resistance.


title: Cusco

text: The Spanish built stone arcades around the plaza which endure to this day. The main cathedral and the Church of La Compañía both open directly onto the plaza.


title: Cusco

text: This church (Church of the Society of Jesus), whose construction was initiated by the Jesuits in 1576 on the foundations of the "Amarucancha" or the palace of the Inca ruler Wayna Qhapaq, is considered one of the best examples of colonial baroque style in the Americas.


title: Cusco

text: Its façade is carved in stone and its main altar is made of carved wood covered with gold leaf. It was built over an underground chapel and has a valuable collection of colonial paintings of the Cusco School.


title: Cusco

text: The Qurikancha ("golden place") was the most important sanctuary dedicated to the Sun God (Inti) at the time of the Inca Empire. According to ancient chronicles written by Garcilaso de la Vega (chronicler), Qurikancha was said to have featured a large solid golden disc that was studded with precious stones and represented the Inca Sun God – Inti. Spanish chroniclers describe the Sacred Garden in front of the temple as a garden of golden plants with leaves of beaten gold, stems of silver, solid gold corn-cobs and 20 life-size llamas and their herders all in solid gold.


title: Cusco

text: The temple was destroyed by its Spanish invaders who, as they plundered, were determined to rid the city of its wealth, idolaters and shrines. Nowadays, only a curved outer wall and partial ruins of the inner temple remain at the site.


title: Cusco

text: With this structure as a foundation, colonists built the Convent of Santo Domingo in the Renaissance style. The building, with one baroque tower, exceeds the height of many other buildings in this city.


title: Cusco

text: The city had a population of about 434,114 people in 2013 and 434,654 people in 2015 according to INEI.


title: Cusco

text: As capital to the Inca Empire, Cusco was an important agricultural region. It was a natural reserve for thousands of native Peruvian species, including around 3,000 varieties of potato cultivated by the people. Fusion and neo-Andean restaurants developed in Cusco, in which the cuisine is prepared with modern techniques and incorporates a blend of traditional Andean and international ingredients.


title: Ghost pepper

text: The ghost pepper, also known as bhut jolokia (which literally means 'Bhutan pepper' in Assamese), is an interspecific hybrid chili pepper cultivated in Northeast India. It is a hybrid of "Capsicum chinense" and "Capsicum frutescens".


title: Ghost pepper

text: In 2007, "Guinness World Records" certified that the ghost pepper was the world's hottest chili pepper, 170 times hotter than Tabasco sauce. The ghost chili is rated at more than one million Scoville Heat Units (SHUs). However, in the race to grow the hottest chili pepper, the ghost chili was superseded by the Trinidad Scorpion Butch T pepper in 2011 and the Carolina Reaper in 2013.


title: Ghost pepper

text: The name "bhüt jolokia" (ভোট জলকীয়া) means 'Bhutanese pepper' in Assamese; the first element "bhüt", meaning 'Bhutan', was mistakenly confused for a near-homonym "bhut" meaning 'ghost'.


title: Ghost pepper

text: In Assam, the pepper is also known as "bih zôlôkia" ('poison chili'), from Assamese "bih" 'poison' and "zôlôkia" 'chili pepper,' denoting the plant's heat.


title: Ghost pepper

text: Similarly, in Nagaland, one of the regions of cultivation, the chili is called "Naga jolokia" ('Naga chili'; also romanized "nôga zôlôkia") and "bhut jolokia" (also romanized "bhût zôlôkiya"). This name is especially common in other regions where it is grown, such as Assam and Manipur. Other usages on the subcontinent are "saga jolokia", 'Indian mystery chili' and 'Indian rough chili'.


title: Ghost pepper

text: It has also been called the Tezpur chili after the Assamese city of Tezpur. In Manipur, the chili is called "umorok" or "oo-morok" ('tree chili').


title: Ghost pepper

text: In northeastern India, the "bhut jolokia" is also known as the "king chilli" or "king cobra chilli'".


title: Ghost pepper

text: In 2000, India's Defence Research Laboratory (DRL) reported a Scoville rating for the ghost pepper of 855,000 SHUs, and in 2004 a rating of 1,041,427 SHUs was made using HPLC analysis. For comparison, Tabasco red pepper sauce rates at 2,500–5,000, and pure capsaicin (the chemical responsible for the pungency of pepper plants) rates at 16,000,000 SHUs. In 2005, New Mexico State University's Chile Pepper Institute in Las Cruces, New Mexico found ghost peppers grown from seed in southern New Mexico to have a Scoville rating of 1,001,304 SHUs by HPLC. Unlike most peppers, ghost peppers produce capsaicin in vesicles found in both the placenta around the seeds and throughout the fruit, rather than just in the placenta.


title: Ghost pepper

text: Ripe peppers measure in length and in width with a red, yellow, orange, or chocolate color. The unselected strain of ghost peppers from India is an extremely variable plant, with a wide range in fruit sizes and fruit production per plant. Ghost pepper pods are unique among peppers because of their characteristic shape and very thin skin. However, the red fruit variety has two different types: the rough, dented fruit and the smooth fruit. The rough fruit plants are taller, with more fragile branches, while the smooth fruit plants yield more fruit and are compact with sturdier branches. It takes about 7–12 days to germinate at 32–38 °C.


title: Ghost pepper

text: Ghost peppers are used as a food and a spice. It is used in both fresh and dried forms to "heat up" curries, pickles and chutneys. It is popularly used in combination with pork or dried or fermented fish. In northeastern India, the peppers are smeared on fences or incorporated in smoke bombs as a safety precaution to keep wild elephants at a distance. The pepper's intense heat makes it a fixture in competitive chili-pepper eating.


title: Ghost pepper

text: In 2009, scientists at India's Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) announced plans to use the peppers in hand grenades as a nonlethal method to control rioters with pepper sprays or in self-defence. The DRDO said that ghost pepper-based aerosol sprays could be used as a "safety device", and "civil variants" of chili grenades could be used to control and disperse mobs. Chili grenades made from ghost peppers were successfully used by the Indian Army in August 2015 to flush out a terrorist hiding in a cave.


title: Borderlands (series)

text: Borderlands is an action role-playing first-person looter shooter video game franchise set in a space Western science fiction setting, created and produced by Gearbox Software and published by 2K Games for multiple platforms.


title: Borderlands (series)

text: The series consists of four games, each with multiple downloadable content packs: "Borderlands" (2009), "Borderlands 2" (2012), "" (2014) by 2K Australia and "Borderlands 3" (2019). "Tales from the Borderlands" (2014–) is a spin-off episodic graphic adventure game by Telltale Games.


title: Borderlands (series)

text: The series has received critical acclaim and commercial success for its loot-driven multiplayer co-op gameplay and its sense of humor. As of November 2022, more than 77 million copies of "Borderlands" games had been shipped, with 26 million from "Borderlands 2". An additional 5 million copies of "Borderlands 3" were sold within five days of release, bringing the total series' net revenues to over . This makes it one of the best-selling video game franchises of all time. A film adaptation of the series is in development by Lionsgate.


title: Borderlands (series)

text: The "Borderlands" games are first-person loot shooters, set in an open world, with some role-playing game (RPG) elements ("Tales from the Borderlands," however, is an episodic adventure game). The concept came from Randy Pitchford's idea to combine the mechanics of first-person shooters like "Doom" with role-playing games with randomized loot such as "Diablo". After developing the mechanics of this shooter-RPG hybrid, Gearbox established the idea of players seeking Vaults on the planet Pandora, comparing the discovery of new loot to opening a Pandora's box.


title: Borderlands (series)

text: Players select one of the available characters, representing Vault Hunters that have traveled to the planet Pandora to try to seek its fabled Vault. Each Vault Hunter has a different skill tree and one or more unique abilities. Players then work on completing quests and exploring Pandora while dealing with the violent Pandora wildlife, crazed scavengers that have been stranded on the planet, and various military groups that attempt to stop them. Completing quests and defeating foes earns in-game money and experience, which is used for expanding the player's skill tree. If the player loses their health or falls into bottomless chasms, they respawn at the most recent checkpoint and lose some of their money. The games are divided into several maps, and once players have reached a waypoint station on the map, they can teleport to any other previously visited map. Otherwise, players must reach certain points on the edges of the map to move into a different area. Some maps allow the player to spawn an armed vehicle to help traverse large maps or to deal with more powerful enemies.


title: Borderlands (series)

text: A core feature of "Borderlands" is the loot system, which generates a variety of guns (such as pistols, shotguns, assault rifles, sniper rifles, and rocket launchers), shield generators, grenade modifications, and class modifications. This equipment is randomly dropped by foes, found in containers around Pandora, or obtained as rewards for completing quests. The statistics of the equipment, such as the amount of damage and accuracy for a gun and special elemental attacks, are procedurally generated, and use a loot color-coding system similar to games like "World of Warcraft" to indicate rarity, ranging from white (most common), to purple and orange (most rare and powerful). The first "Borderlands" is credited by the Guinness Book of World Records to have over 17 million different possible guns that could be generated, while the latter games expand further on this. Other facets of the game use a similar procedural system: foes may have unique attributes and more powerful variants, such as creatures that can spit corrosive acid or flame, or scavengers with higher amounts of health and armor. Weapons and other equipment can be sold and bought at various vending machines scattered about the maps; nearly all vending machines include a rare piece of loot that is only available for a limited amount of in-game time, after which the machine's inventory is rotated for a new set of equipment. "Borderlands 2", "3", and "The Pre-Sequel!" include the use of "SHIFT codes", which the player can obtain through social media or other promotions, and give players "golden keys" that can be used once to obtain an item of exceptional quality appropriate for the player's level; this feature was also added to the remaster of "Borderlands".


title: Borderlands (series)

text: As the player levels, the loot drops will become more powerful; at the same time, the enemies that the player faces on the map will increase in level as well. All three games feature a New Game Plus-type replay mode, where they can start with the same character at the same level they completed the game with, and continue to level up the character through the replay up to a fixed level, making the game more difficult. All three games support co-operative play for up to four people; the difficulty of the enemies as well as the quality of the loot drops scales with the number of players.