title: Strabismus

text: A subsequent study with participants from the same area monitored people with congenital esotropia for a longer time period; results indicated that people who are esotropic were also more likely to develop mental illness of some sort upon reaching early adulthood, similar to those with constant exotropia, intermittent exotropia, or convergence insufficiency. The likelihood was 2.6 times that of controls. No apparent association with premature birth was observed, and no evidence was found linking later onset of mental illness to psychosocial stressors frequently encountered by those with strabismus.


title: Strabismus

text: Investigations have highlighted the impact that strabismus may typically have on quality of life. Studies in which subjects were shown images of strabismic and non-strabismic persons showed a strong negative bias towards those visibly displaying the condition, clearly demonstrating the potential for future socioeconomic implications with regard to employability, as well as other psychosocial effects related to an individual's overall happiness.


title: Strabismus

text: Adult and child observers perceived a right heterotropia as more disturbing than a left heterotropia, and child observers perceived an esotropia as "worse" than an exotropia. Successful surgical correction of strabismus, for adult as well as children, has been shown to have a significantly positive effect on psychological well-being.


title: Strabismus

text: Very little research exists regarding coping strategies employed by adult strabismics. One study categorized coping methods into three subcategories: avoidance (refraining from participation in an activity), distraction (deflecting attention from the condition), and adjustment (approaching an activity differently). The authors of the study suggested that individuals with strabismus may benefit from psychosocial support such as interpersonal skills training. No studies have evaluated whether psychosocial interventions have had any benefits on individuals undergoing strabismus surgery.


title: Strabismus

text: The extraocular muscles control the position of the eyes. Thus, a problem with the muscles or the nerves controlling them can cause paralytic strabismus. The extraocular muscles are controlled by cranial nerves III, IV, and VI. An impairment of cranial nerve III causes the associated eye to deviate down and out and may or may not affect the size of the pupil. Impairment of cranial nerve IV, which can be congenital, causes the eye to drift up and perhaps slightly inward. Sixth nerve palsy causes the eyes to deviate inward and has many causes due to the relatively long path of the nerve. Increased cranial pressure can compress the nerve as it runs between the clivus and brain stem. Also, if the doctor is not careful, twisting of the baby's neck during forceps delivery can damage cranial nerve VI.


title: Strabismus

text: Evidence indicates a cause for strabismus may lie with the input provided to the visual cortex. This allows for strabismus to occur without the direct impairment of any cranial nerves or extraocular muscles.


title: Strabismus

text: Strabismus may cause amblyopia due to the brain ignoring one eye. Amblyopia is the failure of one or both eyes to achieve normal visual acuity despite normal structural health. During the first seven to eight years of life, the brain learns how to interpret the signals that come from an eye through a process called visual development. Development may be interrupted by strabismus if the child always fixates with one eye and rarely or never fixates with the other. To avoid double vision, the signal from the deviated eye is suppressed, and the constant suppression of one eye causes a failure of the visual development in that eye.


title: Strabismus

text: Also, amblyopia may cause strabismus. If a great difference in clarity occurs between the images from the right and left eyes, input may be insufficient to correctly reposition the eyes. Other causes of a visual difference between right and left eyes, such as asymmetrical cataracts, refractive error, or other eye disease, can also cause or worsen strabismus.


title: Strabismus

text: Accommodative esotropia is a form of strabismus caused by refractive error in one or both eyes. Due to the near triad, when a person engages accommodation to focus on a near object, an increase in the signal sent by cranial nerve III to the medial rectus muscles results, drawing the eyes inward; this is called the accommodation reflex. If the accommodation needed is more than the usual amount, such as with people with significant hyperopia, the extra convergence can cause the eyes to cross.


title: Strabismus

text: During an eye examination, a test such as cover testing or the Hirschberg test is used in the diagnosis and measurement of strabismus and its impact on vision. Retinal birefringence scanning can be used for screening of young children for eye misalignment. A Cochrane review to examine different types of diagnosis test found only one study. This study used a photoscreener which was found to have high specificity (accurate in identifying those without the condition) but low sensitivity (inaccurate in identifying those with the condition).


title: Strabismus

text: Strabismus can be manifest ("-tropia") or latent ("-phoria"). A manifest deviation, or heterotropia (which may be "eso-", "exo-", "hyper-", "hypo-", "cyclotropia" or a combination of these), is present while the person views a target binocularly, with no occlusion of either eye. The person is unable to align the gaze of each eye to achieve fusion. A latent deviation, or heterophoria ("eso-", "exo-", "hyper-", "hypo-", "cyclophoria" or a combination of these), is only present after binocular vision has been interrupted, typically by covering one eye. This type of person can typically maintain fusion despite the misalignment that occurs when the positioning system is relaxed. Intermittent strabismus is a combination of both of these types, where the person can achieve fusion, but occasionally or frequently falters to the point of a manifest deviation.


title: Strabismus

text: Strabismus may also be classified based on time of onset, either congenital, acquired, or secondary to another pathological process. Many infants are born with their eyes slightly misaligned, and this is typically outgrown by six to 12 months of age. Acquired and secondary strabismus develop later. The onset of accommodative esotropia, an overconvergence of the eyes due to the effort of accommodation, is mostly in early childhood. Acquired non-accommodative strabismus and secondary strabismus are developed after normal binocular vision has developed. In adults with previously normal alignment, the onset of strabismus usually results in double vision.


title: Strabismus

text: Any disease that causes vision loss may also cause strabismus, but it can also result from any severe and/or traumatic injury to the affected eye. Sensory strabismus is strabismus due to vision loss or impairment, leading to horizontal, vertical or torsional misalignment or to a combination thereof, with the eye with poorer vision drifting slightly over time. Most often, the outcome is horizontal misalignment. Its direction depends on the person's age at which the damage occurs: people whose vision is lost or impaired at birth are more likely to develop esotropia, whereas people with acquired vision loss or impairment mostly develop exotropia. In the extreme, complete blindness in one eye generally leads to the blind eye reverting to an anatomical position of rest.


title: Strabismus

text: Although many possible causes of strabismus are known, among them severe and/or traumatic injuries to the affected eye, in many cases no specific cause can be identified. This last is typically the case when strabismus is present since early childhood.


title: Strabismus

text: Results of a U.S. cohort study indicate that the incidence of adult-onset strabismus increases with age, especially after the sixth decade of life, and peaks in the eighth decade of life, and that the lifetime risk of being diagnosed with adult-onset strabismus is approximately 4%.


title: Strabismus

text: Strabismus may be classified as unilateral if the one eye consistently deviates, or alternating if either of the eyes can be seen to deviate. Alternation of the strabismus may occur spontaneously, with or without subjective awareness of the alternation. Alternation may also be triggered by various tests during an eye exam. Unilateral strabismus has been observed to result from a severe or traumatic injury to the affected eye.


title: Strabismus

text: Horizontal deviations are classified into two varieties, using prefixes: "eso-" describes inward or convergent deviations towards the midline, while "exo-" describes outward or divergent misalignment. Vertical deviations are also classified into two varieties, using prefixes: "hyper-" is the term for an eye whose gaze is directed higher than the fellow eye, while "hypo-" refers to an eye whose gaze is directed lower. Finally, the prefix "cyclo-" refers to torsional strabismus, which occurs when the eyes rotate around the anterior–posterior axis to become misaligned and is quite rare.


title: Strabismus

text: These five directional prefixes are combined with "-tropia" (if manifest) or "-phoria" (if latent) to describe various types of strabismus. For example, a constant left hypertropia exists when a person's left eye is always aimed higher than the right. A person with an intermittent right esotropia has a right eye that occasionally drifts toward the person's nose, but at other times is able to align with the gaze of the left eye. A person with a mild exophoria can maintain fusion during normal circumstances, but when the system is disrupted, the relaxed posture of the eyes is slightly divergent.


title: Strabismus

text: Nonparetic strabismus is generally concomitant. Most types of infant and childhood strabismus are comitant. Paretic strabismus can be either comitant or noncomitant. Incomitant strabismus is almost always caused by a limitation of ocular rotations that is due to a restriction of extraocular eye movement (ocular restriction) or due to extraocular muscle paresis. Incomitant strabismus cannot be fully corrected by prism glasses, because the eyes would require different degrees of prismatic correction dependent on the direction of the gaze. Incomitant strabismus of the eso- or exo-type are classified as "alphabet patterns": they are denoted as A- or V- or more rarely λ-, Y- or X-pattern depending on the extent of convergence or divergence when the gaze moves upward or downward. These letters of the alphabet denote ocular motility pattern that have a similarity to the respective letter: in the A-pattern there is (relatively speaking) more convergence when the gaze is directed upwards and more divergence when it is directed downwards, in the V-pattern it is the contrary, in the λ-, Y- and X-patterns there is little or no strabismus in the middle position but relatively more divergence in one or both of the upward and downward positions, depending on the "shape" of the letter.


title: Strabismus

text: Types of incomitant strabismus include: Duane syndrome, horizontal gaze palsy, and congenital fibrosis of the extraocular muscles.


title: Strabismus

text: When the misalignment of the eyes is large and obvious, the strabismus is called large-angle, referring to the angle of deviation between the lines of sight of the eyes. Less severe eye turns are called small-angle strabismus. The degree of strabismus can vary based on whether the person is viewing a distant or near target.


title: Strabismus

text: Strabismus that sets in after eye alignment had been surgically corrected is called "consecutive strabismus".


title: Strabismus

text: Pseudostrabismus is the false appearance of strabismus. It generally occurs in infants and toddlers whose bridge of the nose is wide and flat, causing the appearance of esotropia due to less sclera being visible nasally. With age, the bridge of the child's nose narrows and the folds in the corner of the eyes become less prominent.


title: Strabismus

text: Strabismus is usually treated with a combination of eyeglasses, vision therapy, and surgery, depending on the underlying reason for the misalignment. As with other binocular vision disorders, the primary goal is comfortable, single, clear, normal binocular vision at all distances and directions of gaze.


title: Strabismus

text: Whereas amblyopia (lazy eye), if minor and detected early, can often be corrected with use of an eye patch on the dominant eye or vision therapy, the use of eye patches is unlikely to change the angle of strabismus.


title: Strabismus

text: In cases of accommodative esotropia, the eyes turn inward due to the effort of focusing far-sighted eyes, and the treatment of this type of strabismus necessarily involves refractive correction, which is usually done via corrective glasses or contact lenses, and in these cases surgical alignment is considered only if such correction does not resolve the eye turn.


title: Strabismus

text: In case of strong anisometropia, contact lenses may be preferable to spectacles because they avoid the problem of visual disparities due to size differences (aniseikonia) which is otherwise caused by spectacles in which the refractive power is very different for the two eyes. In a few cases of strabismic children with anisometropic amblyopia, a balancing of the refractive error eyes via refractive surgery has been performed before strabismus surgery was undertaken.


title: Strabismus

text: Early treatment of strabismus when the person is a baby may reduce the chance of developing amblyopia and depth perception problems. However, a review of randomized controlled trials concluded that the use of corrective glasses to prevent strabismus is not supported by existing research. Most children eventually recover from amblyopia if they have had the benefit of patches and corrective glasses. Amblyopia has long been considered to remain permanent if not treated within a critical period, namely before the age of about seven years; however, recent discoveries give reason to challenge this view and to adapt the earlier notion of a critical period to account for stereopsis recovery in adults.


title: Strabismus

text: Eyes that remain misaligned can still develop visual problems. Although not a cure for strabismus, prism lenses can also be used to provide some temporary comfort and to prevent double vision from occurring.


title: Strabismus

text: Glasses affect the position by changing the person's reaction to focusing. Prisms change the way light, and therefore images, strike the eye, simulating a change in the eye position.


title: Strabismus

text: Strabismus surgery does not remove the need for a child to wear glasses. Currently it is unknown whether there are any differences for completing strabismus surgery before or after amblyopia therapy in children.


title: Strabismus

text: Strabismus surgery attempts to align the eyes by shortening, lengthening, or changing the position of one or more of the extraocular eye muscles. The procedure can typically be performed in about an hour, and requires about six to eight weeks for recovery. Adjustable sutures may be used to permit refinement of the eye alignment in the early postoperative period. It is unclear if there are differences between adjustable versus non-adjustable sutures as it has not been sufficiently studied. An alternative to the classical procedure is minimally invasive strabismus surgery (MISS) that uses smaller incisions than usual.


title: Strabismus

text: Medication is used for strabismus in certain circumstances. In 1989, the US FDA approved botulinum toxin therapy for strabismus in people over 12 years old. Most commonly used in adults, the technique is also used for treating children, in particular children affected by infantile esotropia. The toxin is injected in the stronger muscle, causing temporary and partial paralysis. The treatment may need to be repeated three to four months later once the paralysis wears off. Common side effects are double vision, droopy eyelid, overcorrection, and no effect. The side effects typically resolve also within three to four months. Botulinum toxin therapy has been reported to be similarly successful as strabismus surgery for people with binocular vision and less successful than surgery for those who have no binocular vision.


title: Strabismus

text: When strabismus is congenital or develops in infancy, it can cause amblyopia, in which the brain ignores input from the deviated eye. Even with therapy for amblyopia, stereoblindness may occur. The appearance of strabismus may also be a cosmetic problem. One study reported 85% of adult with strabismus "reported that they had problems with work, school, and sports because of their strabismus." The same study also reported 70% said strabismus "had a negative effect on their self-image." A second operation is sometimes required to straighten the eyes.


title: Strabismus

text: Siamese cats and related breeds are prone to having crossed eyes. Research suggests this is a behavioral compensation for developmental abnormalities in the routing of nerves in the optic chiasm.


title: Strabismus

text: Strabismus may also occur in dogs, most often due to imbalanced muscle tone of the muscles surrounding the eye. Some breeds such as the Shar Pei are genetically predisposed to the condition. Treatment may involve surgery or therapy to strengthen the muscles.


title: Urmila Matondkar

text: Urmila Matondkar (born 4 February 1974) is an Indian actress and politician. Known for her work primarily in Hindi films, in addition to Telugu, Malayalam, Marathi and Tamil films, she has received numerous accolades, including the Filmfare Award and the Nandi Award. Having established a distinctive on-screen persona, she is known for her style statements and dancing skills.


title: Urmila Matondkar

text: After making her debut as a child in the 1977 film "Karm", Matondkar gained wide recognition with "Masoom" (1983), following which she appeared in few other films. Her first lead role came with the Malayalam film "Chanakyan" (1989), and her subsequent lead role in Hindi cinema with "Narsimha" (1991), both of which were commercial successes.


title: Urmila Matondkar

text: After a brief setback, Matondkar established herself as a leading actress with the romance "Rangeela" (1995), the drama "Judaai" (1997), the crime film "Satya" (1998), the romantic comedy "Khoobsurat" (1999), and the thriller "Jungle" (2000). She also achieved success in Telugu and Tamil cinema with starring roles in "Antham" (1992), "Gaayam" (1993), "Indian" (1996) and "Anaganaga Oka Roju" (1997). Matondkar garnered critical recognition for portraying a range of intense characters in several psychological thrillers and horror films, including a serial killer in "Kaun" (1999), an obsessive lover in "Pyaar Tune Kya Kiya" (2001), a possessed woman in "Bhoot" (2003) and a violent avenger in "Ek Hasina Thi" (2004). During these years, she collaborated with independent filmmakers in art-house cinema, including the dramas "Tehzeeb" (2003), "Pinjar" (2003), "Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Mara" (2005), "Bas Ek Pal" (2006) and the Marathi film "Ajoba" (2014).


title: Urmila Matondkar

text: In addition to acting in films, Matondkar is involved with several humanitarian causes and is vocal about issues faced by women and children. She has participated in concert tours and stage shows, and featured as a talent judge for various dance reality shows, including "Jhalak Dikhhla Jaa" (2007) and "DID Super Moms" (2022).


title: Urmila Matondkar

text: to Shrikant and Sunita Matondkar in present-day Mumbai in a Hindu Maharashtrian family. She studied at DG Ruparel College, Mumbai. She married Kashmir based businessman and model Mohsin Akhtar Mir on 3 March 2016.


title: Urmila Matondkar

text: Matondkar made her film debut as a child artiste in B.R. Chopra's "Karm" (1977). Subsequently, she featured in Shreeram Lagoo's Marathi film "Zaakol" (1980), Shyam Benegal's crime "Kalyug" (1980), Shekhar Kapur's drama "Masoom" (1983), Praveen Bhatt's "Bhavna" (1984), K. Viswanath's "Sur Sangam" (1985), Rahul Rawail's "Dacait" (1987) and Kalpataru's "Bade Ghar Ki Beti" (1989) as a child star.


title: Urmila Matondkar

text: She made her debut as an adult in 1989, with T. K. Rajeev Kumar's Malayalam blockbuster "Chanakyan", opposite Kamal Haasan. Her Bollywood adult debut came with N. Chandra's 1991 action drama "Narsimha". Upon release, the film emerged a commercial success. Matondkar played the role of Meenu S. Singh, the rebellious daughter of Baapji (played by Om Puri), a goon lord and capitalist of the city. She next starred in Rajiv Mehra's ghost comedy "Chamatkar", alongside Shah Rukh Khan (1992). Her first Telugu film came with the action-crime "Antham", and its Hindi bilingual "Drohi" opposite Nagarjuna. She played Bhavna, an ornithologist who is in love with Nagarjuna's character. Upon release, the film received positive reviews from critics. The film marked first of her many collaborations with director Ram Gopal Verma. In 1993, Matondkar appeared in "Shreemaan Aashique" opposite Rishi Kapoor and "Bedardi" opposite Ajay Devgn— both these films failed critically and commercially. Varma's Telugu political thriller "Gaayam" (1993) was her next release. The film garnered positive reviews, with six state Nandi Awards, and emerged a "Super Hit" at the box office. Matondkar's performance earned her a Nandi Award for Best Supporting Actress.


title: Urmila Matondkar

text: She gained wider public recognition with the 1994 hit romantic drama "Aa Gale Lag Ja", starring alongside Jugal Hansraj.


title: Urmila Matondkar

text: In 1995, Matondkar established herself as a leading actress of contemporary Hindi cinema by featuring in Varma's musical romance "Rangeela", one of the top-grossing productions of the year. Co-starring Aamir Khan and Jackie Shroff, the film emerged as a blockbuster with a gross of 334 million. Matondkar played Mili Joshi, an effervescent fun-loving friend of a street-toughened orphan, who ambitions of becoming an actress. At the 41st Filmfare Awards, "Rangeela" was nominated for 12 awards including a first Best Actress nomination for Matondkar. The film was screened at the International Film Festival of India.


title: Urmila Matondkar

text: In the same year, she also starred alongside Mohanlal in the Malayalam action "Thacholi Varghese Chekavar". She played Maya, the only witness in a homicide who is kept under house arrest by her parents.


title: Urmila Matondkar

text: In 1996, she played Sapna, the daughter of an RTO official in S. Shankar's "Indian" (1996), which marked her first Tamil film. It was also dubbed and released in Hindi under the title "Hindustani". Featuring Kamal Haasan in dual roles alongside Matondkar and Manisha Koirala, it was the most expensive Indian film at that time, with a budget of 150 million. Nirupama Subramanian of "India Today" felt the film was a commercial potboiler and wrote, ""Indian" has dances, foot-tapping melodies by A. R. Rahman and two pretty women, Manisha Koirala and Urmila Matondkar". Both "Indian" and "Hindustani" were commercial successes. The film was India's official entry for the Best Foreign Language Film for the Academy Awards in 1996, but was not nominated.


title: Urmila Matondkar

text: Matondkar's first release of 1997 was Raj Kanwar's melodrama "Judaai". A remake of the 1994 Telugu film "Shubhalagnam", it tells the story of Kajal (played by Sridevi), lured by wealth who asks her husband, Raj (played by Anil Kapoor), an honest engineer, to marry Janhvi (played by Matondkar), the rich daughter of his boss. "The Indian Express" asserted that "it is Urmila Matondkar who comes out with flying colours". The film emerged as a commercial success and her performance fetched her a Filmfare Best Supporting Actress Award nomination. Her next releases were the crime comedy "Daud" alongside Sanjay Dutt, the romantic drama "Mere Sapno Ki Rani" alongside Sanjay Kapoor and the action romance "Aflatoon" alongside Akshay Kumar. All these films underperformed at the box-office. She next reunited with Varma for her third Telugu release, the road movie "Anaganaga Oka Roju", starring alongside J. D. Chakravarthy. The film involves the comic travails of a couple eloping, on the run from their parents who get entangled as murder suspects of a politician, in a police and political mafia road hunt for an incriminating audio tape. The film received positive reviews and emerged as a box office hit.


title: Urmila Matondkar

text: Her next release was the crime "Satya", for which she received another Filmfare Best Actress nomination. The film was received favourably by critics and was a huge hit at the box office, solidifying Matondkar's position as a leading lady of Bollywood. "Satya" was on CNN-IBN's 2013 list of the 100 greatest Indian films of all time, in the "100 Filmfare Days" series and on the "70 iconic movies of independent India" list. It was mentioned in Rachel Dwyer's "100 Bollywood Films" (where she called it a "masterpiece"), and in critic and author Shubhra Gupta's "50 Films That Changed Bollywood, 1995-2015".


title: Urmila Matondkar

text: In 1999, Matondkar had six film releases; four of them − "Jaanam Samjha Karo", "Hum Tum Pe Marte Hain", "Mast" and "Dillagi" − were commercial failures. However, Matondkar's performances were generally well received by critics, (nn a review for Jaanam Samjha Karo, Rediff stating, "Urmila is just about the only heroine who can give Karisma a run for her money when it comes to pelvic thrusts").


title: Urmila Matondkar

text: Her first hit that year was Varma's psychological horror thriller "Kaun", opposite Manoj Bajpayee, where she played a nameless character. Khalid Mohamed of "The Times of India" (who would later cast her in "Tehzeeb") wrote, "She rivets the viewer's interest, carrying off entire reels on her shoulders, through a gamut of quicksilver facial expressions. Vulnerable and baffled, she is utterly believable as the traumatised girl-next-door".


title: Urmila Matondkar

text: Matondkar next played the love interest of Sanjay Dutt's character in the action comedy "Khoobsurat". It emerged as a box-office hit.


title: Urmila Matondkar

text: During the 2000s, Matondkar revealed strong, dramatic and psychological features in her roles, and delivered a number of critically acclaimed performances. In 2000, Matondkar re-united with Varma for the action "Jungle", alongside Fardeen Khan and Sunil Shetty. She played Anu, who is hostaged by the chief of bandits, when he starts liking her. Taran Adarsh of Bollywood Hungama wrote, "Urmila Matondkar is at ease in a role that gives her ample scope to showcase her talent. Her scenes with Durga can easily be singled out, for they have been shot with brilliance." The film was both critically and commercially successful. She next starred opposite Govinda in David Dhawan's romantic comedy "Kunwara". The film underperformed at the box office, with a grossing of .


title: Urmila Matondkar

text: The next year, Matondkar portrayed Ria, an obsessed lover, in Rajat Mukherjee's romantic thriller "Pyaar Tune Kya Kiya", a film which received critical acclaim. Her performance was highly acclaimed and several critics noted her for showing great emotional range and depth. Taran Adarsh of Bollywood Hungama, in a positive review wrote, "the 'actual hero' of the film is definitely Urmila Matondkar, who will walk away with all laurels at the end of the day. Her career-best performance, she oozes intensity, love, hate, relentlessness and obsessive behaviour with perfection. And despite the fact that her character gets nuttier as the movie tags along, it is to Urmila's credit that we are able to feel for her pathetic persona." Planetbollywood.com described Matondkar as: "The star of the show is Urmila who is simply mind blowing in this film. The film is sure to get her nominated for best actress or even in some cases best villain. Not only does she look amazing, but she acts so well it will leave you speechless. If you hate everything else in the film, her performance will surely win you over! Her last two scenes in the film are simply breath taking. Ladies and gentlemen stand up and applaud this fantastic performance!" The film emerged successful at the box office with gross earnings of . Matondkar received various "Best Villain" nominations for her performance, including a Filmfare Award for Best Performance in a Negative Role nomination.


title: Urmila Matondkar

text: In 2002, Matondkar appeared alongside an ensemble cast (Waheeda Rehman, Anil Kapoor, Fardeen Khan, Mahima Chaudhary, Abhishek Bachchan and Tara Sharma), in the drama "Om Jai Jagadish". She played the role of Neetu, the love interest of the protagonist (played by Fardeen Khan). The film failed commercially. Anees Bazmee's psychological thriller "Deewangee" was her next release. She played Sargam, a popular singer, who is the object of conflict between the protagonist and antagonist. Co-starring Ajay Devgan and Akshaye Khanna, the film was well received by critics and was moderately successful at the box office. "Deepa Gumaste", writing for Rediff, praised the performances of the three leads and wrote: "As usual, the heroine has little to do apart from looking cute in the first half and scared in the second. It is another matter that she is supposed to be the object of the film's conflict. For what it is worth, Urmila Matondkar executes her part well".


title: Urmila Matondkar

text: Her first release of 2003 was the supernatural horror "Bhoot". She played Swati, a ghost-possessed woman. Taran Adarsh wrote praised her performance and wrote: "...the film clearly belongs to Urmila Matondkar all the way. To state that she is excellent would be doing gross injustice to her work. Sequences when she is possessed are simply astounding. If this performance doesn't deserve an award, no other performance should. It beats all competition hollow". Khalid Mohamed wrote, "Matondkar is consistently excellent - controlled and persuasively vulnerable – as the beleaguered wife, evoking your concern and empathy. She's the major triumph of Bhoot actually". She received her first Filmfare Award under the Best Actress (Critics' Choice) as well as various "Best Actress" awards at different award ceremonies, including Star Screen Awards, Zee Cine Awards and Bollywood Movie Awards. She received another Filmfare Award for Best Actress nomination and also received the national honour "Rajiv Gandhi Award" for the work in the film, also recognising her achievements in Bollywood. The film became successful at the box office with gross earnings of .


title: Urmila Matondkar

text: She achieved further critical acclaim for her portrayal of the title role of a girl in a strained relationship with her mother, in Khalid Mohammed's crime drama "Tehzeeb" (2003). "Rediff" complimented her by stating, "Urmila as the emotionally scarred Tehzeeb, who is uncomfortable expressing her feelings even to her husband, has done a commendable job. The only person she expresses her love to is her mentally challenged sister."


title: Urmila Matondkar

text: She next played the role of Puro, a North Indian girl who leads a happy life but her dreams of a happy future are shattered when, one evening, she is kidnapped by Bajpayee's character, in the background of the 1947 India partition in the critically acclaimed "Pinjar" (2003). Derek Elley of Variety reviewed the film commenting, "A handsomely shot drama centered on a Hindu woman's travails during the 1947 Partition, "Pinjar" ranks as one of the better Bollywood treatments of this still hot-button issue. Good performances, especially by lead actress Urmila Matondkar and by Manoj Bajpai as her Muslim partner, compensate for a slightly wobbly structure".


title: Urmila Matondkar

text: In 2004, Matondkar starred in the thriller "Ek Hasina Thi". The film (which marked the debut of Sriram Raghavan) tells the story of a Sarika Vartak, a deceived woman, played by Matondkar, who is jailed and arrested for having links with the underworld, because of her lover, played by Khan, and later flees from prison to seek revenge on him. Upon release, the film was positively received by critics, with Matondkar's performance earning praise. "The Deccan Herald" commented: "An author-backed role ensures that Urmila gets to do everything just right. Whether it's kicking a bully into shape in the dreary prison of which she's an inmate or whether it's making nice with Karan while plotting his ruin, she's a total treat. She carries off the transition from naive to knowing effortlessly. Seductive and steely, she's quite explosive." The film was a box office success. For her performance, Matondkar received nominations at the Filmfare, Screen, Zee Cine and IIFA ceremonies. The film was premiered at the New York Asian Film Festival.


title: Urmila Matondkar

text: In 2005, she played the title role in the horror "Naina". The film tells the story of Matondkar's character who after receiving an eye transplant, realises that she can see into the supernatural world. The film was premiered in the Marché du Film section at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival. She next starred as Trisha Chaudhary, a caring daughter of Professor Uttam Chaudhary, played by Anupam Kher, in Jahnu Barua's art drama "Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Mara". The film was well received by critics, with Rediff stating, "Her credibility as a versatile actress is further established in her reserved albeit realistic delivery of emotions." Matondkar won her second Bollywood Movie Award for Best Actress. In 2006, she appeared in Pankaj Parashar's romance "" with Ashmit Patel and Dimple Kapadia. The film was not well received by critics, with "Raja Sen" commenting: "And then there's Urmila. Let's start with the good. She looks great, refreshingly beautiful and striking. That's about it. This is an actress who has worked hard to earn respectability, but this role, like the film itself, suffers from inconsistency". Her next release was Onir's "Bas Ek Pal" (2006).


title: Urmila Matondkar

text: Her next release was the thriller "Karzzzz" (2008), a remake of "Karz" (1980), alongside Himesh Reshammiya. The film was a major critical and commercial failure, however, Matondkar was praised for her portrayal and adding her own flavour to the role of Kamini. The same year, she re-united with Sanjay Dutt for EMI. In 2012, she provided her voice to the role of Begum in the computer-animated comedy "Delhi Safari".


title: Urmila Matondkar

text: Matondkar made her Marathi film debut with "Ajoba" in 2014. She portrayed Purva Rao, a wildlife activist in search of leopards. Daily News and Analysis wrote, "..this one's another jewel in her crown. She portrays Purva with a mild aggressive and rebellious streak. But all of these are an undercurrent to Purva's actions." After a four-year hiatus, Matondkar made a special appearance in a song of the dark comedy "Blackmail" (2018).


title: Urmila Matondkar

text: In addition to her acting career, Matondkar has participated in several stage shows and televised award ceremonies.


title: Urmila Matondkar

text: In 2007, she lent her voice for Asha Bhonsle's album "Asha and Friends Vol 1", where she performed with Bhonsle for a duet song "Mehbooba Dilruba". Later that year, she featured as a talent judge for the second season of Sony Entertainment's dance reality show "Jhalak Dikhhla Jaa" alongside Jeetendra and Shiamak Davar. She described her experience of judging "Jhalak Dikhhla Jaa" by saying, "I'm ecstatic about being able to be part of this show. I was facing the participants and audience for the first time. There were no written lines, no cues, no second chances. Either it worked or it didn't work for you. It was a concept that I liked."


title: Urmila Matondkar

text: In 2011, she co-judged Colors' dance reality show "Chak Dhoom Dhoom", along with Javed Jaffrey and Terence Lewis and in 2012, she featured as one of the jury of Zee Marathi's "Dance Maharashtra Dance", where the dancers from Maharashtra demonstrated their dancing prowess through different dance forms.


title: Urmila Matondkar

text: During her years in the film industry, Matondkar has been involved in different charitable organisations and has particularly supported women's causes in India. In February 2013, Matondkar along with Parineeti Chopra, walked for Manish Malhotra in London, England, to support the Angeli Foundation – a charity that works to empower the Girl Child in India. She has walked the runway for designers such as Manish Malhotra and Rohit Verma.


title: Urmila Matondkar

text: Matondkar joined the Indian National Congress on 27 March 2019. She contested from Mumbai North constituency in the 2019 Lok Sabha Election, but lost. On 10 September 2019, she resigned from the party, citing petty internal politics. On 1 December 2020, she joined Shiv Sena in presence of party president Uddhav Thackeray. Shiv Sena hoped to add a nationally recognised face and voice, well conversant in Marathi, Hindi as well as English, to represent the party.


title: Urmila Matondkar

text: Matondkar has been described by critics as one of the most talented actresses and has been praised for her dancing skills. In 2016, film critic Subhash K. Jha praised her work.


title: Urmila Matondkar

text: Film critic Sukanya Verma has described Matondkar as "a thinking actress who performs spontaneously." She further added,"..It is her charismatic image that stays with the audience. She is an actress with a lot of style and a fair amount of substance." Director Ram Gopal Varma, describing her as someone who impacted him, commented, "I was mesmerised by Urmila's beauty -- from her face to her figure... everything about her was just divine...One of my primary motives in making Rangeela was to capture Urmila's beauty eternally on camera and to make it a benchmark for sex symbols." Saurav Bhanot of Scoop Whoop wrote, "Breaking Bollywood stereotypes of how heroines should be on-screen, Urmila was always ahead of her times. With Rangeela, Urmila single-handedly redefined the 90s Bollywood heroine." In an interview with "Rediff", Matondkar described her approach to acting:


title: Urmila Matondkar

text: I have always tried to make life interesting for myself by doing different roles that connect mainstream cinema with its offbeat counterpart. I guess I have been daring and lucky with my roles. I want to do every kind of role with a reasonable amount of panache. I want to be a fair combination of style and substance.


title: Urmila Matondkar

text: In 2003, following the success of "Bhoot", "Pinjar" and "Tehzeeb", Matondkar featured in Rediff's annual Top Bollywood actresses listing. Planetbollywood.com described Matondkar as "a force to reckon with in the industry".


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (often abridged as Last Week Tonight) is an American late-night talk and news satire television program hosted by comedian John Oliver. The half-hour-long show premiered in April 2014 on HBO. "Last Week Tonight" shares some similarities with Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" (where Oliver was previously featured as a correspondent and fill-in host), as the show takes a satirical look at news, politics and current events, but on a weekly basis and primarily from a liberal bent.


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: Oliver's initial contract with HBO was for two years with an option for extension. In September 2020, HBO announced that the show had been renewed for three additional seasons of 30 episodes each, keeping the show on the air through 2023. The show's ninth season premiered on February 20, 2022.


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: Oliver described his preparations for the show to an interviewer for "The Wire": "... I basically have to watch everything. The only thing I kind of watch for pleasure is Fareed Zakaria's show on Sundays ... That and "60 Minutes" I watch for pleasure, or maybe "Frontline" ... I have a TV on in my office all the time and I'll generally flick around on that from CNN, Fox, MSNBC, Bloomberg, CNBC, Al Jazeera ... I'm watching with a certain thing in mind and that is how to see a story told badly."


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: If something happens on a Monday, realistically all the meat is going to be picked off that bone by the time it gets to us — there's probably barely a point in doing it ... I think we'll be attracted to some extent by stories that are off the grid ... Our show may end up skewing more international in terms of stories.


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: Tim Carvell, executive producer of "Last Week Tonight", explained in an interview how the cast and crew deal with a half hour of Oliver speaking without any commercial breaks.


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: Carvell also revealed that HBO gave them freedom in choosing guests for the show, advising them not to feel obligated to feature celebrities. When asked by an interviewer about "correspondents" such as those featured on "The Daily Show", Oliver replied, "we're not going to be a parody news show, so no people pretending to be journalists."


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: After the fifth episode of season 7, Oliver stated that the studio and the show's offices were shut down after employees tested positive for COVID-19 and that the show would go on temporary hiatus. The show returned on March 29, 2020, being filmed in Oliver's home with no studio audience due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and produced largely by virtual communication. The show remained there until it resumed filming, in a new studio, in September 2021.


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: Oliver has stated that he has "full creative freedom, including free rein to criticize corporations", and frequently pokes fun at HBO's (now former) parent company AT&T.


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: Unlike "The Daily Show", which followed recent news, Oliver tends to explore one concept in depth. The show is taped in front of a studio audience, and HBO offers a limited number of free tickets to attend each week's "Last Week Tonight" taping. Taping takes place on Sunday at 7pm.


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: The show's theme starts off every episode containing images relating to it or the world at large with satirical captions written in dog Latin (e.g., a photo of a gun labelled ""deus ex machina"", a picture of Vladimir Putin labelled ""POTUS Operandi"", a photo of Oliver himself labelled ""hostus mostus""). Each episode contains a small handful of shorter segments, and then one main segment. While the short segments almost always relate to recent news, the episode's main segment usually covers in length and detail a political issue, even if that issue did not have news media attention during the preceding week. On occasion, the short segments are omitted and the main segment takes up the entirety of the episode. Some of the episodes will follow up the main segment with another video compilation or news story. Oliver's speech is broken up with video compilations of recent news clips, or recurring segments, into which Oliver segues with the slogan, "And now, this." Oliver has also ended some segments with mock trailers for fictional TV shows or commercials that satirize the subject of his speech.


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: Oliver injects humor into his presentation, including satirical analogies, and allusions to popular culture and celebrities. The show includes a panel in the upper-left corner that frequently displays a photo or graphic for that accompanies subject at hand, as a comedic aid. A full-screen graphic will show and play a video clip (such as excerpts from news show or documentaries) when Oliver is citing it. He often coins hashtags related to his segment for use in social media, some of which go viral.


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: A recurring element of the show is Oliver's use of mascots. The mascots used in the show include Jeff the Diseased Lung in a Cowboy Hat, Hoots the NSA Owl, Taryn the Tinder Chicken, and the Last Week Tonight puppets. Oliver told Vulture in February 2019 that "[Executive producer] Tim Carvell and I — I think we’ve always seen the show as our attempt to make The Muppet Show and failing to do so. But occasionally, just occasionally, you get the kind of Muppet Show adoration in the ludicrous mascots."


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: The show frequently features one or more celebrity guests in its segments to help Oliver better get his point on the week's topic across. Guests have featured in many different capacities including giving monologues directly to camera, being interviewed by Oliver, playing musical numbers, participating in comedic skits with or without Oliver, or starring in fictitious parody PSAs. On the show, guests are sometimes seen in the Last Week Tonight studio itself doing their part during the show's main taping, while at other times they are seen in video clips that were pre-recorded at a different location and later included in the show. Oliver often interviews personalities who were directly involved in or impacted by the issues being discussed in the show to get their first-hand experiences and viewpoints on the issue. Some of the famous personalities Oliver has interviewed include Edward Snowden, the 14th Dalai Lama, Professor Anita Hill, Stephen Hawking, and Monica Lewinsky.


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: While broadly within the categories of political satire and late-night talk shows, Last Week Tonight has taken a more specific approach to deeper dives into systemic issues which intend to illustrate both the wider socio-political context and the complex interconnections and embeddedness of public policies in social outcomes.


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver" episode clips can be seen internationally on YouTube. It is broadcast on premium channel HBO Canada that is simulcast with HBO in the U.S.; around the same time it is shown on the international HBO channels. It airs in Australia on The Comedy Channel hours after the U.S. airing and airs in New Zealand on SoHo. In the United Kingdom and Ireland, it is broadcast on Mondays on Sky Comedy. In Belgium, it is broadcast on Thursdays by the Telenet cable-only channel PRIME Series. It airs in South Africa on M-Net and in Portugal on RTP3. In India, the show is streamed on Disney+ Hotstar. In Greece, the show airs on Cosmote TV’s Cosmote Series HD.


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: Oliver often makes use of joke hashtags to facilitate the viral spread of his videos on Twitter and Facebook, as with the hashtag #NotMyChristian, which he used in 2014 to complain about the casting of actor Jamie Dornan as Christian Grey in the feature film adaptation of "Fifty Shades of Grey". The hashtag became a recurring punchline on the show, mentioned in both serious stories and casual segues.


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: "Last Week Tonight" has a YouTube channel where videos are intermittently (depending on series) added after a show has aired. Most of the videos are of the main segment from each episode. Some extended clips are also available on the show's YouTube channel, as are "Web Exclusives" that are produced solely for the channel, such as a July 2016 video in which Oliver responded to negative comments left on the channel itself.


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: A YouTube video of a segment on the show supporting the UK remaining in the EU was found to be the single most shared video clip on Twitter during the run-up to the 2016 EU membership referendum.


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: The show's production has also created content specifically for fan use. For the March 19, 2017, episode, which reported on Bolivia's growing coalition of workers clad in zebra suits to educate civilians about traffic laws, the show's production recorded 23 minutes of a person in a zebra costume dancing and gesticulating before a green screen so that viewers could edit it into other videos for humorous effect. A similar video called "Real Animals, Fake Paws" for use in reenacting U.S. Supreme Court cases was released after the October 19, 2014, episode where dogs were used instead of justices to make listening to oral court cases more amusing to the general public and to increase interest in the subject.


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: By April 2015, the channel had attained over a million subscribers. That number had risen to 3.6 million by July 2016, and over 5 million by May 2017. , the channel had over 8.5 million subscribers and more than 3.1 billion views.


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: Oliver's debut show garnered 1.11 million viewers. The number of viewers online, through websites such as YouTube showing extended clips of different segments, have steadily climbed into multiple millions. The show's YouTube channel also features Web Exclusives which are occasionally posted when the main show is taking a week off. Across the TV airings, DVR, on-demand and HBO Go, "Last Week Tonight" averaged 4.1 million weekly viewers in its first season.


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: "Last Week Tonight" has received widespread critical acclaim. Matthew Jacobs of "The Huffington Post" named Oliver's program as 2014's best television show, writing "the year's most surprising contribution to television is a show that bucked conventional formats, left us buzzing and paved the way for a burgeoning dynasty. "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver" is 2014's crowning achievement."


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: Hank Stuever of "The Washington Post" compared Oliver's program with "The Daily Show" several times in his review of Oliver's debut:


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: Another scathing, stick-it-to-'em critique of American mass media and politics shellacked in satire and delivered by a funny if almost off-puttingly incredulous man with a British accent ... Exactly like "The Daily Show", the goal is to make elected and appointed officials, as well as just about any corporate enterprise, look foolish and inept while slyly culling together television news clips that make the media look equally inept at covering such evident truths.


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: James Poniewozik of "Time" similarly compared "Last Week" with "The Daily Show", but also wrote that the "full half-hour gives Oliver the room to do more," and praised Oliver's "sharper tone and his globalist, English-outsider perspective," as well as his "genuine passion over his subjects." Poniewozik wrote that Oliver's debut was "a funny, confident start."


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: The "Entertainment Weekly" review began by ringing the same changes: "The fear with "Last Week Tonight" is that it's "The Daily Show" except once a week — a staggered timeline that would rob the basic news-punning format of its intrinsic topical punch ... The first episode of his HBO series didn't stray far from the [Jon] Stewart mothership, stylistically ..." However, the reviewer, Darren Franich, liked that Oliver has "a half-hour of television that is simultaneously tighter and more ambitious, that the extra production time leads to sharper gags but also the ability to present more context" and thought that the debut had "plenty of funny throwaway lines." Franich appreciated Oliver's coverage of the 2014 Indian election, which the American press was largely ignoring, and, like Poniewozik, praised Oliver's "passion." Franich concluded that "Last Week Tonight" "suggested the sharpest possible version of its inspiration" and that it "should feel like an experiment" but "felt almost fully formed."


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: David Haglund of "Slate" was ambivalent, writing that the show is "obviously a work in progress" and that one segment "felt like misplaced overkill," but also that it is "good use of a weekly show, and it was funny to boot." Gawker's Jordan Sargent claimed "Last Week Tonight" was "the new "Daily Show"," while simultaneously criticizing the "Daily Show" for abandoning those "who have moved on from caring about Fox [News] and Republicans."


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: A number of commentators from mainstream media outlets, including "The New York Times", "The Huffington Post", "Time", and Associated Press, have described Oliver's style of reporting as journalism or even investigative journalism. Oliver himself disagrees, stating that "it's not journalism, it's comedy—it's comedy first, and it's comedy second."


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: According to a document obtained by "Vice", the military government of Thailand listed Oliver as "undermining the royal institution" for calling Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn a "buffoon" and an "idiot."


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: During the June 17, 2018, episode, Oliver spoke at length about Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, in part criticizing his censorship of Chinese media, his dictatorship and consolidation of power. Both "John Oliver" and "Last Week Tonight" were blocked from Chinese social media platform Sina Weibo immediately following the segment. The HBO website and content from the network were also blocked, although "Last Week Tonight" had already been excluded from HBO Asia.


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: On several occasions, show segments on major societal issues, such as the "Chickens" or "Bail" segments, were soon followed by real-world change and action on said issues by the public, policymakers and/or other institutions. Several media outlets, noticing this pattern, suggested that attention from the show had instigated these changes, going so far as to dub the phenomenon the "John Oliver Effect".


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: A June 2014 segment about net neutrality in the United States was thought to spur over 45,000 comments on the Federal Communications Commission's electronic filing page about a net neutrality proposal that, if implemented, would have priority "lanes" for certain internet traffic. The FCC also received an extra 300,000 comments in an email inbox designated specifically for the proposal. It was thought that Oliver's segment had a major role in the FCC's ultimate reversal of stance on that proposal, with the FCC instead implementing net-neutrality rules that prohibited priority "lanes". A sequel in 2017 inspired over 150,000 comments on a subsequent proposal to scrap the new net neutrality rules.


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: In a segment about public defenders and how some offices are extremely underfunded, the New Orleans Public Defense office's crowdfunding efforts to improve their conditions were featured. In the days following the episode's broadcast, thousands of dollars were donated to the office by the show's fans, helping them reach their goal four days after the show aired.


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: Oliver himself does not believe the effect to be real and has openly ridiculed the idea on the show, even calling the term "completely meaningless".


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: "Tobacco" is a segment about the tobacco industry, which aired on February 15, 2015, as part of the second episode of the second season. During the eighteen-minute segment, Oliver discusses tobacco industry trends and practices. He also introduces Jeff the Diseased Lung, a mascot he created for the American global cigarette and tobacco company Philip Morris International, the makers of Marlboro brand of cigarettes. The anthropomorphic diseased lung, who smokes and coughs, has been compared to Joe Camel and the Marlboro Man. Oliver and his team promoted the cartoon character by sending shirts with Jeff's image to Togo and displaying billboards in Uruguay, and by encouraging use of the hashtag #JeffWeCan, which trended on Twitter following the broadcast.


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: The segment received widespread media coverage, with several outlets praising Oliver's ability to launch successful marketing campaigns and change perceptions about smoking through the creation of the mascot. The mascot later made an appearance at a protest organized by the "Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids" in New York City in May 2015.


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: Philip Morris International issued a response to the segment, stating that it included "many mischaracterizations" of the company.


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: In August 2015, after delivering his "Televangelists" segment, Oliver hired a professional tax lawyer to set up a church called Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption as a legal entity. He did this partly as a way to demonstrate how "disturbingly easy" it is, in terms of paperwork, to set up a tax-exempt religious organization as viewed by the Internal Revenue Service. As Oliver explained, the requirements needed to be defined as a "church" are quite broad. Since regulatory guidelines require an established location for a church, Oliver chose his studio location in New York City as its official location, although he registered the nonprofit organization in the state of Texas. Oliver's "megachurch" had a toll-free phone number which allowed callers to donate to the church, and said that any money collected would be redistributed to the charitable relief organization Doctors Without Borders. Oliver announced the formation of his church on the episode of the show that aired on August 16, 2015.


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: Matt Wilstein, writing for "Mediaite", saw Oliver's stunt as being along the same lines as comedian Stephen Colbert's setting up of a 501(c)(4) organization—Colbert Super PAC—as a way to "test the absurd limits of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision"; Oliver's megachurch, in contrast, is a way to test whether the IRS might view his "megachurch" as a tax-exempt organization. Steve Thorngate, writing in "The Christian Century", suggested that the question of the religious exemption from taxation was more difficult and nuanced than Oliver portrayed, and not a simple matter of government regulation, describing Oliver's pivot to IRS policy as "unhelpful." However, Thorngate agreed that Oliver's exposure and criticism of "manipulative sleazeballs" who "fleece the faithful" is "spot-on". Leonardo Blair, writing for "Christian Post", described Oliver's segment as a "brutal takedown" of televangelists and churches which preach "the prosperity gospel," a message that dupes people into thinking that cash donations will solve medical or financial problems, while in fact the donations go to the personal aggrandizement of televangelists who buy expensive jets or large mansions.


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: A week later, on the following episode, Oliver devoted a short segment to the donations the church had received, which included money from around the world. Oliver said he had received "thousands of envelopes with thousands of dollars" from donors. Displayed were several US Post Office containers full of mail. Oliver told viewers that the more money they sent in, the more "blessings" would be returned to them, adding that "that is still something I'm — amazingly — legally allowed to say."


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: Oliver announced that the Church would be shutting down during his show on September 13, 2015. All monetary donations have been forwarded to Doctors Without Borders.


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: "Donald Trump" is a segment discussing American businessman Donald Trump. It aired on February 28, 2016, as part of the third episode of the third season. During the 22-minute segment, Oliver discusses Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and his long career in business. He also reveals that the Trump family name was changed at one point from the ancestral name 'Drumpf'. Although the changing of names was once a common practice among many non-English immigrants to the United States, the segment popularized the term "Donald Drumpf" and started a campaign urging viewers to "Make Donald Drumpf Again," a play on Trump's own campaign slogan, "Make America Great Again." The segment garnered more than 85 million views on Facebook and YouTube combined which, an HBO spokesman has said, "is a record for any piece of HBO content." Throughout the 2016 presidential election and following Trump's inauguration, Oliver made additional segments regarding Trump.


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: "Debt Buyers" is a segment discussing the business and questionable practice of debt buyers. It aired on June 5, 2016, as part of the fourteenth episode of the third season. Oliver announced he had purchased nearly $15 million in medical debt that belonged to 9,000 debtors. He did this through a company he had created, called "Central Asset Recovery Professionals Inc." (CARP), which he described as being "for the bottom-feeding fish." Oliver stated that it was "pretty clear by now [that] debt buying is a grimy business, and badly needs more oversight" and went to point out that starting such a business was "disturbingly easy." It cost him $50 to register the business in Mississippi, while it cost less than $60,000 to purchase almost $15 million in bad debt, medical debt from Texas. Oliver forgave the debt in its entirety, and claimed that it was the largest single giveaway in the American television history, eclipsing that of General Motors on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" in 2004 where it gifted cars to Winfrey's studio audience, worth an estimated $8 million in total. Writing for "Slate", Jordan Weissmann disputed the $15 million figure: "[Oliver] says CARP paid around $60,000 ... for its paper, which was 'out-of-statute'—meaning the debts were so old that creditors technically couldn't even sue over them anymore. That suggests the seller thought the debts were worth no more than, well, $60,000." The show partnered with RIP Medical Debt, Inc. to abolish the debt.


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: On June 18, 2017, "Last Week Tonight"s main segment was about coal mining and Bob Murray. In his segment, Oliver talked about safety conditions inside coal mines, specifically the 2007 Crandall Canyon Mine collapse, which killed six miners. Oliver criticized Murray for claiming the collapse was caused by an earthquake, despite all evidence demonstrating otherwise. The show ended with a costumed squirrel named "Mr. Nutterbutter", portrayed by Noel MacNeal, offering Murray with an oversized check for "3 acorns and 18 cents" in response to Murray's company presenting its employees with low sums of money as bonuses—to which the employees retaliate by voiding the checks—and in reference to a claim that Murray supposedly got the idea to start his company from a talking squirrel. On June 22, Bob Murray presented a lawsuit against Oliver, HBO, and Time Warner for defamation. HBO believed "Last Week Tonight" had done nothing wrong, with a First Amendment lawyer describing the lawsuit as "frivolous." In February 2018, a West Virginia judge stated that he planned to dismiss the lawsuit filed by Murray as unfounded.


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: After Murray's appeal to the West Virginia Supreme Court was delayed due to the impeachment of its judges, Murray offered to drop the charges and HBO accepted. On November 10, 2019, Oliver discussed the case in a segment about SLAPP suits, revealing that the suit cost HBO $200,000 in legal costs and tripled the show's libel insurance fees. Oliver acknowledged that, despite the segment being vetted, the content would likely lead to another lawsuit, and that he would stand behind his team if it were to happen. The segment ended with a five-minute, Times Square-set musical number featuring crude and ludicrous fictional anecdotes about Murray. The musical number, entitled "Eat Shit, Bob", was later nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics in 2020.


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: On March 18, 2018, Oliver announced the publication of a children's book, "A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo", which parodies a book that Mike Pence's family wrote about their family rabbit, . Oliver used his book as a platform to criticize Pence's positions on LGBT issues, as it featured a rabbit in a same-sex relationship. The book became the number-one book and e-book on Amazon the next day, and the top-selling audiobook on Audible.


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: Russell Crowe's jockstrap was purchased by the "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver" and then donated to a Blockbuster Video shop. The jockstrap reappeared in a skit in the final episode of the 2018 season of the show.


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: The main story of the August 11, 2019, episode was Turkmenistan and its autocratic leader Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow. The last portion of the segment centered around Berdimuhamedow's obsession with "Guinness World Records", with the Turkmen capital of Ashgabat being home to the most buildings with white marble cladding, the largest indoor Ferris wheel, and the largest statue of a horse's head, among others. Oliver found that "Guinness World Records" received sums of money ranging from US$12,000 to US$500,000 from companies and authoritarian nations to set records for publicity. He ended the show with a 600 square foot marble cake adorned with a picture of Berdimuhamedow falling from a horse; he had requested a Guinness adjudicator to certify it as the world's largest marble cake, a record previously set by Betty Crocker in Saudi Arabia in 2017. Guinness refused, stating that because their brand was "aligned with kids and families", they would not send an adjudicator; Oliver mockingly commented that he did not "run a brutal enough dictatorship to meet Guinness World Records' high ethical standards". Oliver claimed that Guinness offered to certify it after the fact only if he signed an agreement not to criticize their practices on the show, which Oliver dismissed as "ridiculous". Guinness called Oliver's allegations "false and unfair", claiming that they did not send an adjudicator because they felt the cake was specifically for the purpose of mocking a record holder, stating it was their policy "not to partake in any activities which may belittle their achievements or subject them to ridicule".


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: John Oliver extensively satirized Indian prime minister Narendra Modi in a segment which was broadcast on February 23, 2020, calling him a temporary symbol of hate. This was during a visit of US president Donald Trump to India, and in an organized rally that coincided with large-scale violence in Delhi. He criticized Modi's "increasingly controversial reputation and widespread protests against his government's citizenship measures", as well as BJP condonation of widespread violence against Muslims in India.


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: Disney+ Hotstar, an Indian streaming service who holds rights to HBO programming in the country, refused to stream the episode, leading to criticism by local viewers (including Hotstar's apps being review bombed with 1-star reviews). Oliver addressed the censorship in the March 8, 2020, episode, also noting that since the acquisition of Hotstar by The Walt Disney Company (which occurred as part of its acquisition of 21st Century Fox), Hotstar had begun to censor jokes regarding Disney characters from the program, such as his "factually-accurate" claim that Donald Duck had a corkscrew penis.


title: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

text: John Oliver satirized the city of Danbury, Connecticut on a broadcast that aired on August 16, 2020, by making fun of the general quaintness of the town, starting a feud with the town that would last a few weeks, involving the Mayor of Danbury Mark Boughton, a YouTube show called "Danbury Hat Tricks", and other various content creators in Danbury. The mayor of Danbury, in response, revealed that they would rename their sewer plant, which makes up more than 80% of their $127 million budget, the "John Oliver Memorial Sewer Plant", saying "it's full of crap, just like you [John Oliver]". The mayor reneged on this statement later in the week, claiming it was a joke, but after John Oliver offered $55,000 to local charities on a broadcast that aired on August 30, 2020, in exchange for the sewage plant actually being named after him, Danbury accepted the offer.


title: Daniela Melchior

text: Daniela Melchior ((); born November 1, 1996) is a Portuguese actress. After beginning her career in her home country, she garnered worldwide attention with her English-language debut as Cleo Cazo / Ratcatcher 2 in the DC Extended Universe (DCEU) film "The Suicide Squad" (2021).


title: Daniela Melchior

text: Melchior started her career in 2014 with several Portuguese film and television productions, including "Ouro Verde", "A Herdeira", "The Black Book", and "Parque Mayer". She also provided the Portuguese voice for Spider-Gwen / Gwen Stacy in Sony Pictures Animation's "", who is voiced by Hailee Steinfeld in the original English version.


title: Daniela Melchior

text: In August 2021, Melchior appeared as Cleo Cazo / Ratcatcher 2, in her first English-language theatrical film, James Gunn's DCEU film "The Suicide Squad" alongside Margot Robbie, Idris Elba, John Cena and Viola Davis, being the first actress from Portugal to play a DC character in a DCEU film. James Gunn described her as being "the heart of the film", being the second actor with more time on screen. Melchior will star with Henry Golding, Noomi Rapace and Sam Neill in spy movie "Assassin Club" directed by Camille Delamarre and written by Thomas C. Dunn. Production was finalised in Turin, Italy. She will star in "Marlowe" directed by Neil Jordan, alongside Liam Neeson, Diane Kruger and Jessica Lange. By March 2022, she joined the cast of the tenth "Fast & Furious" film titled "Fast X", starring Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, John Cena (second time after "The Suicide Squad"), Jordana Brewster, Tyrese Gibson, Chris "Ludacris" Bridges, Nathalie Emmanuel, Sung Kang, Scott Eastwood, Michael Rooker, Charlize Theron, Jason Statham, Helen Mirren, Cardi B, Jason Momoa, Brie Larson, Alan Ritchson and Rita Moreno. In June 2022 she announced that she will collaborate for the second time after "The Suicide Squad" with James Gunn's MCU film "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3", starring Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldaña, Dave Bautista, Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel (first time before "Fast X"), Will Poulter and Sylvester Stallone (second time after "The Suicide Squad"), making her the first actress from Portugal to portray a Marvel character and to appear in an MCU film. In August 2022, she was cast in "Road House", a remake of the 1989 film starring Patrick Swayze.


title: Daniela Melchior

text: Melchior stated in an interview how she got herself in Hollywood « I got scripts on the table saying "We want you" ».


title: Daniela Melchior

text: In May 2022 Melchior was criticized for her nose when a person told her that she had a "Potato nose", to which she politely replied in a story from Instagram: « This is why girls grow up thinking there's something wrong with their face (I myself have had photos and videos I didn't post online because i didn't feel comfortable with my nose); they only feel comfortable using filters or having surgery. – I'm not against seeking to be your best version FOR YOURSELF, but self-acceptance is very important. Girls, noses don't exist to be pretty, or thin, or upturned, they exist to breathe (and other things) and not look like Voldemort (character from Harry Potter) ». Then, in a later story, the actress stated that the response was in no way meant to offend the person.


title: Zhao Ziyang

text: Zhao Ziyang (; pronounced , 17 October 1919 – 17 January 2005) was a Chinese politician. He was the third premier of the People's Republic of China from 1980 to 1987, vice chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from 1981 to 1982, and CCP general secretary from 1987 to 1989. He was in charge of the political reforms in China from 1986, but lost power in connection with the reformative neoauthoritarianism current and his support of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.


title: Zhao Ziyang

text: Zhao joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in February 1938. During the Second Sino-Japanese War, he served as the chief officer of CCP Hua County Committee, Director of the Organization Department of the CCP Yubei prefecture Party Committee, Secretary of the CCP Hebei-Shandong-Henan Border Region Prefecture Party Committee and Political Commissar of the 4th Military Division of the Hebei-Shandong-Henan Military Region. During the Chinese Civil War of 1945-1949, Zhao served as the Deputy Political Commissar of Tongbai Military Region, Secretary of the CCP Nanyang Prefecture Party Committee and Political Commissar of Nanyang Military Division.


title: Zhao Ziyang

text: After the establishment of the People's Republic of China, Zhao became Deputy Secretary of the South China Branch of the CCP Central Committee. He also served as Secretary of the Secretariat of the Guangdong Provincial Committee of the CCP, Second Secretary and First Secretary of the Guangdong Provincial Committee of the CCP. He was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution and spent time in political exile. After being rehabilitated, Zhao then was appointed Secretary of the CCP Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region Committee, First Secretary of the CCP Guangdong Provincial Committee, First Secretary of the CCP Sichuan Provincial Committee and First Political Commissar of the Chengdu Military Region, Vice Chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference of the People's Republic of China.


title: Zhao Ziyang

text: As a senior government official, Zhao was critical of Maoist policies and instrumental in implementing free-market reforms, first in Sichuan and subsequently nationwide. He emerged on the national scene due to support from Deng Xiaoping after the Cultural Revolution. An advocate of the privatization of state-owned enterprises, the separation of the party and the state, and general market economy reforms, he sought measures to streamline China's bureaucracy and fight corruption and issues that challenged the party's legitimacy in the 1980s. Many of these views were shared by the then General Secretary Hu Yaobang.


title: Zhao Ziyang

text: His economic reform policies and sympathies with student demonstrators during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 placed him at odds with some members of the party leadership, including Central Advisory Commission Chairman Chen Yun, CPPCC Chairman Li Xiannian, and Premier Li Peng. Zhao also began to lose favor with Deng Xiaoping, who was the Chairman of the Central Military Commission. In the aftermath of the events, Zhao was purged politically and effectively placed under house arrest for the rest of his life. After his house arrest, he became much more radical in his political beliefs, supporting China's full transition to liberal democracy. He died from a stroke in Beijing in January 2005. Because of his political fall from grace, he was not given the funeral rites generally accorded to senior Chinese officials. His secret memoirs were smuggled out and published in English and in Chinese in 2009, but the details of his life remain censored in China.


title: Zhao Ziyang

text: Zhao was born Zhao Xiuye (), but changed his given name to "Ziyang" while attending middle school in Wuhan. He was the son of a wealthy landlord in Hua County, Henan, who was later murdered by CCP officials during a "land reform movement" in the early 1940s. Zhao joined the Communist Youth League in 1932, and became a full member of the Party in 1938.


title: Zhao Ziyang

text: Unlike many Party members active in the 1930s and 1940s who later became senior Chinese leaders, Zhao joined the Party too late to have participated in the Long March of 1934–1935. He served in the People's Liberation Army, which was integrated into the Republic of China's National Revolutionary Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War, and the subsequent civil war, but his posts were largely administrative. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Zhao served as the party chief of Hua County. It was there he met his wife, Liang Boqi, who was Zhao's subordinate; the couple married in 1944. Zhao's career was not especially notable before he emerged as a Party leader in Guangdong in the early 1950s.


title: Zhao Ziyang

text: Zhao rose to prominence in Guangdong from 1951, initially following a ruthless ultra-leftist, Tao Zhu, who was notable for his heavy-handed efforts to force local peasants into living and working in "People's Communes". When Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward (1958–1961) created an artificial famine, Mao publicly blamed the nation's food shortages on the greed of rich peasants, who were supposedly hiding China's huge surplus production from the government. Zhao subsequently led a local campaign aimed at torturing peasants into revealing their food supplies, which did not exist. On the other hand, Zhao worked with regional party officials to put in place arrangements that allowed peasants to profit from the sale of their crops. These projects were masked by ambiguous names such as "a control system for field management" to hide them from Mao, who would have forbidden the projects. According to Zhao, areas where these plans were implemented had a much lower death toll from famine. Jasper Becker, however, wrote that Zhao's torture campaign during the Great Leap meant he was partially responsible for the millions of people who died from starvation and malnutrition in Guangdong between 1958 and 1961.


title: Zhao Ziyang

text: Zhao's experiences during the Great Leap Forward led him to support moderate political and economic policies, including those supported by Deng Xiaoping and President Liu Shaoqi. He led efforts to re-introduce limited amounts of private agriculture and commerce, and dismantled the People's Communes. Zhao's methods of returning private plots to farmers and assigning production contracts to individual households were replicated in other parts of China, helping the country's agricultural sector recover. After achieving senior positions in Guangdong, Zhao directed a harsh purge of cadres accused of corruption or having ties to the Kuomintang.


title: Zhao Ziyang

text: By 1965 Zhao was the Party secretary of Guangdong province, despite not being a member of the CCP Central Committee. He was 46 at the time that he first became Party secretary, a notably young age to hold such a prestigious position. Because of his moderate political orientation, Zhao was attacked by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976).


title: Zhao Ziyang

text: He was dismissed from all official positions in 1967, after which he was paraded through Guangzhou in a dunce cap and publicly denounced as "a stinking remnant of the landlord class".


title: Zhao Ziyang

text: Zhao spent four years as a fitter in Hunan, at the Xianzhong Mechanics Factory. Zhao Wujun, the youngest of his five sons, worked with him (Zhao also had a younger daughter). While in political exile, Zhao's family lived in a small apartment near his factory, with a small suitcase in the living room that served as a dinner table.


title: Zhao Ziyang

text: Zhao's rehabilitation began in April 1971, when he and his family were woken in the middle of the night by someone banging on the door. Without much explanation, the Party chief of the factory that Zhao was working at informed Zhao that he was to go at once to Changsha, the provincial capital. The factory's only means of transport was a three-wheeled motorcycle, which was ready to take him. Zhao was driven to Changsha's airport, where a plane had been prepared to fly him to Beijing. Still unaware of what was happening, Zhao boarded the plane. He was checked into the comfortable Beijing Hotel, but was unable to sleep: he later claimed that, after years of living in poverty, the mattress was too soft. In the morning, Zhao was taken to a meeting with Premier Zhou Enlai at the Great Hall of the People. Soon after they met, Zhao began a speech that he had prepared over the previous night: "I have been rethinking the Cultural Revolution during these years as a labourer..." Zhou cut him off, saying "You've been called to Beijing because the Central Committee has decided to name you as a deputy Party chief of Inner Mongolia."


title: Zhao Ziyang

text: After being recalled from political exile, Zhao attempted to portray himself as a born-again Maoist, and publicly renounced any interest in encouraging private enterprise or material incentive. Zhao's late conversion to Maoism did not last long, and he later became a "principal architect" of the sweeping, pro-market changes that followed the death of Mao. Despite his important role in guiding the economy of China over the course of his career, Zhao had no formal training in economics.


title: Zhao Ziyang

text: Throughout 1972, Zhou Enlai directed Zhao's political rehabilitation. He was appointed to the Central Committee, and in Inner Mongolia became the Revolutionary Committee Secretary and vice-chairman in March 1972. Zhao was elevated to the 10th Central Committee in August 1973, and returned to Guangdong as 1st CCP Secretary and Revolutionary Committee Chair in April 1974. He became Political Commissar of the Chengdu Military Region in December 1975.


title: Zhao Ziyang

text: Zhao was appointed Party Secretary of Sichuan in October 1975, effectively the province's highest-ranking official. Earlier in the Cultural Revolution, Sichuan had been notable for the violent battles that rival organizations of local Red Guards had fought against each other. At the time, Sichuan was China's most populous province, but had been economically devastated by the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, whose collective policies had collapsed the province's agricultural production to levels not seen since the 1930s, despite a great increase in the province's population. The economic situation was so dire that citizens in Sichuan were reportedly selling their daughters for food.


title: Zhao Ziyang

text: During his tenure in Sichuan, Zhao introduced a series of successful market-oriented reforms, which distributed farmland to families for private use, and allowed peasants to freely sell their crops on the marketplace. The reforms led to an increase in industrial production by 81% and agricultural output by 25% within three years. Zhao's reforms made him popular in Sichuan, where the local people coined the saying: . (This saying is a homophonic pun on Zhao's name, loosely translated as: "if you want to eat, look for Ziyang.")


title: Zhao Ziyang

text: After ousting Hua Guofeng as China's "paramount leader" in 1978, Deng Xiaoping recognized the "Sichuan Experience" as a model for Chinese economic reform. Deng promoted Zhao to a position as an alternate member of the CCP Politburo in 1977, and as a full member in 1979. He joined the CCP Politburo Standing Committee, China's highest ruling organ, in 1980. Zhao became the Leader of the Leading Group for Financial and Economic Affairs and Vice Chairman of the CCP in 1980 and 1981 separately.


title: Zhao Ziyang

text: After 1978 Zhao's policies were replicated in Anhui, with similar success. After serving under Hua Guofeng as vice-premier for six months, Zhao replaced Hua as Premier of the State Council in 1980, with a mandate to introduce his rural reforms across China. Between 1980 and 1984, China's agricultural production rose by 50%.


title: Zhao Ziyang

text: Zhao developed "preliminary stage theory", a model for transforming the socialist system via gradual economic reform. As premier, Zhao implemented many of the policies that were successful in Sichuan at a national scale, increasingly de-centralizing industrial and agricultural production. Zhao successfully sought to establish a series of Special economic zones in coastal provinces in order to attract foreign investment and create export hubs. He also led the 863 Program to respond to rapid global technological change. Zhao's reforms led to a rapid increases in both agricultural and light-industrial production throughout the 1980s, but his economic reforms were criticized for causing inflation. Zhao promoted an open foreign policy, improving China's relations with Western nations in order to support China's economic development.


title: Zhao Ziyang

text: One of Zhao's major cultural reforms included allowing the band Wham! to make a 10-day visit to China, the first by a Western pop group. Wham!'s 1985 visit, engineered by the band's manager Simon Napier-Bell, was a highly publicized cultural exchange and seen as a major step in increasing friendly bilateral relations between China and the West.


title: Zhao Ziyang

text: In the 1980s, Zhao was branded by conservatives as a revisionist of Marxism, but his advocacy of government transparency and a national dialogue that included ordinary citizens in the policymaking process made him popular with many. Zhao was a solid believer in the Party, but he defined socialism very differently from Party conservatives. Zhao called political reform "the biggest test facing socialism." He believed economic progress was inextricably linked to democratization. Zhao was a fan of golf, and is credited with popularizing the game's reintroduction to the mainland in the 1980s.


title: Zhao Ziyang

text: While Zhao focused on economic reforms during the early 1980s, his superior, Hu Yaobang, promoted a number of political reforms. In the late 1980s Hu and Zhao collaborated to promote a series of large-scale political reforms with vaguely defined goals. The political reforms of Hu and Zhao included proposals to have candidates directly elected to the Politburo, more elections with more than one candidate, more government transparency, more consultation with the public on policy, and increased personal responsibility directed to officials for their mistakes.


title: Zhao Ziyang

text: Zhao and Hu also began a large-scale anti-corruption programme, and permitted the investigations of the children of high-ranking Party elders, who had grown up protected by their parents' influence. Hu's investigation of Party officials belonging to this "Crown Prince Party" made Hu unpopular with many powerful Party officials. In January 1987 a clique of Party elders forced Hu to resign, on the grounds that he had been too lenient in his response to the student protests that had taken place over the last year. After Hu's dismissal, Deng promoted Zhao to replace Hu as CCP general secretary, putting Zhao in the position to succeed Deng as "paramount leader". One month before Zhao was appointed to the position of general secretary, Zhao stated to an American reporter that "I am not fit to be the general secretary... I am more fit to look after economic affairs." Zhao's vacated premiership was in turn filled by Li Peng, a conservative who opposed many of Zhao's economic and political reforms.


title: Zhao Ziyang

text: At the 13th National Party Congress in 1987, Zhao declared that China was in "a primary stage of socialism" that could last 100 years. Under this premise, Zhao believed that China needed to experiment with a variety of economic reforms in order to stimulate production. Zhao proposed to separate the roles of the Party and state, a proposal that has since become taboo. The 13th Congress was also notable for the lack of representation by women at the highest levels of the party; Members of the All-China Women's Federation attributed this to Zhao's rise to General-Secretary. Zhao had previously made comments opposing the participation of women in political processes.


title: Zhao Ziyang

text: Western observers generally view the year that Zhao served as general secretary as the most open in the history of the People's Republic of China. Many limitations on freedom of speech and freedom of press were relaxed, allowing intellectuals to freely express themselves, and to propose "improvements" for the country.


title: Zhao Ziyang

text: Zhao introduced the stock market in China and promoted futures trading there. In 1984, with his support, Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou became experimental cities of a joint-stock system; however, some companies only issued stock to their workers. In November 1985, the first share-issuing enterprise was established in Shanghai and publicly issued 10,000 shares of 50 RMB par value stock, which attracted investors. Zhao hosted a financial meeting on 2 August 1986, calling for the joint stock system to be implemented nationwide in the following year.


title: Zhao Ziyang

text: Zhao played a major role in the approach to price liberalization and the question of whether China should adopt a sudden price liberalization approach akin to shock therapy or a more gradual model. "Confronted with the diverse, authoritative warnings about the unforeseeable risks of imposing the shock of price reform and the uncertainty about its benefits" he ultimately rejected shock price reform. Zhao had accepted the argument that the basic concern in economic reform was energizing enterprises. By late summer of 1986, what started under the rubric of "coordinated comprehensive package reform" had been diluted to an adjustment in the price of steel (although its price was both important and carried symbolic weight) as well as partial tax and financial reform. Zhao's reform program in 1987 and early 1988 focused on combining enterprise contracting and a coastal development strategy.


title: Zhao Ziyang

text: However, Zhao's proposal in May 1988 to accelerate price reform led to widespread complaints about rampant inflation, giving opponents of rapid reform the opportunity to call for greater centralization of economic controls and stricter prohibitions against Western influence. This precipitated a political debate, which grew more heated through the winter of 1988 to 1989.


title: Zhao Ziyang

text: Because Zhao had risen to power through his work in the provinces, he never enjoyed strong connections among the Party leadership in Beijing. Because he had led the Communist Youth League in the 1950s, Zhao often relied on its former members for support, and Zhao's enemies accused him of promoting a "Communist Youth League faction" within the CCP. Among Beijing's Party elders, Chen Yun and Li Xiannian were notably critical of Zhao and his policies.


title: Zhao Ziyang

text: Despite his criticism of Zhao, Chen Yun was the Party elder most respected by Zhao, and Zhao would frequently attempt to consult with Chen before implementing new policies. Li Xiannian resented Zhao personally for Zhao's interest in foreign culture, and his willingness to learn from economic models that had been successful outside of China. According to Zhao, Li Xiannian "hated me because I was implementing Deng Xiaoping's reforms, but since it was difficult for him to openly oppose Deng, he made me the target of the opposition."


title: Zhao Ziyang

text: Zhao wrote warmly of Hu Yaobang in his memoirs, and generally agreed with Hu on the direction of China's economic reforms. Although Deng Xiaoping was Zhao's only firm supporter among the Party elders, Deng's support was sufficient to protect Zhao throughout Zhao's career. As late as April 1989, one month before the dramatic end to Zhao's career, Deng assured Zhao that he had secured the support of Chen Yun and Li Xiannian for Zhao to serve two more full terms as Party general secretary.


title: Zhao Ziyang

text: The second half of 1988 saw the increasing deterioration of Zhao's political support. Zhao found himself in multi-front turf battles with the Party elders, who grew increasingly dissatisfied with Zhao's hands-off approach to ideological matters. The conservative faction in the politburo, led by Premier Li Peng and Vice-premier Yao Yilin, were constantly at odds with Zhao in economic and fiscal policy making. Zhao was under growing pressure to combat runaway corruption by rank-and-file officials and their family members. In the beginning of 1989, it was evident that Zhao was faced with an increasingly difficult uphill battle, and he may have seen that he was fighting for his own political survival. If Zhao was unable to turn things around rapidly, a showdown with the Party conservatives would be all but inevitable. The student protests triggered by the sudden death of former CCP general secretary Hu Yaobang, widely admired as a reform-minded leader, created a crisis in which Zhao was forced into a confrontation with his political enemies.


title: Zhao Ziyang

text: Zhao was general secretary for little more than a year before the death of Hu Yaobang on 15 April 1989, which, coupled with a growing sense of public outrage caused by high inflation and economic uncertainty, provided the backdrop for the large-scale protest of 1989 by students, intellectuals, and other parts of a disaffected urban population. The Tiananmen protests initially began as a spontaneous public mourning for Hu, but evolved into nationwide protests supporting political reform and demanding an end to Party corruption.


title: Zhao Ziyang

text: Student demonstrators, taking advantage of the loosening political atmosphere, reacted to a variety of causes of discontent. The diverse demands of protesters included greater economic liberalization, political democracy, media freedom, freedom of speech and association, rule of law, and to have the legitimacy of the movement recognized. Some protest leaders spoke against official corruption and speculation, price stability, social security, and the democratic means to supervise the reform process. Ironically, some of the original invective was also directed against Zhao. Party hard-liners increasingly came to the conclusion that the demonstrations were due to Zhao's rapid pace of reform, which they believed caused a sense of confusion and frustration among college students. The protesters may have also been encouraged by the imminent collapse of other Communist governments in Eastern Europe.


title: Zhao Ziyang

text: Zhao treated the protesters sympathetically. While the protests were dying down on 26 April, Zhao was obliged (as the Party General Secretary) to leave for North Korea on a state visit. While he was away, Premier Li Peng organized a meeting between Deng Xiaoping and the Standing Committee, in which Li and his allies convinced Deng that the protests were threatening to the Party. Following the meeting, Li had the "People's Daily" publish an article (which he attributed to Deng), which criticized the protests as "premeditated and organized turmoil with anti-Party and anti-socialist motives." Following the publication of Li's article, the protests grew to over 10,000 and spread to cities across China, notably including Shanghai and Guangzhou.


title: Zhao Ziyang

text: Zhao attempted to mollify the protesters by engaging in dialogue with student groups. He attempted to institute numerous government reforms, including the creation of a special commission to investigate government corruption; but, according to Zhao, the commission was ineffective because "Li Peng and others in his group actively attempted to block, delay and even sabotage the process." Zhao attempted to arrange a meeting with Deng in order to convince him to retract Li's "April 26 article". He was granted a meeting with Deng on 17 May; but, instead of the private meeting he expected, he found that the entire Standing Committee was present. When Zhao advocated modifying the editorial, President Yang Shangkun proposed declaring martial law according to the decision of National People's Congress, which Zhao refused. The next day, Zhao wrote a letter to Deng, suggesting he retract the 26 April editorial to reduce tensions between protesters and the government. In the letter, Zhao also warned that "imposing harsh measures while a majority of people are adamantly opposed may result in serious repercussions that threaten the fate of the Party and the state." He did not receive a reply.


title: Zhao Ziyang

text: Deng eventually decided on declaring martial law. According to the Tiananmen Papers, the standing committee vote was split 2–2 with one abstention, and retired CCP veterans were called in to determine the vote. According to Zhao however, there was no vote, and the decision to declare martial law was illegal according to the Party's rules.


title: Zhao Ziyang

text: Shortly before 5 am on 19 May, Zhao appeared in Tiananmen Square and wandered among the crowd of protesters. Using a megaphone, he delivered a now-famous speech to the students gathered at the square. It was first broadcast through China Central Television nationwide, and reported on by the Xinhua News Agency. Below is a translated version:


title: Zhao Ziyang

text: After a bow, people began to applaud and some students burst into tears. That was Zhao's last public appearance, for Zhao had been ousted by party elders just before coming to the square. The phrase "", translated "We are already old, and do not matter" and Zhao's speech, have since become a well known part of the protests. What motivated Zhao's visit remains, even today, a topic of debate. According to Wu Guoguang, Zhao's former speechwriter, some say he went into the square hoping a conciliatory gesture would gain him leverage against hard-liners like Premier Li Peng. Others believe he supported the protesters and misjudged the risk of breaking with the leadership.


title: Zhao Ziyang

text: The protesters did not disperse. A day after Zhao's 19 May visit to Tiananmen Square, Premier Li Peng publicly declared martial law, leading to the deaths of hundreds to thousands of protesters on 4 June.