title: Impalement

text: Athanasios Diakos, a klepht and later a rebel military commander, was captured after the Battle of Alamana (1821), near Thermopylae, and after refusing to convert to Islam and join the Ottoman army, he was impaled. Diakos became a martyr for a Greek independence and was later honored as a national hero. Non-combatant Greeks (elders, monks, women etc.) were impaled around Athens during the first year of the revolution (1821).


title: Impalement

text: Impaling perceived rebels was an attested practice in other parts of the empire as well, such as the 1809 quelling of a Bosnian revolt, and during the Serbian Revolution (1804–1835) against the Ottoman Empire, about 200 Serbs were impaled in Belgrade in 1814. Historian James J. Reid, in his "Crisis of the Ottoman Empire: Prelude to Collapse 1839–1878", notes several instances of later use, in particular in times of crises, ordered by military commanders (if not, that is, directly ordered by the supreme authority possessed by the sultan). He notes late instances of impalement during rebellions (rather than cases of robbery) like the Bosnian revolt of 1852, during the Cretan insurrection of 1866–69, and during the insurrections in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1876–77.


title: Impalement

text: In the Nobel Prize-winning novel "The Bridge on the Drina", by Ivo Andrić, in the third chapter is described impalement of a Bosnian Serb, who was trying to sabotage the bridge's construction.


title: Impalement

text: Aurora Mardiganian, a survivor of the Armenian genocide of 1915–1923, said that impalement of girls was used in that genocide.


title: Impalement

text: A Russian clergyman who visited ravaged Christian villages in northwestern Persia claimed that he found the remains of several impaled people. He wrote: "The bodies were so firmly fixed, in some instances, that the stakes could not be withdrawn; it was necessary to saw them off and bury the victims as they were."


title: Social constructionism

text: Social constructionism is a theory in sociology, social ontology, and communication theory which proposes that certain ideas about physical reality arise from collaborative consensus, instead of pure observation of said reality. The theory centers on the notion that meanings are developed in coordination with others rather than separately by each individual. It has often been characterised as neo-Marxian or also as a neo-Kantian theory, in that social constructionism replaces the transcendental subject with a concept of society that is at the same time descriptive and normative.


title: Social constructionism

text: While some social constructs are obvious, for instance money or the concept of currency, in that people have agreed to give it importance/value, others are controversial and hotly debated, such as the concept of self/self-identity. This articulates the view that people in society construct ideas or concepts that may not exist without the existence of people or language to validate those concepts.


title: Social constructionism

text: There is weak and strong social constructionism. Weak social constructionism relies on brute factsfacts that are not socially constructed, such as, arguably, facts about physical particlesor institutional facts (which are formed from social conventions). It has been objected that strong social constructionism undermines the foundation of science as the pursuit of objectivity, and as a theory defies any attempt at falsifying it.


title: Social constructionism

text: A social construct or construction is the meaning, notion, or connotation placed on an object or event by a society, and adopted by that society with respect to how they view or deal with the object or event.


title: Social constructionism

text: Social constructionism posits that phenomena do not have an independent foundation outside the mental and linguistic representation that people develop about them throughout their history, and which becomes their shared reality. From a linguistic viewpoint, social constructionism centres meaning as an internal reference within language (words refer to words, definitions to other definitions) rather than to an external reality.


title: Social constructionism

text: In the 16th century, Michel de Montaigne wrote that, "We need to interpret interpretations more than to interpret things." In 1886 or 1887, Friedrich Nietzsche put it similarly: In his 1922 book "Public Opinion", Walter Lippmann said, "The real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance" between people and their environment. Each person constructs a pseudo-environment that is a subjective, biased, and necessarily abridged mental image of the world, and to a degree, everyone's pseudo-environment is a fiction. People "live in the same world, but they think and feel in different ones." Lippman's "environment" might be called "reality", and his "pseudo-environment" seems equivalent to what today is called "constructed reality".


title: Social constructionism

text: Social constructionism has more recently been rooted in "symbolic interactionism" and "phenomenology". With Berger and Luckmann's "The Social Construction of Reality" published in 1966, this concept found its hold. More than four decades later, much theory and research pledged itself to the basic tenet that people "make their social and cultural worlds at the same time these worlds make them." It is a viewpoint that uproots social processes "simultaneously playful and serious, by which reality is both revealed and concealed, created and destroyed by our activities." It provides a substitute to the "Western intellectual tradition" where the researcher "earnestly seeks certainty in a representation of reality by means of propositions."


title: Social constructionism

text: In social constructionist terms, "taken-for-granted realities" are cultivated from "interactions between and among social agents"; furthermore, reality is not some objective truth "waiting to be uncovered through positivist scientific inquiry." Rather, there can be "multiple realities that compete for truth and legitimacy." Social constructionism understands the "fundamental role of language and communication" and this understanding has "contributed to the linguistic turn" and more recently the "turn to discourse theory". The majority of social constructionists abide by the belief that "language does not mirror reality; rather, it constitutes [creates] it."


title: Social constructionism

text: A broad definition of social constructionism has its supporters and critics in the organizational sciences. A constructionist approach to various organizational and managerial phenomena appear to be more commonplace and on the rise.


title: Social constructionism

text: Andy Lock and Tom Strong trace some of the fundamental tenets of social constructionism back to the work of the 18th-century Italian political philosopher, rhetorician, historian, and jurist Giambattista Vico.


title: Social constructionism

text: Berger and Luckmann give credit to Max Scheler as a large influence as he created the idea of sociology of knowledge which influenced social construction theory.


title: Social constructionism

text: According to Lock and Strong, other influential thinkers whose work has affected the development of social constructionism are: Edmund Husserl, Alfred Schutz, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, Jürgen Habermas, Emmanuel Levinas, Mikhail Bakhtin, Valentin Volosinov, Lev Vygotsky, George Herbert Mead, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gregory Bateson, Harold Garfinkel, Erving Goffman, Anthony Giddens, Michel Foucault, Ken Gergen, Mary Gergen, Rom Harre, and John Shotter.


title: Social constructionism

text: Since its appearance in the 1950s, personal construct psychology (PCP) has mainly developed as a constructivist theory of personality and a system of transforming individual meaning-making processes, largely in therapeutic contexts. It was based around the notion of persons as scientists who form and test theories about their worlds. Therefore, it represented one of the first attempts to appreciate the constructive nature of experience and the meaning persons give to their experience. Social constructionism (SC), on the other hand, mainly developed as a form of a critique, aimed to transform the oppressing effects of the social meaning-making processes. Over the years, it has grown into a cluster of different approaches, with no single SC position. However, different approaches under the generic term of SC are loosely linked by some shared assumptions about language, knowledge, and reality.


title: Social constructionism

text: A usual way of thinking about the relationship between PCP and SC is treating them as two separate entities that are similar in some aspects, but also very different in others. This way of conceptualizing this relationship is a logical result of the circumstantial differences of their emergence. In subsequent analyses these differences between PCP and SC were framed around several points of tension, formulated as binary oppositions: personal/social; individualist/relational; agency/structure; constructivist/constructionist. Although some of the most important issues in contemporary psychology are elaborated in these contributions, the polarized positioning also sustained the idea of a separation between PCP and SC, paving the way for only limited opportunities for dialogue between them.


title: Social constructionism

text: Reframing the relationship between PCP and SC may be of use in both the PCP and the SC communities. On one hand, it extends and enriches SC theory and points to benefits of applying the PCP "toolkit" in constructionist therapy and research. On the other hand, the reframing contributes to PCP theory and points to new ways of addressing social construction in therapeutic conversations.


title: Social constructionism

text: Like social constructionism, social constructivism states that people work together to construct artifacts. While social constructionism focuses on the artifacts that are created through the social interactions of a group, social constructivism focuses on an individual's learning that takes place because of his or her interactions in a group.


title: Social constructionism

text: Social constructivism has been studied by many educational psychologists, who are concerned with its implications for teaching and learning. For more on the psychological dimensions of social constructivism, see the work of Lev Vygotsky, Ernst von Glasersfeld and A. Sullivan Palincsar.


title: Social constructionism

text: Some of the systemic models that use social constructionism include Narrative Therapy and Solution Focused Therapy


title: Social constructionism

text: Potter and Kappeler (1996), in their introduction to "Constructing Crime: Perspective on Making News And Social Problems" wrote, "Public opinion and crime facts demonstrate no congruence. The reality of crime in the United States has been subverted to a constructed reality as ephemeral as swamp gas."


title: Social constructionism

text: Criminology has long focussed on why and how society defines criminal behavior and crime in general. While looking at crime through a social constructionism lens, we see evidence to support that criminal acts are a social construct where abnormal or deviant acts become a crime based on the views of society. Another explanation of crime as it relates to social constructionism are individual identity constructs that result in deviant behavior. If someone has constructed the identity of a "madman" or "criminal" for themselves based on a society's definition, it may force them to follow that label, resulting in criminal behavior.


title: Social constructionism

text: A bibliographic review of social constructionism as used within communication studies was published in 2016. It features an overview of resources from that disciplinary perspective The collection of essays published in Galanes and Leeds-Hurwitz (2009) should also be useful to anyone interested in how social construction actually works during communication. This collection was the result of a conference held in 2006, sponsored by the National Communication Association as a Summer institute, entitled "Catching ourselves in the Act: A Collaboration to Enrich our Discipline Through Social Constructionist Approaches". Briefly, the basic assumption of the group was that "individuals jointly construct (create) their understandings of the world and the meanings they give to encounters with others, or various products others create. At the heart of the matter is the assumption that such meanings are constructed "jointly", that is, in coordination with others, rather than individually. Thus the term of choice most often is "social" construction." At that event, John Stewart in his keynote presentation, suggested it was time to choose a single term among the set then common (social constructionist, social constructivism, social constructivist), and proposed using the simpler form: "social construction". Those present at the conference agreed to that use, and so that is the term most often used in this article, and by communication scholars since then. During discussion at the conference, participants developed a common list of principles:


title: Social constructionism

text: A survey of publications in communication relating to social construction in 2009 found that the major topics covered were: identity, language, narratives, organizations, conflict, and media.


title: Social constructionism

text: Constructionism became prominent in the U.S. with Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann's 1966 book, "The Social Construction of Reality". Berger and Luckmann argue that all knowledge, including the most basic, taken-for-granted common sense knowledge of everyday reality, is derived from and maintained by social interactions. In their model, people interact on the understanding that their perceptions of everyday life are shared with others, and this common knowledge of reality is in turn reinforced by these interactions. Since this common sense knowledge is negotiated by people, human typifications, significations and institutions come to be presented as part of an objective reality, particularly for future generations who were not involved in the original process of negotiation. For example, as parents negotiate rules for their children to follow, those rules confront the children as externally produced "givens" that they cannot change. Berger and Luckmann's social constructionism has its roots in phenomenology. It links to Heidegger and Edmund Husserl through the teaching of Alfred Schutz, who was also Berger's PhD adviser.


title: Social constructionism

text: During the 1970s and 1980s, social constructionist theory underwent a transformation as constructionist sociologists engaged with the work of Michel Foucault and others as a narrative turn in the social sciences was worked out in practice. This particularly affected the emergent sociology of science and the growing field of science and technology studies. In particular, Karin Knorr-Cetina, Bruno Latour, Barry Barnes, Steve Woolgar, and others used social constructionism to relate what science has typically characterized as objective facts to the processes of social construction, with the goal of showing that human subjectivity imposes itself on those facts we take to be objective, not solely the other way around. A particularly provocative title in this line of thought is Andrew Pickering's "Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics". At the same time, social constructionism shaped studies of technologythe Sofield, especially on the social construction of technology, or SCOT, and authors as Wiebe Bijker, Trevor Pinch, Maarten van Wesel, etc. Despite its common perception as objective, mathematics is not immune to social constructionist accounts. Sociologists such as Sal Restivo and Randall Collins, mathematicians including Reuben Hersh and Philip J. Davis, and philosophers including Paul Ernest have published social constructionist treatments of mathematics.


title: Social constructionism

text: Within the social constructionist strand of postmodernism, the concept of socially constructed reality stresses the ongoing mass-building of worldviews by individuals in dialectical interaction with society at a time. The numerous realities so formed comprise, according to this view, the imagined worlds of human social existence and activity, gradually crystallized by habit into institutions propped up by language conventions, given ongoing legitimacy by mythology, religion and philosophy, maintained by therapies and socialization, and subjectively internalized by upbringing and education to become part of the identity of social citizens.


title: Social constructionism

text: In the book "The Reality of Social Construction", the British sociologist Dave Elder-Vass places the development of social constructionism as one outcome of the legacy of postmodernism. He writes "Perhaps the most widespread and influential product of this process [coming to terms with the legacy of postmodernism] is social constructionism, which has been booming [within the domain of social theory] since the 1980s."


title: Social constructionism

text: One criticism that has been leveled at social constructionism is that it generally ignores the contribution made by natural sciences or misuses them in social sciences. Most notably, social constructionists have been accused of using the term "society" in both a descriptive way and a normative way, thereby failing to provide adequate explanation as to what they mean by society, whether it be an ideological concept or a description of any historically located community.


title: Social constructionism

text: As a theory, social constructionism rejects the influences of biology on behaviour and culture, or suggests that they are unimportant to achieve an understanding of human behaviour, while the scientific consensus is that behaviour is a complex outcome of both biological and cultural influences. Social constructionism has been criticized for having an overly narrow focus on society and culture as a causal factor in human behavior, excluding the influence of innate biological tendencies, by psychologists such as Steven Pinker in "The Blank Slate" as well as by Asian Studies scholar Edward Slingerland in "What Science Offers the Humanities". John Tooby and Leda Cosmides used the term "standard social science model" to refer to social theories that they believe fail to take into account the evolved properties of the brain.


title: Social constructionism

text: Social constructionism equally denies or downplays to a significant extent the role that meaning and language have for each individual, seeking to configure language as an overall structure rather than a historical instrument used by individuals to communicate their personal experiences of the world. This is particularly the case with cultural studies, where personal and pre-linguistic experiences are disregarded as irrelevant or seen as completely situated and constructed by the socio-economical superstructure.


title: Social constructionism

text: In 1996, to illustrate what he believed to be the intellectual weaknesses of social constructionism and postmodernism, physics professor Alan Sokal submitted an article to the academic journal "Social Text" deliberately written to be incomprehensible but including phrases and jargon typical of the articles published by the journal. The submission, which was published, was an experiment to see if the journal would "publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions." In 1999, Sokal, with coauthor Jean Bricmont published the book "Fashionable Nonsense", which criticized postmodernism and social constructionism.


title: Social constructionism

text: Philosopher Paul Boghossian has also written against social constructionism. He follows Ian Hacking's argument that many adopt social constructionism because of its potentially liberating stance: if things are the way that they are only because of our social conventions, as opposed to being so naturally, then it should be possible to change them into how we would rather have them be. He then states that social constructionists argue that we should refrain from making absolute judgements about what is true and instead state that something is true in the light of this or that theory. Countering this, he states:


title: Social constructionism

text: Woolgar and Pawluch argue that constructionists tend to "ontologically gerrymander" social conditions in and out of their analysis.


title: Social constructionism

text: Alan Sokal also criticize social constructionism for contradicting itself on the knowability of the existence of societies. The argument is that if there was no knowable objective reality, there would be no way of knowing whether or not societies exist and if so, what their rules and other characteristics are. One example of the contradiction is that the claim that "phenomena must be measured by what is considered average in their respective cultures, not by an objective standard" since there are languages that have no word for average and therefore the whole application of the concept of "average" to such cultures contradict social constructionism's own claim that cultures can only be measured by their own standards.


title: Macbeth, King of Scotland

text: Macbeth ( – 15 August 1057) was King of Scots from 1040 until his death. He ruled over the Kingdom of Alba, which covered only a portion of present-day Scotland.


title: Macbeth, King of Scotland

text: Little is known about Macbeth's early life, although he was the son of Findláech of Moray and may have been a grandson of Malcolm II. He became Mormaer of Moray – a semi-autonomous province – in 1032, and was probably responsible for the death of the previous mormaer, Gille Coemgáin. He subsequently married Gille Coemgáin's widow, Gruoch, but they had no children together.


title: Macbeth, King of Scotland

text: In 1040, Duncan I launched an attack into Moray and was killed in action by Macbeth's troops. Macbeth succeeded him as King of Alba, apparently with little opposition. His 17-year reign was mostly peaceful, although in 1054 he was faced with an English invasion, led by Siward, Earl of Northumbria, on behalf of Edward the Confessor. Macbeth was killed at the Battle of Lumphanan in 1057 by forces loyal to the future Malcolm III. He was buried on Iona, the traditional resting place of Scottish kings.


title: Macbeth, King of Scotland

text: Macbeth was initially succeeded by his stepson Lulach, but Lulach ruled for only a few months before also being killed by Malcolm III, whose descendants would rule Scotland until the late 13th century. Macbeth is today best known as the main character of William Shakespeare's tragedy "Macbeth" and the many works that it has inspired. However, Shakespeare's Macbeth is based on "Holinshed's Chronicles" (published in 1577) and is not historically accurate.


title: Macbeth, King of Scotland

text: Macbeth's full name in Medieval Gaelic was '. This is realised as ' in Modern Gaelic, and anglicised as Macbeth MacFinlay (also spelled Findlay, Findley, or Finley). The name "Mac Bethad", from which the anglicised "MacBeth" is derived, means "son of life". Although it has the appearance of a Gaelic patronymic it does not have any meaning of filiation but instead carries an implication of "righteous man" or "religious man". An alternative proposed derivation is that it is a corruption of "macc-bethad" meaning "one of the elect".


title: Macbeth, King of Scotland

text: Some sources make Macbeth a grandson of King Malcolm II and thus a cousin to Duncan I, whom he succeeded. He was possibly also a cousin to Thorfinn the Mighty, Earl of Orkney and Caithness. Nigel Tranter, in his novel "Macbeth the King", went so far as to portray Macbeth as Thorfinn's half-brother, and Dorothy Dunnett portrays Macbeth and Thorfinn as a single individual (Macbeth being a baptismal name) in the novel ""King Hereafter". However, this is speculation arising from the lack of historical certainty regarding the number of daughters that Malcolm had.


title: Macbeth, King of Scotland

text: When Cnut the Great came north in 1031 to accept the submission of King Malcolm II, Macbeth too submitted to him:


title: Macbeth, King of Scotland

text: Malcolm II's grandson Duncan (Donnchad mac Crínáin), later King Duncan I, was acclaimed as king of Alba on 30 November 1034, apparently without opposition. Duncan appears to have been "tánaise ríg", the king in waiting, so that far from being an abandonment of tanistry, as has sometimes been argued, his kingship was a vindication of the practice. Previous successions had involved strife between various "rígdomna" men of royal blood. Far from being the aged King Duncan of Shakespeare's play, the real King Duncan was a young man in 1034, and even at his death in 1040 his youthfulness is remarked upon.


title: Macbeth, King of Scotland

text: Duncan's early reign was apparently uneventful. His later reign, in line with his description as "the man of many sorrows" in the "Prophecy of Berchán", was not successful. In 1039, Strathclyde was attacked by the Northumbrians, and a retaliatory raid led by Duncan against Durham turned into a disaster. Duncan survived the defeat, but the following year he led an army north into Moray, Macbeth's domain, apparently on a punitive expedition against Moray. There he was killed in action, at the battle of Bothnagowan, now Pitgaveny, near Elgin, by the men of Moray led by Macbeth, probably on 14 August 1040.


title: Macbeth, King of Scotland

text: On Duncan's death, Macbeth became king. Had his reign not been universally accepted, resistance would have been expected but none is known to have occurred. In 1045, Duncan's father Crínán of Dunkeld (a scion of the Scottish branch of the Cenél Conaill and Hereditary Abbot of Iona) was killed in a battle between two Scottish armies. Duncan's younger brother Maldred of Allerdale is believed to have died in the same battle, the family fighting Macbeth in defence of Duncan I's young son Malcolm III.


title: Macbeth, King of Scotland

text: John of Fordun wrote that Duncan's wife fled Scotland, taking her children, including the future kings Malcolm III (Máel Coluim mac Donnchada) and Donald III (Domnall Bán mac Donnchada, or Donalbane) with her. On the basis of the author's beliefs as to whom Duncan married, various places of exile, Northumbria and Orkney among them, have been proposed. However, E. William Robertson proposes the safest place for Duncan's widow and her children would be with her or Duncan's kin and supporters in Atholl.


title: Macbeth, King of Scotland

text: After the defeat of Crínán, Macbeth was evidently unchallenged. Marianus Scotus tells how the king made a pilgrimage to Rome in 1050, where, Marianus says, he gave money to the poor as if it were seed.


title: Macbeth, King of Scotland

text: The "Orkneyinga Saga" says that a dispute between Thorfinn Sigurdsson, Earl of Orkney, and Karl Hundason began when Karl Hundason became "King of Scots" and claimed Caithness. The identity of Karl Hundason, unknown to Scots and Irish sources, has long been a matter of dispute, and it is far from clear that the matter is settled. The most common assumption is that Karl Hundason was an insulting byname (Old Norse for "Churl, son of a Dog") given to Macbeth by his enemies. William Forbes Skene's suggestion that he was Duncan I of Scotland has been revived in recent years. Lastly, the idea that the whole affair is a poetic invention has been raised.


title: Macbeth, King of Scotland

text: According to the "Orkneyinga Saga", in the war which followed, Thorfinn defeated Karl in a sea-battle off Deerness at the east end of the Orkney Mainland. Then Karl's nephew Mutatan or Muddan, appointed to rule Caithness for him, was killed at Thurso by Thorkel the Fosterer. Finally, a great battle at Tarbat Ness on the south side of the Dornoch Firth ended with Karl defeated and fugitive or dead. Thorfinn, the saga says, then marched south through Scotland as far as Fife, burning and plundering as he passed. A later note in the saga claims that Thorfinn won nine Scottish earldoms.


title: Macbeth, King of Scotland

text: Whoever Karl Hundason may have been, it appears that the saga is reporting a local conflict with a Scots ruler of Moray or Ross:


title: Macbeth, King of Scotland

text: In 1052, Macbeth was involved indirectly in the strife in the Kingdom of England between Godwin, Earl of Wessex and Edward the Confessor when he received a number of Norman exiles from England in his court, perhaps becoming the first king of Scots to introduce feudalism to Scotland. In 1054, Edward's Earl of Northumbria, Siward, led a very large invasion of Scotland (Duncan's widow and Malcolm's mother, Suthed, was Northumbrian-born; it is probable but not proven that there was a family tie between Siward and Malcolm). The campaign led to a bloody battle at Dunsinnan, in which the "Annals of Ulster" reported 3,000 Scots and 1,500 English dead; which can be taken as meaning very many on both sides. One of Siward's sons and a son-in-law were among the dead. The result of the invasion was that one Máel Coluim, "son of the king of the Cumbrians" (not to be confused with Máel Coluim mac Donnchada, the future Malcolm III of Scotland) was restored to his throne, i.e., as ruler of the kingdom of Strathclyde. It may be that the events of 1054 are responsible for the idea, which appears in Shakespeare's play, that Malcolm III was put in power by the English.


title: Macbeth, King of Scotland

text: Macbeth did not survive the English invasion for long, for he was defeated and mortally wounded or killed by the future Malcolm III ("King Malcolm "Ceann-mor"", son of Duncan I) on the north side of the Mounth in 1057, after retreating with his men over the Cairnamounth Pass to take his last stand at the battle at Lumphanan. "The Prophecy of Berchán" has it that he was wounded and died at Scone, sixty miles to the south, some days later. Macbeth's stepson Lulach was installed as king soon after.


title: Macbeth, King of Scotland

text: Unlike later writers, no near-contemporary source remarks on Macbeth as a tyrant. The "Duan Albanach," which survives in a form dating to the reign of Malcolm III, calls him "Mac Bethad the renowned". "The Prophecy of Berchán", a verse history which purports to be a prophecy, describes him as "the generous king of Fortriu", and says:


title: Macbeth, King of Scotland

text: Macbeth's life, like that of King Duncan I, had progressed far towards legend by the end of the 14th century, when John of Fordun and Andrew of Wyntoun wrote their histories. Hector Boece, Walter Bower, and George Buchanan all contributed to the legend.


title: Macbeth, King of Scotland

text: In Shakespeare's play, which is based mainly upon Raphael Holinshed's account, Macbeth is initially a valiant and loyal general to the elderly King Duncan. After being manipulated by Three Witches and his wife, Lady Macbeth, Macbeth murders Duncan and usurps the throne. Ultimately, the prophecies of the witches prove misleading, and Macbeth becomes a murderous tyrant. Duncan's son Malcolm stages a revolt against Macbeth, during which a guilt-ridden Lady Macbeth commits suicide. During battle, Macbeth encounters Macduff, a refugee nobleman whose wife and children had earlier been murdered on Macbeth's orders. Upon realising that he will die if he duels with Macduff, Macbeth at first refuses to do so. But when Macduff explains that if Macbeth surrenders he will be subjected to ridicule by his former subjects, Macbeth vows, "I will not yield to kiss the ground before young Malcolm's feet, to be baited by a rabble's curse." He chooses instead to fight Macduff to the death. Macduff kills and beheads Macbeth, and the play ends with Prince Malcolm becoming king.


title: Macbeth, King of Scotland

text: The likely reason for Shakespeare's unflattering depiction of Macbeth is that King James VI and I was descended from Malcolm III via the House of Bruce and his own House of Stewart, whereas Macbeth's line died out with the death of Lulach six months after his step-father. King James was also thought to be a descendant of Banquo through Walter Stewart, 6th High Steward of Scotland.


title: Macbeth, King of Scotland

text: In a 1959 essay, Boris Pasternak compared Shakespeare's characterisation of Macbeth to Raskolnikov, the protagonist of "Crime and Punishment" by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Pasternak explained that neither character begins as a murderer, but becomes one by a set of faulty rationalisations and a belief that he is above the law.


title: Macbeth, King of Scotland

text: Lady Macbeth has also become famous in her own right. In his 1865 novel "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District", Nikolai Leskov updated "The Tragedy of Macbeth" so that it takes place among the Imperial Russian merchant class. In an ironic twist, however, Leskov reverses the gender roles – the woman is the murderer and the man is the instigator. Leskov's novel was the basis for Dmitri Shostakovich's 1936 opera of the same name.


title: Macbeth, King of Scotland

text: In modern times, Dorothy Dunnett's novel "King Hereafter" aims to portray a historical Macbeth, but proposes that Macbeth and his rival and sometime ally, Thorfinn of Orkney, are one and the same (Thorfinn is his birth name and Macbeth his baptismal name). John Cargill Thompson's play "Macbeth Speaks 1997", a reworking of his earlier "Macbeth Speaks", is a monologue delivered by the historical Macbeth, aware of what Shakespeare and posterity have done to him. Scottish author Nigel Tranter based one of his historical novels, "MacBeth the King", on the historical figure. David Greig's 2010 play "Dunsinane" takes Macbeth's downfall at Dunsinane as its starting point, with his reign portrayed as long and stable, in contrast to Malcolm's. British Touring Shakespeare also produced in 2010 "A Season Before the Tragedy of Macbeth" by dramatist Gloria Carreño describing events from the murder of "Lord Gillecomgain", Gruoch Macbeth's first husband, to the fateful letter in the first act of Shakespeare's tragedy


title: Macbeth, King of Scotland

text: Macbeth appears as a character in the television series "Gargoyles" with the Gargoyle Demona playing a crucial role in both his rise and fall as King of Scotland. He was voiced by John Rhys-Davies.


title: Android TV

text: Android TV is a smart TV operating system based on Android and developed by Google for television sets, digital media players, set-top boxes, and soundbars. A successor to Google TV, it features a user interface designed around content discovery and voice search, content aggregation from various media apps and services, and integration with other recent Google technologies such as Assistant, Cast, and Knowledge Graph.


title: Android TV

text: The platform was first unveiled in June 2014, and was first made available on the Nexus Player that November. The platform has been adopted as smart TV middleware by companies such as Sony and Sharp, while Android TV products have also been adopted as set-top boxes by a number of IPTV television providers.


title: Android TV

text: A special edition, called Android TV "Operator Tier", is provided to pay television and other service operators that implement Android TV on the device they provide to their subscribers to access media content. In this edition, the operator can customize the home screen and services on the device.


title: Android TV

text: Android TV was first announced at Google I/O in June 2014, as a successor to the commercially unsuccessful Google TV. "The Verge" characterized it as being more in line with other digital media player platforms, but leveraging Google's Knowledge Graph project; Chromecast compatibility; a larger emphasis on search; closer ties to the Android ecosystem (including Google Play Store and integration with other Android families such as Android Wear); and native support for video games, Bluetooth gamepads, and the Google Play Games framework. Some attendees received the platform's development kit, the ADT-1; "The Information" reported that the ADT-1 was based on a scrapped "Nexus TV" launch device that was being developed internally by Google. Google unveiled the first Android TV device, the Nexus Player developed by Asus, at a hardware event in October 2014.


title: Android TV

text: The ADT-2 development kit device was released before the release of Android TV 9.0. Android TV 10 was released on December 10, 2019, together with the ADT-3 development kit. Android TV 11 was released for the ADT-3 on September 22, 2020, while rollouts were planned for original equipment manufacturer partners in subsequent months. Android TV 12 was released on November 30, 2021, with rollouts planned for late 2022. Android TV 13 was released on December 2, 2022 for developers using the ADT-3 development kit.


title: Android TV

text: The Android TV platform is an adaptation of the Android OS for set-top boxes and as integrated software on smart TV hardware. Its home screen uses a vertically-scrolling, row-based interface, including a "content discovery" area populated by suggested content, followed by "Watch Now" rows that surface media content from installed apps. Android TV supports voice input for commands and universal search across multiple services using Google Assistant. With Google assistant, users can also control their Smart Home devices.


title: Android TV

text: Subsequent releases of Android TV brought new features to the operating system, e.g. camera support (with Android TV 9), Auto low-latency mode for gaming (with Android TV 11), 4K UI, Refresh Rate switching & Text scaling (with Android TV 12) among others.


title: Android TV

text: All Android TV devices support Google Cast, allowing media to be played on them from supported apps on other devices in an identical manner to Chromecast. Android TV supports software from the Play Store, including media apps and games (although not all Google Play apps are compatible with Android TV). Some Android TV devices, such as the Nvidia Shield and Razer Forge TV, are also marketed as microconsoles and bundled with a Bluetooth wireless gamepad.


title: Android TV

text: A modified Android TV user interface, branded "Google TV" (unrelated to the company's discontinued smart TV platform of the same name), debuted on the Chromecast with Google TV streaming device, which was released on September 30, 2020, coinciding with the rebranding of the Google Play Movies & TV video-on-demand (VOD) service to Google TV on Android devices. The Google TV interface emphasizes on content recommendations and discovery across different services and installed apps, compared to the stock Android TV interface that is more focused on navigating between individual installed apps. Google TV is compatible with over 10,000 apps built for Android TV, up from the 6,500 available at launch.


title: Android TV

text: , Google TV integrates with 43 streaming services for use in its content aggregation features in the United States:


title: Android TV

text: The Google TV interface was intended to replace the stock Android TV interface by the end of 2022, starting with set-top boxes, dongles, and smart TVs in 2021. Thus far, the Android TV operating system has only received a redesign of its homescreen, called the "Discover" UI, a server-side update that began rolling out in February 2021.


title: Android TV

text: Android TV has been used to power many types of devices, like smart TVs, smart projectors, set-top boxes and dongles.


title: Android TV

text: During Google I/O 2014, Google announced that Sony, Sharp, and TP Vision/Philips would release smart TVs with Android TV integrated in 2015. It was noted that support for handling TV-specific functions, such as input switching and tuning, were natively integrated into the Android platform.


title: Android TV

text: Sony unveiled a range of Bravia smart TVs running Android TV at CES 2015. Sharp released two TV models on June 10, 2015. Philips announced that 80% of their 2015 TVs will run Android TV, the first two models of which were released in June 2015.


title: Android TV

text: Google announced other television hardware partners in January 2016, including Arçelik, Bang & Olufsen, Hisense, RCA, TCL Corporation, Vestel, OnePlus and Realme.


title: Android TV

text: Numerous commercial set-top boxes and dongles have been released using Android TV, most notably Google's Nexus Player, the Nvidia Shield TV, and Xiaomi's Mi Box, Mi Box S, and Mi TV Stick.


title: Android TV

text: Google also released its own Chromecast with Google TV dongle which effectively replaced Nexus Player.


title: Android TV

text: Also, several pay television providers have released IPTV services using Android TV-based hardware as opposed to a proprietary set-top box.


title: Nwankwo Kanu

text: Nwankwo Kanu (born 1 August 1976) is a Nigerian former professional footballer who played as a forward. He was a member of the Nigeria national team, and played for Nigerian team Iwuanyanwu Nationale, Dutch side Ajax, Inter Milan of Italy, and English clubs Arsenal, West Bromwich Albion and Portsmouth.


title: Nwankwo Kanu

text: Kanu won a UEFA Champions League medal, a UEFA Cup medal, three FA Cup medals and two African Player of the Year awards amongst others. He is one of few players to have won the Premier League, FA Cup, Champions League, UEFA Cup and an Olympic Gold Medal. He made the third-most substitute appearances in Premier League history, appearing from the bench 118 times, and is regarded as one of the best players in African football history.


title: Nwankwo Kanu

text: He is also a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, and African brand ambassador for digital TV operator StarTimes. He is also the owner of Kanu Sports TV, an Internet sports television company.


title: Nwankwo Kanu

text: Born in Owerri, Imo state, Nigeria, Kanu began his career at Nigerian league club Federation Works, before moving to Iwuanyanwu Nationale. After a notable performance at the U-17 World Championships, he was signed by Dutch Eredivisie AFC Ajax in 1993 for an undisclosed fee. He made his Ajax debut that year and went on to score 25 goals in 54 appearances. Kanu also came on as a sub in Ajax's 1995 UEFA Champions League final win over AC Milan. And the next year he started in the 1996 UEFA Champions League Final against Juventus.


title: Nwankwo Kanu

text: In 1996, Ajax sold Kanu to Serie A side Inter Milan for around $4.7 million. That summer he captained the Nigeria national team that won gold at the Olympics, and scored two late goals in the semi-finals against powerhouses Brazil to overturn a 2–3 scoreline into a 4–3 win in extra time. Kanu was also named African Footballer of the Year for that year.


title: Nwankwo Kanu

text: However, soon after returning from the Olympics, Kanu underwent a medical examination at Inter, which revealed a serious heart defect, and it was believed by doctors that his career was over. He underwent successful surgery in November to replace an aortic valve, and did not return to his club until April 1997. In interviews, Kanu frequently cites his faith as a Christian, and has often mentioned this trying time of his career as an occasion when he prayed to God. Kanu's experience also led to his founding the Kanu Heart Foundation, an organisation that helps predominantly young African children who suffer heart defects and whose work was expanded to provide aid for homeless children in 2008.


title: Nwankwo Kanu

text: In February 1999, after just twelve league games and one goal for Inter, Kanu was signed by Arsenal for approximately £4.15 million. He made his debut for Arsenal, against Sheffield United in the FA Cup. With the score 1–1 and ten minutes to go, the Sheffield United goalkeeper Alan Kelly kicked the ball out of touch so that treatment could be given to Lee Morris. When the ball was thrown back into play by Ray Parlour, although it was intended for Kelly, Kanu chased the throw-in down the right wing unchallenged and centered the ball for Marc Overmars, who scored to make the match 2–1. After the match, Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger accepted that it was not correct sportsmanship and offered to re-play the match which was again won by Arsenal.


title: Nwankwo Kanu

text: Despite the events overshadowing his debut, Kanu's career was quickly revived at Arsenal. He scored his first goal for the club in the next round of the cup against Derby County, coming off the bench to net the only goal of the game. He quickly became known for his goal scoring prowess from the bench, scoring important goals against Sheffield Wednesday, Tottenham Hotspur and Aston Villa as a substitute. He became very popular among the fans for his two-fingered salute which started in 1999 against Middlesbrough – something that he later explained was based on the team's nickname, The Gunners.


title: Nwankwo Kanu

text: Kanu was named African Footballer of the Year for the second time in 1999. In the 1999–2000 season he scored 17 times in 50 matches for the Gunners, including a hat-trick in fifteen minutes against Chelsea in October 1999 to turn a 2–0 deficit into a 3–2 victory. In August 2001, Arsenal rejected a bid from Fulham of around £7m for Kanu. However, Kanu's appearances for Arsenal gradually became less frequent, particularly after the emergence of Thierry Henry as Arsenal's first choice striker with Kanu being mainly used as a substitute. Kanu then won the 2003 FA Cup with Arsenal. Along with other famous players, such as Henry and Robert Pires, Kanu is a member of the "Invincibles", the Arsenal side that finished the 2003–04 season of the Premier League undefeated. He played 197 games for Arsenal, scoring 44 goals. In the summer of 2004, after his contract with Arsenal ended, he moved to West Bromwich Albion on a free transfer. In 2008, Kanu was voted 13th in the "Gunners' Greatest 50 Players" poll.


title: Nwankwo Kanu

text: In the summer of 2006, Kanu played as a guest for Arsenal in Dennis Bergkamp's testimonial game, the first match to be played in Arsenal's new Emirates Stadium. The game was tied 1–1 when Kanu scored the winning goal, making him the third person to score in the stadium. At the end of the match, Kanu joined the rest of the Arsenal side in hoisting the retired Dutchman on their shoulders as fans gave him a standing ovation.


title: Nwankwo Kanu

text: He remains a popular figure at Arsenal, being applauded when he appears at the Emirates Stadium. During his time with the club, he wore the number 25 shirt.


title: Nwankwo Kanu

text: West Bromwich Albion had just been promoted to the Premier League for the second time in the space of two years. Kanu started as a regular for the club, making his debut in a 1–1 draw away at Blackburn Rovers on 14 August 2004. He scored his first goal for Albion on 18 September 2004, an 88th-minute equalizer in a 1–1 home draw against Fulham. In a match against Middlesbrough on 14 November 2004, Kanu was guilty of an incredible miss in injury time, with Albion 2–1 down. Kanu had sent a low cross over the bar from a yard away from the goal line. Manager Bryan Robson was seen in TV footage mouthing the words "How did he miss that?", and Kanu's howler was crowned "Miss of the Season" by many media outlets in their end-of-season reviews. Nevertheless, the 2004–05 season was ultimately a memorable one for West Bromwich Albion, as they became the first club to avoid relegation from the Premier League after being bottom of the table at Christmas.


title: Nwankwo Kanu

text: One of the most memorable games of the 2005–06 season for Kanu came with the visit of his former club Arsenal to The Hawthorns on 15 October 2005. Philippe Senderos put the visitors ahead in the 17th minute, but Kanu equalised shortly before half time. West Brom went on to win the match 2–1 with a spectacular strike from Darren Carter. It was their first home win over Arsenal since 1973, and the first time that they had come from behind to win a Premier League game. But such highlights were rare for Albion that season, and the club was relegated at the end of 2005–06. Kanu's contract had expired, and he chose not to renew it. In his two years at The Hawthorns he made a total of 58 appearances – 16 of them as a substitute – and scored nine goals.


title: Nwankwo Kanu

text: Kanu was a free agent following his departure from West Brom, and he signed for Portsmouth on a one-year deal shortly before the start of the 2006–07 season. Pompey had undergone a revival in the second half of the previous campaign, following the return of Harry Redknapp as manager, avoiding relegation by four points after being in serious danger at the turn of the year. At the start of the 2006–07 season, they were undefeated in their first five games, during which they did not concede a single goal. Kanu made his debut for Portsmouth as a substitute against Blackburn Rovers on 19 August 2006, the opening day of the 2006–07 Premier League season. He scored twice and missed a penalty. Kanu went on to finish the season as the top goalscorer for Portsmouth, with 12 goals altogether. He then signed a new one year deal with the club.


title: Nwankwo Kanu

text: In his second season at Portsmouth, Kanu scored in both the FA Cup 1–0 semi-final win against West Bromwich Albion and the 1–0 win in the final against Cardiff City, earning him a third FA Cup winner's medal.


title: Nwankwo Kanu

text: His first goal of the 2008–09 season put Portsmouth 2–0 up in their eventual 2–2 UEFA Cup draw with Italian club AC Milan. He later scored the winning goal against Bolton Wanderers, which ensured Pompey's mathematical safety. It was his only Premier League goal of 2008–09. He re-signed with Pompey in August 2010, with an eye on becoming a coach when he retired. Kanu signed a three-year deal and kept the number 27 shirt, but was not a regular starter throughout the course of the season and only managed two goals.


title: Nwankwo Kanu

text: During the 2011–12 season, his playing time was reduced, appearing only from the bench. After the departure of Steve Cotterill, and the arrival of Michael Appleton, he was also removed from the bench, due to fitness and injury problems. By May 2012, aided by a point deduction for entering administration Portsmouth had found themselves in a relegation battle which eventually ended in them relegated to League One. To cut costs the Administrator hoped to reach agreement to terminate the contracts of Kanu along with six other players due to them being the highest-earning players at the club. On 9 July 2012, it was announced that Kanu and Aaron Mokoena were expected to leave the club after failing to attend the first day back at pre-season training. Kanu threatened to sue Portsmouth for unpaid back wages. On 30 July, Kanu agreed to leave Portsmouth, but he reiterated that he was still in a dispute over the unpaid wages that the club owed him. In April 2013 he confirmed that he had dropped the case and let the club off the £3 million he claimed he was owed.


title: Nwankwo Kanu

text: Kanu was a member of the Nigeria national team from 1994 to 2010, making his debut in a friendly against Sweden. Earlier on at the start of his career, Kanu was instrumental in Nigeria's overall success at the 1993 FIFA U-17 World Championship in Japan and their subsequent 2–1 victory over Ghana in the final. With five goals, he was the second joint-scorer in the tournament with Peter Anosike and Manuel Neira, behind compatriot and captain Wilson Oruma.


title: Nwankwo Kanu

text: As well as winning the Olympic gold in the football event at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, where he scored the winning goal in the 4–3 semi-final win over Brazil, his second goal of the match, Kanu participated at the 1998 and 2002 FIFA World Cups. On 24 June 2010, Kanu ended his international career following Nigeria's exit from the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. The Super Eagles lost their group matches against Argentina and Greece, before drawing 2–2 with South Korea. He won 86 caps and scored 13 goals for his country and was the joint most capped Nigerian player of all-time alongside Muda Lawal, until Joseph Yobo surpassed both players in 2012, winning his 87th cap. Despite being a striker, he wore the number 4 shirt for the national team.


title: Nwankwo Kanu

text: Despite his physical strength, slender frame, and large stature of 1.97 m (6 ft 6 in), Kanu was a talented player, who was quick and elegant in possession, and who possessed an excellent touch on the ball and nimble footwork; he was also highly regarded in the media for his technical skills, dribbling ability, and close control, as well as his flair and use of feints, which made him an unpredictable player on the pitch. He was also an intelligent player, who possessed good vision and movement, as well as being a good passer, who had the ability to read the game and an eye for the final ball, which – along with his timing and finishing ability – allowed him both to score and create goals; however, he also lacked significant pace, and drew criticism at times in the media over his work-rate, "languid" playing style, and occasional tendency to miss easy goalscoring opportunities. Although he was often deployed as a centre-forward or striker, his creativity also allowed him to operate in a more withdrawn attacking role behind or supporting the main striker, or even in an advanced playmaking role. Although his height made him a strong presence in the air, he was more adept at scoring with his feet than with his head, despite his size, although he improved upon his aerial game in his later career. He was also known for his determination and ability to hold-up the ball with his back to goal. Moreover, his ability to score decisive goals when coming off the bench earned him a reputation as a "super sub" in the media during his time with Arsenal. However, despite being a gifted player, he was also known for being inconsistent, and his congenital heart defect is thought to have had a negative impact on his career and fitness, although he was able to improve his stamina following corrective surgery through his training. He is considered by pundits to be one of the greatest African players of all time, and by some, as the greatest Nigerian player ever.


title: Nwankwo Kanu

text: Kanu is a native of Abia State, southeast Nigeria, and a member of the Aro sub-group of the Igbo ethnic group. Nwankwo means "Child born on Nkwo market day" in the Igbo language.


title: Nwankwo Kanu

text: Kanu's younger brother, Christopher, was also a footballer, who played as a defender; he also has another younger brother, Ogbonna. Kanu is a Christian.


title: Nwankwo Kanu

text: Kanu was born with a congenital heart defect, which impeded his aortic valve from closing properly; it was discovered and operated on in 1996. Although it was feared that he would not play again, and that it would affect his career, he made a full recovery. He undergoes an annual medical check-up for the condition. In March 2014, he successfully underwent corrective heart surgery once again, in the United States.


title: Nwankwo Kanu

text: Kanu's own experience with a congenital heart defect moved him to set up the "Kanu Heart Foundation" in 2000, a foundation which aims to tackle homelessness, and which also built five hospitals in Africa to treat children with undiagnosed heart disease and provide them surgery.


title: Lee Daniels

text: Lee Daniels (born December 24, 1959) is an American film and television producer, director and screenwriter. His first producer credit was "Monster's Ball" (2001), for which Halle Berry won the Academy Award for Best Actress, making Daniels the first African-American film producer to solely produce an Oscar-winning film. He made his directorial debut with "Shadowboxer" in 2005, and has since then directed the films "Precious" (2009), "The Paperboy" (2012, which he co-wrote), "The Butler" (2013) and "The United States vs. Billie Holiday" (2021). Of these, "Precious" was the most critically acclaimed, and was nominated for six Academy Awards, including two nominations for Daniels, for Best Director and Best Picture. Other films he has produced include "The Woodsman" (2004), "Tennessee" (2008), "Pimp" (2018) and "Concrete Cowboy" (2020).


title: Lee Daniels

text: Daniels has co-created and co-executive produced the TV series "Empire" (2015–2020) and "Star" (2016–2019), both set in the music industry.


title: Lee Daniels

text: Daniels was born on December 24, 1959, in West Philly, the eldest son of Clara May (Watson) and William Louis Daniels. Daniels has four siblings - Cheryl, Lydia (aka Girlie), Maynard and Leah. His younger sister, Leah Daniels-Butler, is a television and film casting director credited with casting many of his projects. As a teenager, Daniels mother arranged for a neighbor's family who was a butler for owner of Philadelphia Flyers hockey team to use that owner's address in Radnor so that Lee could attend the public Radnor High School. In 1975, when Daniels was 15 years old, his father, who was a police officer, was killed in the line of duty. He graduated from Radnor High School in 1978.


title: Lee Daniels

text: After graduating from Radnor, Daniels attended Lindenwood University in St. Charles, Missouri. But he soon realized the liberal arts school was not for him, and he moved to Hollywood, eventually working as a receptionist in a nursing agency. Before long, Daniels started his own nursing agency, specializing in HIV/AIDS treatment. Eventually, he sold his nursing agency and segued into casting. He began his career in entertainment as a casting director and manager after a chance meeting with a Hollywood producer, working on such projects as "Under the Cherry Moon" and "Purple Rain". He continued managing talent. The documentary "My Big Break" features Daniels early in his career when he was managing actor Wes Bentley, who starred as Ricky Fitts in "American Beauty". In the documentary, Daniels comments on Bentley's reluctance to capitalize on his newfound celebrity status.


title: Lee Daniels

text: "Monster's Ball", the debut production of Lee Daniels Entertainment, was a critical and box office success. Halle Berry won the Oscar for Best Actress; the film was also nominated for Best Original Screenplay. Daniels said he did not attend the Oscars when the film won, citing his challenges with addiction and his struggle over whether he "deserved" to attend, according to an emotional interview on MSNBC in 2019.


title: Lee Daniels

text: His 2004 production "The Woodsman", starring Kevin Bacon, Kyra Sedgwick, and Mos Def, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. It went on to garner three nominations at the 2005 Independent Spirit Awards, the CICAE Arthouse Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, the Jury Prize at the Deauville International Film Festival, and a "Special Mention for Excellence in Filmmaking" award from the National Board of Review. Former president Bill Clinton persuaded Daniels to produce public service announcements to encourage young people of color to vote. The campaign was launched in March 2004 and featured Grammy winners LL Cool J and Alicia Keys.


title: Lee Daniels

text: His first directorial effort, 2006's "Shadowboxer", debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival. It starred Helen Mirren, Cuba Gooding Jr., Stephen Dorff, Vanessa Ferlito, Mo'Nique, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Macy Gray. It was nominated for Best New Director at the San Sebastian Film Festival.


title: Lee Daniels

text: His 2008 production "Tennessee" was written by Russell Schaumberg and directed by Aaron Woodley ("Rhinoceros Eyes"); the film is about two brothers, played by Adam Rothenberg and Ethan Peck, who travel from New Mexico to Tennessee to search for their estranged father. Along the way they meet Krystal (Mariah Carey), an aspiring singer who flees her controlling husband (Lance Reddick) to join them on their journey.


title: Lee Daniels

text: His 2009 film "Precious" told the story of an obese, illiterate, 16-year-old girl (Gabourey Sidibe) who lives in a Section 8 tenement in Harlem. She has been impregnated twice by her father, Carl, and suffers long-term physical, sexual, and emotional abuse from her unemployed mother, Mary (Mo'Nique). Carey appeared as a social worker. The film screened at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival and went on to garner widespread acclaim. Mo'Nique won the academy award for best supporting actress, Daniels was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director and the film received a Best Picture nomination. It was a financial success grossing $63 million worldwide against a budget of $10 million.


title: Lee Daniels

text: Daniels directed "The Paperboy" (2012), based on the 1995 novel by Pete Dexter who penned the original script which was further developed by Daniels; it starred Matthew McConaughey, Zac Efron, John Cusack, and Nicole Kidman. The film competed for the Palme d'Or at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival.


title: Lee Daniels

text: He directed the historical drama film "The Butler" (2013), starring Forest Whitaker, John Cusack, Jane Fonda, Mariah Carey, Terrence Howard, Alan Rickman, and Oprah Winfrey. "The Butler" received positive reviews from critics and grossed over $100 million in the United States against a budget of $30 million.


title: Lee Daniels

text: "Empire", a television series created by Daniels, premiered on January 7, 2015. Daniels directed the first episode and co-wrote it with "The Butler" screenwriter Danny Strong. The series stars Terrence Howard and Taraji P. Henson, and is about a family's music empire.


title: Lee Daniels

text: In May 2021, Daniels and his production company Lee Daniels Entertainment had extended its overall deal with 20th Television.


title: Lee Daniels

text: In January 2022, Netflix won a bidding war for an exorcism styled horror thriller film directed by Daniels for upwards of 65 million dollars. In April 2022, it was announced that Tasha Smith will star in the film. In April 2022, it was announced that Daniels will develop and direct a limited series based on Sammy Davis Jr. for 20th Television and Hulu, with Elijah Kelley starring as Davis.


title: Lee Daniels

text: In June 2016, the Human Rights Campaign released a video in tribute to the victims of the Orlando nightclub shooting; in the video, Daniels and others told the stories of the people killed there.


title: Lee Daniels

text: In 2010, Grace Hightower De Niro, who appeared in "Precious", presented Daniels with the Pratt Institute's Creative Spirit Award.


title: Lee Daniels

text: On December 2, 2016, Daniels received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his contributions to the television industry.


title: Lee Daniels

text: On February 8, 2018, amfAR (The Foundation for AIDS Research) paid tribute to Daniels at the 20th annual amfAR Gala New York. Actress and musician Queen Latifah presented him the amfAR Award of Courage, describing his past work with HIV/AIDS patients. She also stated that as a gifted creative force, he creates "unfailingly human" characters, who are "often striving to rise above difficult circumstances". In his acceptance speech, he spoke about a generation lost to AIDS and said that the crisis had taken at least 40 of his personal friends. In the fight against AIDS, he said it is important to "step up when it matters".


title: Lee Daniels

text: On September 16, 2015, in a "Rolling Stone" interview, Daniels was asked about actor Terrence Howard who said that his first wife "was talking to him real strong, that he lost his mind and slapped her in front of their kids" and that he got physical with his second wife too. Daniels excused the domestic violence and called Howard a "poor boy", saying that Howard "ain't done nothing different than Marlon Brando or Sean Penn”. A week later, Daniels was sued by Penn in a $10-million-dollar defamation lawsuit. The lawsuit stated that "Daniels falsely equated Penn with Howard and that Penn unlike Howard had never been arrested, much less convicted, for domestic violence, as his ex-wives including Madonna would have confirmed and attested." Penn dropped the lawsuit in May 2016 after Daniels retracted his statement and apologized.


title: Lee Daniels

text: Daniels lives in Manhattan. He is gay. He and his then-partner, casting director Billy Hopkins, adopted Daniels's biological niece and nephew, Clara and Liam.


title: Lee Daniels

text: In 2015, Daniels clarified his sexuality by stating that despite being gay men, both he and "Empire" actor Jussie Smollett are sexually fluid.Jussie and I both share the same feeling that, yes, even though we are gay, we’re sexual human beings...And we do occasionally want to sleep with a woman. [Laughs] Maybe once every 10 or 15 years, but it happens! And there are a lot of people who don’t want to hear about that. It’s such a complicated conversation. It's not necessarily the body one is attracted to. You can be sexually attracted to the spirit, the energy, the life force in another person. We're showing life on "Empire", and I won't apologise for it.


title: Bobby Cummines

text: Robert Cummines (born 23 November 1951) is an English former gang leader, protection racketeer, armed robber, and criminal enforcer who was chief executive of Unlock, The National Association of Reformed Offenders from April 1999 until March 2012. Despite being described as a gangster in media, Cummines has refused the label, saying he never considered himself one, instead stating he was a "businessman whose business was crime."


title: Bobby Cummines

text: Robert Cummines was born in Islington, London, the youngest of eight children. His father was a builder.


title: Bobby Cummines

text: He described the moment he decided to get into crime, saying two of his friends were walking with him at a park when one accidentally set off a starting pistol. Two police officers allegedly mistreated the two during interrogations, which led Cummines to speak up, saying that as the two involved were minors, an adult had to be present during questioning. According to Cummines, the two officers then left for a short period and returned with a straight razor which they threw on the ground in front of him, and said that they would arrest him as well for possession of the blade. He was told that if he pleaded guilty to the possession charge, he would only have to pay a 10 shilling fine, whereas if he chose to proceed to a trial, he would likely be convicted and sentenced to time in a borstal. He pleaded guilty and paid the fine. Upon returning to his place of work (a shipping office), where they had read about the guilty plea in the newspaper, he was fired. Cummines said that with a criminal record, it was incredibly difficult to find another job, and so thought "if you're gonna make me a bad guy, I'll show you how bad I can be."


title: Bobby Cummines

text: Cummines began a criminal career at the age of 16, beating up those who owed associates money, but quickly moved on, becoming Britain's youngest armed robber. He expanded into leading a group of criminal enforcers, extortionists and racketeers known as "The Chaps", employing extreme violence in 1970s North London with his fearsome reputation and a sawn-off double-barrel shotgun named "Kennedy" after JFK. He also used a brutal method common in the underworld, filling his shotgun with rock salt instead of buckshot–doing less damage but causing serious pain and removing any forensic evidence. Cummines claims he was taught to dehumanize anyone he killed, to think of them as vermin, saying that if you did think about it then you would think of their families and guilt. He did, however, feel sorry for one death; a hostage in a routine bank heist died due to suffering a serious panic attack, where he vomited and choked on a gag.


title: Bobby Cummines

text: Cummines was sentenced to 18 years when an arms dealer (referred to as "Ernie" in his autobiography) informed and told the authorities almost everything Cummines and his gang had done. Ernie worked with the police to entrap Cummines, telling him he had an Uzi sub-machine gun for sale, allowing multiple armed police to ambush and arrest him. He went to prison and within the first few months he had taken a governor hostage for being "unreasonable". This led authorities to designate him as a class "A" prisoner, causing him to be frequently moved from one prison to another. In his autobiography, Cummines details how he met a broad range of people, from members of the Irish Republican Army to American gangsters.


title: Bobby Cummines

text: Cummines turned his life around in prison after a conversation with Charlie Richardson, who urged him to become educated and earn money without hurting anyone. He began writing poetry and got into contact with Labour MP Tony Benn who was willing to help him and contributed a foreword to his published poems, as well as changing rules so that the aim of prisons was stated to be to "rehabilitate and educate" rather than the free-for-all ethos that Cummines had experienced.


title: Bobby Cummines

text: Cummines has criticised the system of high-security prisons, which places many brilliant criminal minds in one location and thus enables them to teach each other tricks and establish connections. He has said that if he had not wanted to escape criminal life he would have used these techniques, such as building bombs or smuggling illicit goods. He then studied for a degree with the Open University whilst in prison.


title: Bobby Cummines

text: Queen Elizabeth II awarded Cummines the OBE in June 2011 in recognition of his services to reformed offenders.


title: Bobby Cummines

text: His autobiography, "I Am Not A Gangster", was published 15 May 2014 by Random House's Ebury Press imprint.


title: Greater Khorasan

text: Greater Khorāsān, or Khorāsān (; ), is a historical eastern region in the Iranian Plateau between Western and Central Asia. The name "Khorāsān" is Persian and means "where the sun arrives from" or "the Eastern Province". The name was first given to the eastern province of Persia during the Sasanian Empire and was used from the late Middle Ages in distinction to neighbouring Transoxiana. "Greater Khorasan" is today sometimes used to distinguish the larger historical region from the former Khorasan Province of Iran (1906–2004), which roughly encompassed the western half of the historical Greater Khorasan.


title: Greater Khorasan

text: Khorasan comprised the present territories of northeastern Iran, parts of Afghanistan and southern parts of Central Asia. The province was often subdivided into four quarters, such that Nishapur (present-day Iran), Marv (present-day Turkmenistan), Herat and Balkh (present-day Afghanistan) were the centers, respectively, of the westernmost, northernmost, central, and easternmost quarters. In a strict sense of the term, Khorasan stretched as far as the Amu Darya (Oxus) river. However, the name has often been used in a loose sense to include a wider region that included most of Transoxiana (encompassing Bukhara and Samarqand in present-day Uzbekistan), extended westward to the Caspian coast and to the Dasht-e Kavir (Great Salt Desert), southward to Sistan, and eastward to the Pamir Mountains.


title: Greater Khorasan

text: Khorasan was first established as an administrative division in the 6th century (approximately after 520) by the Sasanians, during the reign of Kavad I () or Khosrow I (), which comprised the eastern and northeastern part of the empire. Early Islamic usage often regarded everywhere east of Jibal or what was subsequently termed Iraq Ajami (Persian Iraq), as being included in a vast and loosely-defined region of Khorasan, which might even extend to the Indus Valley and the Pamir Mountains. The boundary between these two was the region surrounding the cities of Gurgan and Qumis. In particular, the Ghaznavids, Seljuqs and Timurids divided their empires into Iraqi and Khorasani regions. Khorasan is believed to have been bounded in the southwest by desert and the town of Tabas, known as "the Gate of Khorasan", from which it extended eastward to the mountains of central Afghanistan. Sources from the 10th century onwards refer to areas in the south of the Hindu Kush as the Khorasan Marches, forming a frontier region between Khorasan and Hindustan.


title: Greater Khorasan

text: First established in the 6th century as one of four administrative (military) divisions by the Sasanian Empire, the scope of the region has varied considerably during its nearly 1,500-year history. Initially, the Khorasan division of the Sasanian Empire covered the northeastern military gains of the empire, at its height including cities such as Nishapur, Herat, Merv, Faryab, Taloqan, Balkh, Bukhara, Badghis, Abiward, Gharjistan, Tus and Sarakhs.


title: Greater Khorasan

text: With the rise of the Umayyad Caliphate, the designation was inherited and likewise stretched as far as their military gains in the east, starting off with the military installations at Nishapur and Merv, slowly expanding eastwards into Tokharistan and Sogdia. Under the Caliphs, Khorasan was the name of one of the three political zones under their dominion (the other two being "Eraq-e Arab" "Arabic Iraq" and "Eraq-e Ajam" "Non-Arabic Iraq or Persian Iraq"). Under the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates, Khorasan was divided into four major sections or quarters ("rub′"), each section based on a single major city: Nishapur, Merv, Herat and Balkh. By the 10th century, Ibn Khordadbeh and the Hudud al-'Alam mentions what roughly encompasses the previous regions of Abarshahr, Tokharistan and Sogdia as "Khwarasan" proper. They further report the southern part of the Hindu Kush, i.e. the regions of Sistan, Rukhkhudh, Zabulistan and Kabul etc. to make up the "Khorasan" "marches", a frontier region between Khorasan and Hindustan.By the late Middle Ages, the term lost its administrative significance, in the west only being loosely applied among the Turko-Persian dynasties of modern Iran to all its territories that lay east and north-east of the Dasht-e Kavir desert. It was therefore subjected to constant change, as the size of their empires changed. In the east, "Khwarasan" likewise became a term associated with the great urban centers of Central Asia. It is mentioned in the Memoirs of Babur that:


title: Greater Khorasan

text: In modern times, the term has been source of great nostalgia and nationalism, especially amongst the Tajiks of Central Asia. Many Tajiks regard Khorasan as an integral part of their national identity, which has preserved an interest in the term, including its meaning and cultural significance, both in common discussion and academia, despite its falling out of political use in the region. According to Ghulam Mohammad Ghobar, Afghanistan's current Persian-speaking territories formed the major portion of Khorasān, as two of the four main capitals of Khorasān (Herat and Balkh) are now located in Afghanistan. Ghobar uses the terms ""Proper Khorasan"" and ""Improper Khorasan"" in his book to distinguish between the usage of Khorasān in its strict sense and its usage in a loose sense. According to him, Proper Khorasan contained regions lying between Balkh in the east, Merv in the north, Sistan in the south, Nishapur in the west and Herat, known as the "Pearl of Khorasan", in the center. Improper Khorasan's boundaries extended to as far as Hazarajat and Kabul in the east, Baluchistan in the south, Transoxiana and Khwarezm in the north, and Damghan and Gorgan in the west.


title: Greater Khorasan

text: Before the region fell to Alexander the Great in 330 BC, it was part of the Persian Achaemenid Empire and prior to that it was occupied by the Medes. The land that became known as Khorasan in geography of Eratosthenes was recognized as Ariana by Greeks at that time, which made up Greater Iran or the land where Zoroastrianism was the dominant religion. The southeastern region of Khorasan fell to the Kushan Empire in the 1st century AD. The Kushan rulers built a capital in modern-day Afghanistan at Bagram and are believed to have built the famous Buddhas of Bamiyan. Numerous Buddhist temples and buried cities have been found in Afghanistan. However, the region of Khorasan remained predominantly Zoroastrian but there were also Manichaeists, sun worshippers, Christians, Pagans, Shamanists, Buddhists, Jews, Hindus and others. One of the three great fire-temples of the Sassanids "Azar-burzin Mehr" is situated near Sabzevar in Iran. The boundary of the region began changing until the Kushans and Sassanids merged to form the Kushano-Sassanian civilization.


title: Greater Khorasan

text: During the Sasanian era, likely in the reign of Khusrow I, Persia was divided into four regions (known as "kust" Middle Persian), Khwārvarān in the west, apāxtar in the north, nīmrūz in the south and Khorasan in the east. Since the Sasanian territories were more or less remained stable up to Islamic conquests, it can be concluded that Sasanian Khorasan was bordered to the south by Sistan and Kerman, to the west by the central deserts of modern Iran, and to the east by China and India.


title: Greater Khorasan

text: In the Sasanian era, Khorasan was further divided into four smaller regions, and each region was ruled by a marzban. These four regions were Nishapur, Marv, Herat and Balkh.


title: Greater Khorasan

text: Khorasan in the east saw some conflict with the Hephthalites who became the new rulers in the area but the borders remained stable. Being the eastern parts of the Sassanids and further away from Arabia, Khorasan region was conquered after the remaining Persia. The last Sassanid king of Persia, Yazdgerd III, moved the throne to Khorasan following the Arab invasion in the western parts of the empire. After the assassination of the king, Khorasan was conquered by Arab Muslims in 647 AD. Like other provinces of Persia it became a province of the Umayyad Caliphate.


title: Greater Khorasan

text: The first movement against the Arab conquest was led by Abu Muslim Khorasani between 747 and 750. Originally from Isfahan, scholars believe Abu Muslim was probably Persian. It's possible he may have been born a slave. According to the Ancient Persian historian Al-Shahrastani, he was a Kaysanite. This revolutionary Shi'a movement rejected the three Caliphs that had preceded Ali.


title: Greater Khorasan

text: Abu Muslim helped the Abbasids come to power but was later killed by Al-Mansur, an Abbasid Caliph. The first kingdom independent from Arab rule was established in Khorasan by Tahir Phoshanji in 821, but it seems that it was more a matter of political and territorial gain. Tahir had helped the Caliph subdue other nationalistic movements in other parts of Persia such as Maziar's movement in Tabaristan.


title: Greater Khorasan

text: Other major independent dynasties who ruled over Khorasan were the Saffarids from Zaranj (861–1003), Samanids from Bukhara (875–999), Ghaznavids from Ghazni (963–1167), Seljuqs (1037–1194), Khwarezmids (1077–1231), Ghurids (1149–1212), and Timurids (1370–1506). In 1221, Genghis Khan's son Tolui oversaw the Mongol subjugation of Khorasan, carrying out the task "with a thoroughness from which that region has never recovered."


title: Greater Khorasan

text: Under Caliph Umar (), the Rashidun Caliphate seized nearly the entire Persia from the Sasanian Empire. However, the areas of Khorasan weren't conquered until during the caliphate of Uthman (). The Rashidun commanders Ahnaf ibn Qays and Abd Allah ibn Amir were assigned to lead the invasion of Khorasan. In late 651, the Rashidun army defeated the combined forces of the Sasanian and the First Turkic Khaganate in the Battle of the Oxus River. The next year, Ibn Amir concluded a peace treaty with Kanadbak, an Iranian nobleman and the "kanarang" of Tus. The Sasanian rebel Burzin Shah, of the Karen family, revolted against Ibn Amir, though the latter crushed the rebels in the Battle of Nishapur. The Rashidun troops marched towards Herat and seized the city, concluding another treaty with its governor.


title: Greater Khorasan

text: After the invasion of Persia under Rashidun was completed in five years and almost all of the Persian territories came under Arab control, it also inevitable created new problems for the caliphate. Pockets of tribal resistance continued for centuries in the Afghan territories. During the 7th century, Arab armies made their way into the region of Afghanistan from Khorasan. A second problem was as a corollary to the Muslim conquest of Persia, the Muslims became neighbors of the city states of Transoxiana. Although Transoxiana was included in the loosely defined "Turkestan" region, only the ruling elite of Transoxiana was partially of Turkic origins whereas the local population was mostly a diverse mix of local Iranian populations. As the Arabs reached Transoxiana following the conquest of the Sassanid Persian Empire, local Iranian-Turkic and Arab armies clashed over the control of Transoxiana's Silk Road cities. In particular, the Turgesh under the leadership of Suluk, and Khazars under Barjik clashed with their Arab neighbours in order to control this economically important region. Two notable Umayyad generals, Qutayba ibn Muslim and Nasr ibn Sayyar, were instrumental in the eventual conquest. In July 738, at the age of 74, Nasr was appointed as governor of Khorasan. Despite his age, he was widely respected both for his military record, his knowledge of the affairs of Khorasan and his abilities as a statesman. Julius Wellhausen wrote of him that "His age did not affect the freshness of his mind, as is testified not only by his deeds, but also by the verses in which he gave expression to his feelings till the very end of his life". However, in the climate of the times, his nomination owed more to his appropriate tribal affiliation than his personal qualities. The problems of Transoxiana could be resolved, although the Umayyad was on decline and being replaced by the Abbasid.


title: Greater Khorasan

text: In 724, immediately after the rise of Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik (r. 724–743) to the throne, Asad's brother Khalid al-Qasri was appointed to the important post of governor of Iraq, with responsibility over the entire Islamic East, which he held until 738. Khalid in turn named Asad as governor of Khorasan. The two brothers thus became, according to Patricia Crone, "among the most prominent men of the Marwanid period". Asad's arrival in Khorasan found the province in peril: his predecessor, Muslim ibn Sa'id al-Kilabi, had just attempted a campaign against Ferghana and suffered a major defeat, the so-called "Day of Thirst", at the hands of the Turgesh Turks and the Soghdian principalities of Transoxiana that had risen up against Muslim rule.


title: Greater Khorasan

text: From the early days of the Muslim conquests, Arab armies were divided into regiments drawn from individual tribes or tribal confederations ("butun" or "‘asha‘ir"). Despite the fact that many of these groupings were recent creations, created for reasons of military efficiency rather than any common ancestry, they soon developed a strong and distinct identity. by the beginning of the Umayyad period, this system progressed to the formation of ever-larger super-groupings, culminating in the two super-groups: the northern Arab Mudaris or Qaysis, and the south Arabs or "Yemenis" ("Yaman"), dominated by the Azd and Rabi'ah tribes. By the 8th century, this division had become firmly established across the Caliphate and was a source of constant internal instability, as the two groups formed in essence two rival political parties, jockeying for power and separated by a fierce hatred for each other. During Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik's reign, the Umayyad government appointed Mudaris as governors in Khorasan, except for Asad ibn Abdallah al-Qasri's tenure in 735–738. Nasr's appointment came four months after Asad's death. In the interim, the sources report variously that the province was run either by the Syrian general Ja'far ibn Hanzala al-Bahrani or by Asad's lieutenant Juday' al-Kirmani. At any rate, the sources agree that al-Kirmani stood at the time as the most prominent man in Khorasan and should have been the clear choice for governor. His Yemeni roots (he was the leader of the Azd in Khorasan), however, made him unpalatable to the Caliph.


title: Greater Khorasan

text: Khorasan became the headquarters of the Abbasid Revolution against the Umayyads. It was led by Abu Muslim, who himself belonged to Khorasan. This province was part of Iranian world that had been heavily colonised by Arab tribes following the Muslim conquest with the intent of replacing Umayyad dynasty which is proved to be successful under the sign of the Black Standard.


title: Greater Khorasan

text: Between the early 16th and early 18th centuries, parts of Khorasan were contested between the Safavids and the Uzbeks. A part of the Khorasan region was conquered in 1722 by the Ghilji Pashtuns from Kandahar and became part of the Hotaki dynasty from 1722 to 1729. Nader Shah recaptured Khorasan in 1729 and chose Mashhad as the capital of Persia. Following his assassination in 1747, the eastern parts of Khorasan, including Herat was annexed with the Durrani Empire. Mashhad area was under control of Nader Shah's grandson Shahrukh Afshar until it was captured by the Qajar dynasty in 1796. In 1856, the Iranians, under the Qajar dynasty, briefly recaptured Herat; by the Treaty of Paris of 1857, signed between Iran and the British Empire to end the Anglo-Persian War, the Iranian troops withdrew from Herat. Later, in 1881, Iran relinquished its claims to a part of the northern areas of Khorasan to the Russian Empire, principally comprising Merv, by the Treaty of Akhal (also known as the "Treaty of Akhal-Khorasan").


title: Greater Khorasan

text: Khorasan has had a great cultural importance among other regions in Greater Iran. The literary New Persian language developed in Khorasan and Transoxiana and gradually supplanted the Parthian language. The New Persian literature arose and flourished in Khorasan and Transoxiana where the early Iranian dynasties such as Tahirids, Samanids, Saffirids and Ghaznavids (a Turco-Persian dynasty) were based. The early Persian poets such as Rudaki, Shahid Balkhi, Abu al-Abbas Marwazi, Abu Hafas Sughdi, and others were from Khorasan. Moreover, Ferdowsi and Rumi were also from Khorasan.


title: Greater Khorasan

text: Until the devastating Mongol invasion of the 13th century, Khorasan remained the cultural capital of Persia. It has produced scientists such as Avicenna, Al-Farabi, Al-Biruni, Omar Khayyam, Al-Khwarizmi, Abu Ma'shar al-Balkhi (known as Albumasar or Albuxar in the west), Alfraganus, Abu Wafa, Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, Sharaf al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī, and many others who are widely well known for their significant contributions in various domains such as mathematics, astronomy, medicine, physics, geography, and geology. Khorasan artisans contributed to the spread of technology and goods along the ancient trade routes have been traced to this ancient culture, including art objects, textiles and zoomorphic metalworks. Decorative antecedents of the famous "singing bowls" of Asia may have been invented in ancient Khorasan.


title: Greater Khorasan

text: In Islamic theology, jurisprudence and philosophy, and in Hadith collection, many of the greatest Islamic scholars came from Khorasan, namely Imam Bukhari, Imam Muslim, Abu Dawood, Al-Tirmidhi, Al-Nasa'i, Al-Ghazali, Al-Juwayni, Abu Mansur Maturidi, Fakhruddin al-Razi, and others. Shaykh Tusi, a Shi'a scholar, the grandfather of Imam Abu Hanifa was from Khorasan and Al-Zamakhshari, the famous Mutazilite scholar, also lived in Khorasan.


title: Foot-and-mouth disease

text: Foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) or hoof-and-mouth disease (HMD) is an infectious and sometimes fatal viral disease that affects cloven-hoofed animals, including domestic and wild bovids. The virus causes a high fever lasting two to six days, followed by blisters inside the mouth and near the hoof that may rupture and cause lameness.


title: Foot-and-mouth disease

text: FMD has very severe implications for animal farming, since it is highly infectious and can be spread by infected animals comparatively easily through contact with contaminated farming equipment, vehicles, clothing, and feed, and by domestic and wild predators. Its containment demands considerable efforts in vaccination, strict monitoring, trade restrictions, quarantines, and the culling of both infected and healthy (uninfected) animals.


title: Foot-and-mouth disease

text: Susceptible animals include cattle, water buffalo, sheep, goats, pigs, antelope, deer, and bison. It has also been known to infect hedgehogs and elephants; llamas and alpacas may develop mild symptoms, but are resistant to the disease and do not pass it on to others of the same species. In laboratory experiments, mice, rats, and chickens have been artificially infected, but they are not believed to contract the disease under natural conditions. Cattle, Asian and African buffalo, sheep, and goats can become carriers following an acute infection, meaning they are still infected with a small amount of virus but appear healthy. Animals can be carriers for up to 1–2 years and are considered very unlikely to infect other animals, although laboratory evidence suggests that transmission from carriers is possible.


title: Foot-and-mouth disease

text: Humans are only extremely rarely infected by "foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV)". (Humans, particularly young children, can be affected by hand, foot, and mouth disease (HFMDV), which is often confused for FMDV. Similarly, HFMDV is a viral infection belonging to the Picornaviridae family, but it is distinct from FMDV. HFMDV also affects cattle, sheep, and swine.)


title: Foot-and-mouth disease

text: The virus responsible for FMD is an aphthovirus, "foot-and-mouth disease virus". Infection occurs when the virus particle is taken into a cell of the host. The cell is then forced to manufacture thousands of copies of the virus, and eventually bursts, releasing the new particles in the blood. The virus is genetically highly variable, which limits the effectiveness of vaccination. The disease was first documented in 1870.


title: Foot-and-mouth disease

text: The incubation period for FMD virus has a range between one and 12 days. The disease is characterized by high fever that declines rapidly after two to three days, blisters inside the mouth that lead to excessive secretion of stringy or foamy saliva and to drooling, and blisters on the feet that may rupture and cause lameness. Adult animals may suffer weight loss from which they do not recover for several months, as well as swelling in the testicles of mature males, and cows' milk production can decline significantly. Though most animals eventually recover from FMD, the disease can lead to myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle) and death, especially in newborn animals. Some infected ruminants remain asymptomatic carriers, but they nonetheless carry the virus and may be able to transmit it to others. Pigs cannot serve as asymptomatic carriers.


title: Foot-and-mouth disease

text: Subclinical (asymptomatic) infections can be classified as neoteric or persistent based on when they occur and whether the animal is infectious. Neoteric subclinical infections are acute infections, meaning they occur soon after an animal is exposed to the FMD virus (about 1 to 2 days) and last about 8 to 14 days. Acute infections are characterized by a high degree of replicating virus in the pharynx. In a neoteric subclinical infection, the virus remains in the pharynx and does not spread into the blood as it would in a clinical infection. Although animals with neoteric subclinical infections do not appear to have disease, they shed substantial amounts of virus in nasal secretions and saliva, so they are able to transmit the FMD virus to other animals. Neoteric subclinical infections often occur in vaccinated animals but can occur in unvaccinated animals as well.


title: Foot-and-mouth disease

text: Persistent subclinical infection (also referred to as a carrier state) occurs when an animal recovers from an acute infection but continues to have a small amount of replicating virus present in the pharynx. Cattle, buffalo, sheep, and goats can all become carriers, but pigs cannot. Animals can become carriers following acute infections with or without symptoms. Both vaccinated and unvaccinated animals can become carriers. Transmission of the FMD virus from carriers to susceptible animals is considered very unlikely under natural conditions and has not been conclusively demonstrated in field studies.


title: Foot-and-mouth disease

text: However, in an experiment where virus was collected from the pharynx of carrier cattle and inserted in the pharynx of susceptible cattle, the susceptible cattle became infected and developed characteristic blisters in the mouth and on the feet. This supports the theory that while the likelihood of a carrier spreading FMD is quite low, it is not impossible. It is not fully understood why ruminants but not pigs can become carriers or why some animals develop persistent infection while others do not. Both are areas of ongoing study.


title: Foot-and-mouth disease

text: Because vaccinated animals can become carriers, the waiting period to prove FMD-freedom is longer when vaccination rather than slaughter is used as an outbreak-control strategy. As a result, many FMD-free countries are resistant to emergency vaccination in case of in outbreak out of concern for the serious trade and economic implications of a prolonged period without FMD-free status.


title: Foot-and-mouth disease

text: Although the risk of transmission from an individual FMD carrier is considered to be very low, there are many carriers in FMD-endemic regions, possibly increasing the number of chances for carrier transmission to occur. Also, it can be difficult to determine if an asymptomatic infection is neoteric or persistent in the field, as both would be apparently healthy animals that test positive for the FMD virus. This fact complicates disease control, as the two types of subclinical infections have significantly different risks of spreading disease.


title: Foot-and-mouth disease

text: Of the seven serotypes of this virus, A, C, O, Asia 1, and SAT3 appear to be distinct lineages; SAT 1 and SAT 2 are unresolved clades. The mutation rate of the protein-encoding sequences of strains isolated between 1932 and 2007 has been estimated to be 1.46 × 10 substitutions/site/year, a rate similar to that of other RNA viruses. The most recent common ancestor appears to have evolved about 481 years ago (early 16th century). This ancestor then diverged into two clades which have given rise to the extant circulating Euro-Asiatic and South African. SAT 1 diverged first 397 years ago, followed by sequential divergence of serotype SAT 2 (396 years ago), A (147 years ago), O (121 years ago), Asia 1 (89 years ago), C (86 years ago), and SAT 3 (83 years ago). Bayesian skyline plot reveals a population expansion in the early 20th century that is followed by a rapid decline in population size from the late 20th century to the present day. Within each serotype, there was no apparent periodic, geographic, or host species influence on the evolution of global FMD viruses. At least seven genotypes of serotype Asia 1 are known.


title: Foot-and-mouth disease

text: The FMD virus can be transmitted in a number of ways, including close-contact, animal-to-animal spread, long-distance aerosol spread and fomites, or inanimate objects, typically fodder and motor vehicles. The clothes and skin of animal handlers such as farmers, standing water, and uncooked food scraps and feed supplements containing infected animal products can harbor the virus, as well. Cows can also catch FMD from the semen of infected bulls. Control measures include quarantine and destruction of both infected and healthy (uninfected) livestock, and export bans for meat and other animal products to countries not infected with the disease.


title: Foot-and-mouth disease

text: There is significant variation in both susceptibility to infection and ability to spread disease between different species, virus strains, and transmission routes. For example, cattle are far more vulnerable than pigs to infection with aerosolized virus, and infected pigs produce 30 times the amount of aerosolized virus compared to infected cattle and sheep. Also, pigs are particularly vulnerable to infection through the oral route. It has been demonstrated experimentally that FMD can be spread to pigs when they eat commercial feed products contaminated by the FMD virus. Also, the virus can remain active for extended periods of time in certain feed ingredients, especially soybean meal. Feed biosecurity practices have become an important area of study since a 2013 outbreak of Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea Virus (PEDV) in the US, thought to be introduced through contaminated feed.


title: Foot-and-mouth disease

text: Just as humans may spread the disease by carrying the virus on their clothes and bodies, animals that are not susceptible to the disease may still aid in spreading it. This was the case in Canada in 1952, when an outbreak flared up again after dogs had carried off bones from dead animals. Wolves are thought to play a similar role in the former Soviet Union.


title: Foot-and-mouth disease

text: Daniel Rossouw Kannemeyer (1843–1925) published a note in the "Transactions of the South African Philosophical Society" volume 8 part 1 in which he links saliva-covered locusts with the spread of the disease.