title: NatWest

text: NatWest is a member of the Cheque and Credit Clearing Company, Bankers' Automated Clearing Services, the Clearing House Automated Payment System and the LINK Interchange Network. The bank is authorised by the Prudential Regulation Authority and regulated by both the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority. It is a member of the Financial Ombudsman Service, the Financial Services Compensation Scheme, UK Payments Administration and of the British Bankers' Association; and it subscribes to the Lending Code. Mortgages, available in England, Scotland and Wales only, are provided by National Westminster Home Loans, a member of the Council of Mortgage Lenders,


title: NatWest

text: NatWest Insurance Services acts as intermediary and broker for general insurance, policies are underwritten by UK Insurance Limited. Life Protector and Guaranteed Bond products are provided by National Westminster Life Assurance.


title: NatWest

text: RBS International trades as NatWest International in Jersey, Guernsey, the Isle of Man and Gibraltar. In 2010, RBS Intermediary Partners was renamed NatWest Intermediary Solutions.


title: NatWest

text: National Westminster Bank use the following series of six digit sorting codes formatted into three pairs separated by hyphens:


title: NatWest

text: International Bank Account Numbers take the form GBxx NWBK ssss ssaa aaaa aa, where "x" refers to two check digits, "s" to the branch sort code and "a" to the individual account number. The Bank Identifier Code, or SWIFT code, for NatWest (and Isle of Man Bank) is NWBKGB2L (8 digits) or NWBKGB2Lxxx (11 digits).


title: NatWest

text: Bó, a standalone digital banking app with the aim of helping people save more money was launched in November 2019 and discontinued in May 2020.


title: NatWest

text: Mettle is an e-money business account provided by Prepay Solutions, a trading name of Prepay Technologies Ltd.


title: NatWest

text: NatWest also entered the merchant acquiring market by introducing Tyl in 2019. The proposition includes next business day settlement for card transactions.


title: NatWest

text: The so-called NatWest Three—Giles Darby, David Bermingham and Gary Mulgrew—were extradited to the United States in 2006 on charges relating to a transaction with Enron Corporation in 2000 while they were working for Greenwich NatWest. It has been argued that the alleged crime was committed by British citizens living in the UK against a British company based in London and therefore, any resulting criminal case falls under the jurisdiction of the English courts. However, the Serious Fraud Office decided not to prosecute due to lack of evidence. There has been criticism that the Americans do not have to produce a prima facie case, or even a reasonable one, to extradite British citizens, whereas no such facility exists to extradite US citizens to the UK. On 28 November 2007 the three admitted one charge of wire fraud after a plea bargain. On 22 February 2008 they were each sentenced to 37 months in prison.


title: NatWest

text: Following discussions between the Office of Fair Trading, the Financial Ombudsman Service, the Financial Services Authority and the major banks, proceedings were issued on 27 July 2007 in a test case against the banks to determine the legality and enforceability of certain charges relating to unauthorised overdrafts. It is argued that these are contrary to the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999; Schedule 2(e) of which gives a non-exhaustive list of terms which may be regarded as unfair, such as a term requiring a consumer who fails in his obligation to pay a disproportionately high sum in compensation. Penalty charges are irrecoverable at common law. The precedent for this was "Dunlop Pneumatic Tyre Co. Ltd. v New Garage and Motor Co. Ltd." [1915] AC 79 along with "Murray v Leisure Play" [2005] EWCA Civ 963, where it was held that a contractual party can only recover damages for an actual loss or liquidated losses. The RBS Group maintained that its charges were fair and enforceable and stated it intended to defend its position vigorously. On 24 April 2008, the High Court found that although these charges could not constitute penalties, they are challengeable under the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977 and the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999. On 26 February 2009, the Court of Appeal ruled that fees for unauthorised overdrafts and bounced cheques are subject to regulation by the OFT under these rules.


title: NatWest

text: In September 2009, NatWest announced dramatic cuts in their overdraft fees. The unpaid item fee was reduced to £5 from £38 and the card misuse fee was reduced from £35 to £15. The cuts came at a time when the row over the legality of unauthorised borrowing, estimated to earn current account providers about £2.6bn a year, had reached the House of Lords.


title: NatWest

text: In late June 2012, the group suffered a major computer malfunction, resulting in some customers' account balances not updating correctly. Completions of some new home purchases were delayed, customers were stranded abroad, and one man was held in prison. As a result of the error, RBS and NatWest announced that over 1,200 of their busiest branches would extend their hours throughout the week, including the bank's first Sunday opening, to enable the customers affected to access cash. On 25 June, over 1,000 branches opened for extended hours, and the number of phone staff was doubled.


title: NatWest

text: Some customers also reported problems with direct debits and standing orders being returned unpaid due to their account balances not updating correctly. However, RBS stated in an announcement that they would work directly with the receiving banks and companies to ensure that all payments were processed. As a result of the system outage, RBS also announced that they would work with credit rating agencies directly to ensure no customer's credit file was permanently impacted. They also announced that no customer would be permanently out of pocket because of the system outage, and launched a dedicated new freephone helpline for the incident, as well as an online help point to guide and advise customers with any queries they had during the outage.


title: NatWest

text: In December 2013, a similar computer failure led to a number of customers being unable to use NatWest card services to pay for goods. This second major outage of services fell on what is known as Cyber Monday, when major retailers discount goods to boost Christmas shopping. The Group chief executive at the time conceded that the bank would have "to do better".


title: NatWest

text: In December 2021, the bank was convicted at Westminster Magistrates' Court of three counts of failing to comply with anti-money laundering regulations, marking the first time that the Financial Conduct Authority had pursued criminal charges against a financial institution for money laundering failings. Natwest pled guilty to the three counts, which concerned a jewelers, Fowler Oldfield, depositing £365m between 2012 and 2016 of which £264m was in cash, despite predicted annual turnover of £15m. FCA lawyers stated that large volumes of cash were deposited in black bin bags, and that the quantity of notes failed to fit within the branch vaults.


title: NatWest

text: In a statement, a spokesman for the Financial Conduct Authority said "'NatWest is responsible for a catalogue of failures in the way it monitored and scrutinised transactions that were self-evidently suspicious. Combined with serious systems failures, like the treatment of cash deposits as cheques, these failures created an open door for money laundering."


title: NatWest

text: The name NatWest has been associated with cricket tournaments held in England. From 1981 until 2000, the bank was the title sponsor of English domestic cricket's main limited overs knockout tournament, which was known as the NatWest Trophy during that period. Between 2000 and 2013, the NatWest Series was an annual one-day international tournament involving England and two visiting international teams. NatWest were also a main sponsor of the 1999 Cricket World Cup, held in England. Since May 2017, it has been the shirt sponsor for the England men's and women's cricket teams.


title: NatWest

text: NatWest is sponsor of the Southern Paintball League, the leading competitive paintball series in the south of England.


title: NatWest

text: NatWest was the main sponsor of the Island Games (known at the time as the NatWest Island Games) from 1999 through to 2019.


title: NatWest

text: "NatWest CommunityForce" is "a platform that empowers local projects and charities to raise awareness of their work and make their plans a reality with the support of NatWest and their local community."


title: Glucagon-like peptide-1

text: Glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) is a 30- or 31-amino-acid-long peptide hormone deriving from the tissue-specific posttranslational processing of the proglucagon peptide. It is produced and secreted by intestinal enteroendocrine L-cells and certain neurons within the nucleus of the solitary tract in the brainstem upon food consumption. The initial product GLP-1 (1–37) is susceptible to amidation and proteolytic cleavage, which gives rise to the two truncated and equipotent biologically active forms, GLP-1 (7–36) amide and GLP-1 (7–37). Active GLP-1 protein secondary structure includes two α-helices from amino acid position 13–20 and 24–35 separated by a linker region.


title: Glucagon-like peptide-1

text: Alongside glucose-dependent insulinotropic peptide (GIP), GLP-1 is an incretin; thus, it has the ability to decrease blood sugar levels in a glucose-dependent manner by enhancing the secretion of insulin. Beside the insulinotropic effects, GLP-1 has been associated with numerous regulatory and protective effects. Unlike GIP, the action of GLP-1 is preserved in patients with type 2 diabetes and substantial pharmaceutical research has therefore been directed towards the development of GLP-1-based treatment.


title: Glucagon-like peptide-1

text: Endogenous GLP-1 is rapidly degraded primarily by dipeptidyl peptidase-4 (DPP-4), as well as neutral endopeptidase 24.11 (NEP 24.11) and renal clearance, resulting in a half-life of approximately 2 minutes. Consequently, only 10–15 % of GLP-1 reaches circulation intact, leading to fasting plasma levels of only 0–15 pmol/L. To overcome this, GLP-1 receptor agonists and DPP-4 inhibitors have been developed to increase GLP-1 activity. As opposed to common treatment agents such as insulin and sulphonylurea, GLP-1-based treatment has been associated with weight loss and a lower risk of hypoglycemia, two important considerations for patients with type 2 diabetes.


title: Glucagon-like peptide-1

text: The proglucagon gene is expressed in several organs including the pancreas (α-cells of the islets of Langerhans), gut (intestinal enteroendocrine L-cells) and brain (caudal brainstem and hypothalamus). Pancreatic proglucagon gene expression is promoted upon fasting and hypoglycaemia induction and inhibited by insulin. Conversely, intestinal proglucagon gene expression is reduced during fasting and stimulated upon food consumption. In mammals, the transcription gives rise to identical mRNA in all three cell types, which is further translated to the 180 amino acid precursor called proglucagon. However, as a result of tissue-specific posttranslational processing mechanisms, different peptides are produced in the different cells.


title: Glucagon-like peptide-1

text: In the pancreas (α-cells of the islets of Langerhans), proglucagon is cleaved by prohormone convertase (PC) 2 producing glicentin-related pancreatic peptide (GRPP), glucagon, intervening peptide-1 (IP-1) and major proglucagon fragment (MPGF).


title: Glucagon-like peptide-1

text: In the gut and brain, proglucagon is catalysed by PC 1/3 giving rise to glicentin, which may be further processed to GRPP and oxyntomodulin, GLP-1, intervening peptide-2 (IP-2) and glucagon-like peptide-2 (GLP-2). Initially, GLP-1 was thought to correspond to proglucagon (72–108) suitable with the N-terminal of the MGPF, but sequencing experiments of endogenous GLP-1 revealed a structure corresponding to proglucagon (78–107) from which two discoveries were found. Firstly, the full-length GLP-1 (1–37) was found to be catalysed by endopeptidase to the biologically active GLP-1 (7–37). Secondly, the glycine corresponding to proglucagon(108) was found to serve as a substrate for amidation of the C-terminal arginine resulting in the equally potent GLP-1 (7–36) amide. In humans, almost all (>80%) secreted GLP-1 is amidated, whereas a considerable part remains GLP-1 (7–37) in other species.


title: Glucagon-like peptide-1

text: GLP-1 is packaged in secretory granules and secreted into the hepatic portal system by the intestinal L-cells located primarily in the distal ileum and colon, but also found in the jejunum and duodenum. The L-cells are open-type triangular epithelial cells directly in contact with the lumen and neuro-vascular tissue and are accordingly stimulated by various nutrient, neural and endocrine factors.


title: Glucagon-like peptide-1

text: GLP-1 is released in a biphasic pattern with an early phase after 10–15 minutes followed by a longer second phase after 30–60 minutes upon meal ingestion. As the majority of L-cells are located in the distal ileum and colon, the early phase is likely explained by neural signalling, gut peptides or neurotransmitters. Other evidence suggest that the amount of L-cells located in the proximal jejunum is sufficient to account for the early phase secretion through direct contact with luminal nutrients. Less controversially, the second phase is likely caused by direct stimulation of L-cells by digested nutrients. The rate of gastric emptying is therefore an important aspect to consider, as it regulates the entry of nutrients into the small intestines where the direct stimulation occurs. One of the actions of GLP-1 is to inhibit gastric emptying, thus slowing down its own secretion upon postprandial activation.


title: Glucagon-like peptide-1

text: Fasting plasma concentration of biologically active GLP-1 range between 0 and 15 pmol/L in humans and is increased 2- to 3-fold upon food consumption depending on meal size and nutrient composition. Individual nutrients, such as fatty acids, essential amino acids and dietary fibre have also shown to stimulate GLP-1 secretion.


title: Glucagon-like peptide-1

text: Sugars have been associated with various signalling pathways, which initiate depolarisation of the L-cell membrane causing an elevated concentration of cytosolic Ca which in turn induce GLP-1 secretion. Fatty acids have been associated with the mobilisation of intracellular Ca stores and subsequently release of Ca into the cytosol. The mechanisms of protein-triggered GLP-1 secretion are less clear, but the amino acid proportion and composition appear important to the stimulatory effect.


title: Glucagon-like peptide-1

text: Once secreted, GLP-1 is extremely susceptible to the catalytic activity of the proteolytic enzyme dipeptidyl peptidase-4 (DPP-4). Specifically, DPP-4 cleaves the peptide bond between Ala-Glu resulting in the abundant GLP-1 (9–36) amide constituting 60–80 % of total GLP-1 in circulation. DPP-4 is widely expressed in multiple tissues and cell types and exists in both a membrane-anchored and soluble circulating form. Notably, DPP-4 is expressed on the surface of endothelial cells, including those located directly adjacent to GLP-1 secretion sites. Consequently, less than 25% of secreted GLP-1 is estimated to leave the gut intact. Additionally, presumably due to the high concentration of DPP-4 found on hepatocytes, 40–50% of the remaining active GLP-1 is degraded across the liver. Thus, due to the activity of DPP-4 only 10–15 % of secreted GLP-1 reaches circulation intact.


title: Glucagon-like peptide-1

text: Neutral endopeptidase 24.11 (NEP 24.11) is a membrane-bound zinc metallopeptidase widely expressed in several tissues, but found in particularly high concentrations in the kidneys, which is also identified accountable for the rapid degradation of GLP-1. It primarily cleaves peptides at the N-terminal side of aromatic amino acids or hydrophobic amino acids and is estimated to contribute by up to 50% of the GLP-1 degradation. However, the activity only becomes apparent once the degradation of DPP-4 has been prevented, as the majority of GLP-1 reaching the kidneys have already been processed by DPP-4. Similarly, renal clearance appear more significant for the elimination of already inactivated GLP-1.


title: Glucagon-like peptide-1

text: The resulting half-life of active GLP-1 is approximately 2 minutes, which is however sufficient to activate GLP-1 receptors.


title: Glucagon-like peptide-1

text: GLP-1 possesses several physiological properties making it (and its functional analogs) a subject of intensive investigation as a potential treatment of diabetes mellitus, as these actions induce long-term improvements along with the immediate effects. Although reduced GLP-1 secretion has previously been associated with attenuated incretin effect in patients with type 2 diabetes, it is now granted that GLP-1 secretion in patients with type 2 diabetes does not differ from healthy subjects.


title: Glucagon-like peptide-1

text: The most noteworthy effect of GLP-1 is its ability to promote insulin secretion in a glucose-dependent manner. As GLP-1 binds to GLP-1 receptors expressed on the pancreatic β cells, the receptors couples to G-protein subunits and activates adenylate cyclase that increases the production of cAMP from ATP. Subsequently, activation of secondary pathways, including PKA and Epac2, alters the ion channel activity causing elevated levels of cytosolic Ca that enhances exocytosis of insulin-containing granules. During the process, influx of glucose ensures sufficient ATP to sustain the stimulatory effect.


title: Glucagon-like peptide-1

text: Additionally, GLP-1 ensures the β cell insulin stores are replenished to prevent exhaustion during secretion by promoting insulin gene transcription, mRNA stability and biosynthesis. GLP-1 evidently also increases β cell mass by promoting proliferation and neogenesis while inhibiting apoptosis. As both type 1 and 2 diabetes are associated with reduction of functional β cells, this effect is highly interesting regarding diabetes treatment. Considered almost as important as the effect of enhancing insulin secretion, GLP-1 has been shown to inhibit glucagon secretion at glucose levels above fasting levels. Critically, this does not affect the glucagon response to hypoglycemia as this effect is also glucose-dependent. The inhibitory effect is presumably mediated indirectly through somatostatin secretion, but a direct effect cannot be completely excluded.


title: Glucagon-like peptide-1

text: In the brain, GLP-1 receptor activation has been linked with neurotrophic effects including neurogenesis and neuroprotective effects including reduced necrotic and apoptotic signaling, cell death, and dysfunctions. In the diseased brain, GLP-1 receptor agonist treatment is associated with protection against a range of experimental disease models such as Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, stroke, traumatic brain injury, and multiple sclerosis. In accordance with the expression of GLP-1 receptor on brainstem and hypothalamus, GLP-1 has been shown to promote satiety and thereby reduce food and water intake. Consequently, diabetic subjects treated with GLP-1 receptor agonists often experience weight loss as opposed to the weight gain commonly induced with other treatment agents.


title: Glucagon-like peptide-1

text: In the stomach, GLP-1 inhibits gastric emptying, acid secretion and motility, which collectively decrease appetite. By decelerating gastric emptying GLP-1 reduces postprandial glucose excursion which is another attractive property regarding diabetes treatment. However, these gastrointestinal activities are also the reason why subjects treated with GLP-1-based agents occasionally experience nausea.


title: Glucagon-like peptide-1

text: GLP-1 has also shown signs of carrying out protective and regulatory effects in numerous other tissues, including heart, tongue, adipose, muscles, bones, kidneys, liver and lungs.


title: Addams Family Reunion

text: Addams Family Reunion is a 1998 American comedy horror film based on the characters from the cartoon created by cartoonist Charles Addams. Directed by Dave Payne, the film was intended to serve as a pilot for a new proposed television series produced by Saban. The film stars Daryl Hannah and Tim Curry as Morticia and Gomez Addams respectively while Carel Struycken and Christopher Hart's hand are the only ones to reprise their roles from the last two films. The film's plot focused on the eccentric, macabre aristocratic Addams family mistakenly arriving at the wrong family reunion and encountering a man (Ed Begley Jr.) who seeks to commit murder in order to inherit a fortune.


title: Addams Family Reunion

text: Payne had intended to give the film a dark, edgy tone, but Saban had interfered with the development, insisting that the story be aimed solely at entertaining children, and lack much of the black comedy and satire of the previous films. Saban also wanted Payne to imitate aspects of Paramount Pictures' popular 1991–93 duo of films, and the 1964 TV series, and rejected any original idea developed by Payne and the film's screenwriters. As a result, the film was poorly received by critics, who criticized the film's screenplay, special effects, production design, and much of its acting, while singling out Tim Curry's performance for praise, calling Curry the best part of the film.


title: Addams Family Reunion

text: Discovering that his grandparents have developed "Waltzheimer's disease", a disease that is slowly turning them "normal", Gomez plans a family reunion, hoping that some branch of his enormous family tree will find a cure. However, Gomez sends a card written in blood, which damages the machines of the company organizing the reunion and results in the Addams receiving the wrong invitation.


title: Addams Family Reunion

text: Gomez, Morticia, Fester, Lurch, and the grandparents drive to a luxury resort for the family reunion. Gomez meets psychiatrist Dr. Philip Adams, who plans to poison his wealthy father Walter Adams and rearrange his will. Gomez hopes that Dr. Adams can cure his grandparents.


title: Addams Family Reunion

text: Philip's brother and his wife, who are headed to the reunion, are given the wrong address and end up in the Addams family mansion, where Granny and Cousin Itt are staying. They stay there as guests, but are increasingly abused by their hosts. Granny learns that the wife is vegetarian, so she feeds her with a plant: deadly nightshade. Cousin Itt plays poker with the husband, and wins over most of the man's fortune.


title: Addams Family Reunion

text: Pugsley falls in love with Gina Adams, a young bespectacled girl. Wednesday antagonizes two of her new snobby "cousins", children of Philip. Lurch saves Gina's mother from drowning in the swimming pool. He falls in love with the woman, while she is disgusted with him. Walter Adams expresses his hatred for his son and most of his family. Fester and Thing do their best to capture Butcher, Fester's mutated puppy who feeds on human hair.


title: Addams Family Reunion

text: Philip initially refuses to help Gomez in any way, but agrees to a bet. If he beats Gomez in a game, he will earn thousands of dollars. If Gomez wins, Philip will offer his services to him. Philip is overconfident, as he is a champion in many games. But Gomez easily defeats him in successive challenges, in the games of darts, table tennis, and tennis. Philip is publicly humiliated in the process.


title: Addams Family Reunion

text: Instead of offering his services as previously agreed, an enraged Philip attacks Gomez in public. They have a knife fight, which Gomez eventually wins. While Gomez holds his knife to Philip's throat, the police arrive. Gomez and Morticia are arrested for attempted murder, Pugsley and Wednesday are arrested for digging open the grave of the resort's founders. Fester is considered insane and becomes a mental patient, while Butcher and Thing are captured by a sadistic dog catcher. Lurch has been buried alive by Wednesday and is unable to escape.


title: Addams Family Reunion

text: Pugsley and Wednesday are taken in by child services, and placed in foster care with Philip's wife. Meanwhile Philip gains custody over Fester, and tortures him with an electric chair. He has previously used this chair to torture other patients. The dog-catcher plans to feed Thing to one of his dogs. Gomez and Morticia are unable to escape a police cell.


title: Addams Family Reunion

text: Walter Adams has taken a liking to Gomez, and posts bail for him and Morticia. He helps them rescue Lurch, who then helps rescue the rest of the family. Pugsley and Wednesday were in the process of torturing their foster family, but are happily reunited with their parents. The Addams Family strap Philip in his own electric chair, and have him tortured by his patients.


title: Addams Family Reunion

text: The Addams Family eventually return to their mansion, and leave their increasingly "normal" grandparents in the care of Philip's wife. Wednesday amuses herself with lighting fireworks, while Pugsley seems melancholic. Gomez asks him if he misses Gina, but Pugsley is instead sad because he forgot his "Siberian firecracker" back at the foster family's house.


title: Addams Family Reunion

text: At this point, the "firecracker" is revealed to have been a nuclear weapon and the Addams Family witness a distant nuclear explosion apparently caused by it. Morticia comments that a nuclear winter is swiftly approaching and that she feels gloomy. Gomez and Morticia kiss, finishing the movie.


title: Addams Family Reunion

text: Following the success of the theatrically released films "The Addams Family", released in 1991 and its 1993 sequel, "Addams Family Values", Saban negotiated to purchase the home video production rights to the Addams Family brand in order to take advantage of the direct-to-video market. Because of the underwhelming commercial performance of "Addams Family Values", as well as the death of Raúl Juliá, who had played Gomez Addams, Paramount Pictures ultimately decided not to produce a third film, resulting in Saban deciding to reboot the series.


title: Addams Family Reunion

text: "Addams Family Reunion" was co-produced by Saban with Warner Bros. The two studios planned to produce a new series called "The New Addams Family", and intended to produce a two-hour pilot film for the series, which eventually became "Addams Family Reunion"; Saban planned to premiere the film on a cable network owned by the company before releasing it on video, and to follow the film with a television series if the film did well.


title: Addams Family Reunion

text: "Addams Family Reunion" was scripted by Rob Kerchner, who had experience writing numerous direct-to-video sequels, and Scott Sandin; Saban wanted the script to be aimed only for children, with little attempt made to engage an adult audience. Dave Payne, whose directorial experience came from making direct-to-video low-budget horror films for Roger Corman, was hired to direct.


title: Addams Family Reunion

text: According to Payne, Saban had purchased the rights from Charles Addams' estate, and he felt he could start fresh and create a dark fantasy film, comparing the approach he wanted to take as director to the Coen brothers. However, Payne says, Saban wanted him to imitate Barry Sonnenfeld's films and the 1964 TV show, and any original idea proposed by Payne and the screenwriters was rejected. In addition to the film lacking the previous entries' black comedy, Nathan Rabin also said that "Addams Family Reunion" has little of the anarchic satire of the Sonnenfeld films; according to Rabin, the only satirical aspect of the film is that the "normal" Adams family, whose reunion the Addamses mistakenly attend, "turns out to be far more devious, conniving, and evil than the morbid but basically good Addams clan".


title: Addams Family Reunion

text: The producers wanted to bridge the gap in continuity between the Paramount films and the new series, and reached out to Anjelica Huston and Christopher Lloyd to reprise their roles as Morticia Addams and Uncle Fester, but both declined out of respect for Raul Julia. Christina Ricci and Jimmy Workman were too old to reprise their roles as Wednesday and Pugsley Addams. The only actors to reprise their roles from the Paramount films were Carel Struycken as Lurch, and Christopher Hart as Thing.


title: Addams Family Reunion

text: Recast as Gomez and Morticia Addams were Tim Curry and Daryl Hannah, with Pat Thomas as Fester and Nicole Fugere as Wednesday, a role she would later reprise for "The New Addams Family" TV series, the only member of the film's cast to do so. According to Payne, he and Curry both felt that Gomez should be played "weird", in contrast to the Latin lothario Raúl Juliá had created for the Paramount duo of films. Much of the film's cast, including Alice Ghostley, Ray Walston, Clint Howard, and Ed Begley Jr., had appeared in numerous direct-to-video films.


title: Addams Family Reunion

text: "Addams Family Reunion" was shot in Los Angeles, California on a 30-day schedule. Ed Begley Jr. arrived on set unprepared for his first day of filming as a tennis pro, explaining that he had no idea how to play tennis, resulting in the director shooting around Begley's inability to play the sport, and the actor was also difficult to costume, because, as a dedicated environmentalist, Begley would not wear any animal-based clothing such as leather.


title: Addams Family Reunion

text: The show's famous theme song was performed in a doo-wop rendition by the group Strate Vocalz, which Yahoo! described as being "terrible". According to Payne, he had developed a "dark and edgy" opening sequence with appropriate music by the film's composer, but Saban, without his knowledge, had replaced his original opening title sequence and the original music with "some boy band, in bright fluorescent-colored shirts".


title: Addams Family Reunion

text: The film was poorly received by critics, being compared unfavorably to the Paramount films, which reviewers felt Saban and Warner Bros. had tried, unsuccessfully, to imitate. Nathan Rabin wrote that "the dialogue is awful, the acting sitcom-broad [...] [and] the direction [is] unremarkable". Other points of criticism made in negative reviews included poor CGI and cheap-looking production design. However, Bloody Disgusting, Den of Geek and Nathan Rabin praised Tim Curry's performance as Gomez Addams.


title: Cassoulet

text: Cassoulet (, , ; ; from Occitan and cognates with Spanish: "cazoleta" and Catalan: "cassolet") is a rich, slow-cooked stew containing meat (typically pork sausages, goose, duck and sometimes mutton), pork skin () and white beans (), originating in southern France. It is named after its traditional cooking vessel, the "casserole", a deep, round, earthenware pot with slanting sides.


title: Cassoulet

text: The dish is said to have originated in the town of Castelnaudary, and is particularly popular in the neighboring towns of Toulouse and Carcassonne. It is associated with the region once known as the province of Languedoc. An organization called The Grand Brotherhood of the Cassoulet of Castelnaudary (French: "La Grande Confrérie du Cassoulet de Castelnaudary"), has organized competitions and fairs featuring cassoulet every year since 1999.


title: Cassoulet

text: All cassoulets are made with white beans (French: "haricots blancs" or "lingots"), duck or goose confit, sausages, and additional meat. In the cassoulet of Toulouse, the meats are pork and mutton, the latter frequently a cold roast shoulder. The Carcassonne version is similar but doubles the portion of mutton and sometimes replaces the duck with partridge. The cassoulet of Castelnaudary uses a duck confit instead of mutton.


title: Cassoulet

text: In France, cassoulets of varying price and quality are also sold in cans and jars in supermarkets, grocery stores, and delicatessens. The cheapest ones contain only beans, tomato sauce, sausages, and bacon. More expensive versions are likely to be cooked with goose fat and to include Toulouse sausages, lamb, goose, or duck confit.


title: Cassoulet

text: Haute cuisine versions require mixing pre-cooked roasted meats with beans that have been simmered separately with aromatic vegetables, but this runs counter to cassoulet's peasant origins. In the process of preparing the dish it is traditional to deglaze the pot from the previous cassoulet in order to give a base for the next one. This has led to stories, such as the one given by Elizabeth David, citing Anatole France, of a single original cassoulet being extended for years or even decades.


title: Cassoulet

text: In U.S. restaurants, the term "cassoulet" is often applied to any hearty bean-based casserole, with variations such as salmon cassoulet.


title: Stay Puft Marshmallow Man

text: The Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, also known as Mr. Stay-Puft, is a fictional character from the "Ghostbusters" franchise, who sometimes appears as a giant, lumbering and paranormal monster. He first appears in the 1984 "Ghostbusters" film as a logo on a bag of marshmallows in Dana Barrett's apartment, on an advertisement on a building near the Ghostbusters' headquarters, and finally as the physical manifestation and form of the apocalyptic Sumerian deity Gozer.


title: Stay Puft Marshmallow Man

text: Gozer returns in this form multiple times, however, the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man in "The Real Ghostbusters" animated series is the manifestation of the dream of a child holding a bag of Stay-Puft Marshmallows during the attack by The Sandman.


title: Stay Puft Marshmallow Man

text: Subsequently, he has been incorporated into many other types of "Ghostbusters" media, including the animated series "The Real Ghostbusters", comic books, a stage show, and several video games.


title: Stay Puft Marshmallow Man

text: Stay-Puft is a large obese white humanoid figure made of conjoined marshmallows. He wears a white sailor cap with a red ribbon attached on top, and a blue hatband. Around his neck is a traditional blue sailor's collar and a red neckerchief.


title: Stay Puft Marshmallow Man

text: After images of him are seen on an advertisement and a bag of the marshmallows earlier in the film, he is then seen in the climax of "Ghostbusters" as one of two physical manifestations and forms of Gozer, a god who is defeated when Stay-Puft is destroyed. Stay-Puft's exact to-scale height in the movie is 112.5 feet (34.3 m) tall, while his height in the novelization of the movie is given at 100 feet (30.5 m). In "Ghostbusters: The Video Game", Stay-Puft is categorized as a Class 7 Outsider Avatar.


title: Stay Puft Marshmallow Man

text: He is then resurrected and subsequently captured a number of different times by the Ghostbusters. Although mean and destructive at first, he later befriends Slimer and the Ghostbusters in the animated series "The Real Ghostbusters", and helps them out with various problems.


title: Stay Puft Marshmallow Man

text: Dan Aykroyd conceived the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man for his initial script for "Ghostbusters" the movie. He created the character to show that "it seems harmless and puffy and cute—but given the right circumstances, everything can be turned black and become evil". Stay-Puft was only one of many large-scale monsters in this early draft of the script, but after Aykroyd worked with co-writer Harold Ramis and director Ivan Reitman, the team scaled back the intended sequence until only Stay-Puft remained out of the original large-scale monsters.


title: Stay Puft Marshmallow Man

text: The likeness of Stay-Puft was inspired by Peter O'Boyle, a security guard at Columbia Pictures whom Reitman met while filming his previous movie, "" (1983). According to Sam Delaney of "The Guardian", "Stay-Puft's familiar mascot combined elements of real-life brand ambassadors the Pillsbury Doughboy and Bibendum (a.k.a. the Michelin Tire Man)."


title: Stay Puft Marshmallow Man

text: Stay-Puft is seen only briefly in the movie. He is "conjured up" as a new form for the Sumerian god Gozer, who previously arrives atop an apartment building at 55 Central Park West in New York City in the form of an androgynous woman with metallic skin and blood red eyes. After a quick battle with the Ghostbusters, Gozer vanishes and in its disembodied voice demands the Ghostbusters, "Choose the form of The Destructor" – whatever they think of will be the form It will assume to destroy their world. Ray Stantz (Aykroyd) instead makes the decision to think of this marshmallow mascot when the Ghostbusters are given a choice as to which physical form Gozer will destroy the world in.


title: Stay Puft Marshmallow Man

text: As he explains, "It just popped in there", and that he "tried to think of the most harmless thing", describing Mr. Stay-Puft as "something that could never possibly destroy us". Moments later, just then a giant Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man is seen walking towards the apartment building. The Ghostbusters shoot at Stay-Puft with their proton packs, setting him on fire, but do not succeed in stopping his advance. They then get the idea of shooting at the portal through which the god emerged, by crossing the streams of all four of their packs. The plan triggers an explosion that destroys the gate and Stay-Puft, reducing the latter into molten marshmallow cream that rains down onto the roof of the skyscraper and bystanders on the street below.


title: Stay Puft Marshmallow Man

text: The character is also briefly visible in an ad on the side of a building (a matte painting) during the scene where the Ghostbusters headquarters roof explodes. During the egg frying scene in Dana's apartment, a bag of Stay-Puft marshmallows can be seen.


title: Stay Puft Marshmallow Man

text: The character as seen in the movie was created by Linda Frobos by using miniatures and optical compositing with Billy Bryan himself in a latex suit. The suit was made of two layers, an outer flammable layer and inner fire-proof layer. Some of the finished movie's most noticeable errors appear in the Stay-Puft scenes: he is seen with and without his bow tie, while in other scenes the optical rendering was so poor that he passes through a church rather than crushing it. Also, the blue portion of his sailor suit is worn backwards.


title: Stay Puft Marshmallow Man

text: The face of Stay-Puft was puppeteered by Terri Hardin. She used remote controls while laying down below the miniature street on the set as Billy Bryan walked around for his scene.


title: Stay Puft Marshmallow Man

text: Following the original film, the television series "The Real Ghostbusters" brought Stay-Puft back; in fact Joe Medjuck, the executive producer of the show, states that Stay-Puft was in the first script they received from Dan Aykroyd on the series. In the episode titled, "Mr. Sandman, Dream Me a Dream", a spectral Sandman creates versions of anything which a person is dreaming of – in this way a new version of Stay-Puft is created – however, whatever is created disappears when the person awakens. In the episode "Dedcon 1", Stay-Puft appears as a guest of honor at a ghost convention. After another episode, "Cry Uncle", he is accidentally freed from the Ghostbusters' containment system and later recaptured. He reappears in episode 65, "The Revenge of Murray the Mantis", where he is "released" from the Ghostbusters' containment unit to help defeat a giant mantis too powerful for the Ghostbusters to fight on their own. Stay-Puft is controlled with the help of Slimer (a green blob-like creature). After defeating the Mantis, Stay-Puft floats behind the Ghostbusters in a parade. He later helps them again in the episode "Sticky Business" number 85, when the president of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Company asks the Ghostbusters if he can use their large Stay-Puft in a television commercial. Once again Slimer goes into the containment unit to bring Stay-Puft out. An episode explains that Egon took a sample of the marshmallow ectoplasm and positively charged it, thus creating a friendly version of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man that would assist the Ghostbusters when needed. When questioned by a policeman in the series about the abrupt personality change, Peter replied that Stay-Puft was "all better now". The character was voiced by John Stocker, and later by Frank Welker in this series.


title: Stay Puft Marshmallow Man

text: The Terminal Reality game "" (2009), set two years after the events of "Ghostbusters II", brings back the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man to ravage Times Square while searching for Dr. Ilyssa Selwyn. Stay-Puft has the ability to spawn Class 5 Manifesting Outworlders, labeled "Marshmallow Minis" that vaguely resemble Gozer's minions Zuul and Vinz Clortho, to do his bidding like overwhelming the Ghostbusters. Peter, Ray, and a new rookie escort Dr. Selwyn to the roof of a tall building. In pursuit, Stay-Puft climbs the side of the building while Egon at street level preparing a large trap. The rookie burns Stay-Puft's face with "Boson Darts" from an upgraded proton pack, causing Stay-Puft to fall to street level, where he exploded upon impact, scattering his marshmallow body all over Times Square and his hat, which hangs from one of the neighboring buildings. Towards the game's climax, the characters realize that Gozer assumed the form of Stay-Puft again because he can only have one destructor form for each dimension he enters; he was locked into the form of the Marshmallow Man when summoned back to the Earthly plane. This causes Ray to admit he had not selected such a bad destructor after all due to it having strategic disadvantages; as demonstrated in the film "Ghostbusters" (1984), a gargantuan Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man is too slow because of its weight and lacked of bones and had less offensive capability beyond its massive size, therby making Gozer vulnerable to proton streams and boson darts fired by even just one Ghostbuster when under this form. In comparison, Gozer's Destructor Form is weaker than Ivo Shandor's, which is much faster and agile, and, while in the Ghost World, can charge itself with spiritual energy to make itself stronger, taking five Ghostbusters with every upgraded arsenal that they have to defeat. In the realistic version, the player can listen to one of the in-game answering machine messages from an upset member of the fictional company that owns the Stay-Puft Marshmallow brand (voiced by Chuck Huber), who is unhappy with the recent Gozer/Stay-Puft attack, believing it was a publicity stunt by the Ghostbusters. Another message, implied to be left by a Hobo Ghost, asks the Ghostbusters if it is safe to eat Stay-Puft's remains. A Stay-Puft Figurine appears as one of the collectible paranormal objects found in the game; it is found in the kitchen area of the Sedgewick Hotel and, after being collected, will appear in the Ghostbuster Firehouse's bunkhouse.


title: Stay Puft Marshmallow Man

text: In the Tobin's Spirit Guide, it is revealed that since the defeat by the Ghostbusters, Gozer has been trying to assume a more powerful avatar to correct its mistake.


title: Stay Puft Marshmallow Man

text: In the reboot film "Ghostbusters" (2016), which sets in another narrative universe, Stay-Puft makes a brief appearance as a possessed Thanksgiving parade balloon that pinned the Ghostbusters Abby Yates, Jillian Holtzmann, and Patty Tolan to the ground before being saved by Erin Gilbert. Stay-Puft's role as a hundred foot tall rampaging monster is replaced by the sketch ghost from the Ghostbusters' logo who was morphed into a giant-sized version of its self.


title: Stay Puft Marshmallow Man

text: 2021's "" revealed that the events of the original "Ghostbusters" did not tarnish the reputation of the mascot (obviously because, as revealed in the film "Ghostbusters II" and even in the video game, that the Ghostbusters were blamed for conjuring the rampaging monster though despite that it was Gozer who was revealed to be the one behind this). Tiny-sized versions of it (labeled as "Mini-Pufts") make their appearances as Gozer's mischievous minions for purposes of sabotages, deceptions, and distractions. Like Gozer's Destructor Form, they look funny, adorable, seemingly innocent and, additionally, harmless in size (each is 3.5 inches tall) on the outside. However, inside, the Mini-Pufts want chaos like their master and can do a lot of damages as a swarm, with Gozer acts as a general commanding its soldiers to work or battle. In Ghostbusters terminology, they would be Class 5 manifestations, similar to the Marshmallow Minis in "Ghostbusters: The Video Game". Numbers of voice actors including Ira Heiden, Sarah Natochenny, and Shelby Young voiced the Mini-Pufts.


title: Sarah Lancaster

text: Sarah Lancaster (born February 12, 1980) is an American actress. She is known for her long-running roles as Rachel Meyers in the NBC series "" and Ellie Bartowski in the NBC comedy-spy series "Chuck", as well as playing Chloe Grefe in "Lovers Lane", Madison Kellner on The WB's "Everwood", and Marjorie in ABC's TV series "What About Brian".


title: Sarah Lancaster

text: Lancaster has appeared on "Sabrina, the Teenage Witch", "Dawson's Creek", "That '70s Show", "Scrubs", and "". She also landed two recurring roles: on The WB series "Everwood" as Ephram's love interest Madison Kellner; and on David E. Kelley's FOX series "Boston Public". In 2005 she starred in the TV movie "Living With the Enemy". Most notably, she appeared as Ellie Bartowski Woodcomb on the NBC series "Chuck" from 2007 to 2012.


title: Sarah Lancaster

text: Lancaster has also worked as a jealous girlfriend-turned-serial killer in the movie "Lovers Lane", and as the blackjack dealer, Veronica Harold, on CBS's short-lived "Dr. Vegas".


title: Sarah Lancaster

text: In 2019, Lancaster made her directorial debut with the film "Josie & Jack", based on Kelly Braffet's 2005 novel of the same name.


title: Sarah Lancaster

text: Lancaster is married to attorney Matthew Jacobs. She gave birth to their first son in June 2011, and to their second son in January 2017.


title: Abortion in Canada

text: Abortion in Canada is legal at all stages of pregnancy and is publicly funded as a medical procedure under the combined effects of the federal Canada Health Act and provincial health-care systems. However, access to services and resources varies by region. While some non-legal barriers to access continue to exist, Canada is the only nation with absolutely no criminal restrictions on abortion. Abortion availability is, however, subject to provincial health-care regulatory guidelines for physicians. The general rule is that few providers offer abortion care beyond 23 weeks and 6 days, but there can be exceptions in certain cases.


title: Abortion in Canada

text: Formally banned in 1869, abortion would remain illegal in Canadian law for the next 100 years. In 1969, the "Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1968–69" legalized therapeutic abortions, as long as a committee of doctors certified that continuing the pregnancy would likely endanger the woman's life or health. In 1988, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in "R. v. Morgentaler" that the existing law was unconstitutional, and struck down the 1969 Act. The ruling found that the 1969 abortion law violated a woman's right to "life, liberty and security of the person" guaranteed under Section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms established in 1982.


title: Abortion in Canada

text: In Canada, all surgical abortions are performed by a physician, with nurse practitioners, pharmacists and midwives able to provide medications for non-invasive medical abortions within nine weeks (63 days) of gestation. Canada has had a relatively stable abortion rate since decriminalization; the rate of recorded abortion per 1000 women of childbearing age (15-44) was 10.2 in 1974, rising to 16.4 abortions per thousand women in 1997, and declining to 10.1 abortions per 1000 women in 2020. However, these rates of abortion only reflect the number of abortions reported by abortion clinics and hospitals. They do not account for unreported abortions in these setting or count abortions induced by prescription drugs such as mifepristone and misoprostol taken at home, and so these official rates of abortion undercount the true rate of abortion. Nevertheless, Canada has a low abortion rate overall compared to other countries, with approximately 74,000 abortions reported in 2020. Roughly half of abortions occur among women aged 18 to 29 years and roughly 90% of abortions are performed within the first trimester (12 weeks).


title: Abortion in Canada

text: During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, abortion before the “quickening” (15–20 weeks) was legal in the British North American colonies. British Canada like other colonies followed British laws that began restricting abortion rights with the "Malicious Shooting or Stabbing Act 1803", that made performing or attempting to perform a post quickening abortion a death penalty offence. Full prohibition came with the "Offences Against the Person Act 1837", that removed the death penalty clause, while making the procurement of any miscarriage unlawful. Abortion was formally banned in "Canada law" in 1869, two years after the country's formation. That prohibition was continued in the "Criminal Code" until 1969. Anyone who procured a miscarriage for a woman was liable to imprisonment for life, while a woman who procured a miscarriage for herself was liable to imprisonment for two years.


title: Abortion in Canada

text: As in other countries, illegal abortions were still performed, and some cases charged that this led to the deaths of women. The abortion trial of Emily Stowe (1879) is one early example. Another such case, "Azoulay v. The Queen", reached the Supreme Court in 1952. In both cases, the alleged abortion provider was ultimately acquitted of responsibility for the woman's death. Abortion rights activists like Marilyn Wilson, former executive director of the Canadian Abortion Rights Action League, say, "Illegal abortions were common, but often of poor safety. Several hundred women per year died from botched abortions."


title: Abortion in Canada

text: The movement to liberalize Canada's abortion laws began in the 1960s. Former Chief Coroner of Ontario Morton Shulman recalls that in the sixties, abortion could be legally performed only to save the life of the woman, so there were practically no legal abortions. He stated that the pregnant daughters of the rich were sent to reliable physicians who did abortions for cash. He estimated that these physicians did twenty to thirty abortions per week. Women who were not rich were left to perform an abortion on themselves or go to what he called a "nurse" abortionist. Their method was commonly pumping Lysol into the woman's womb. The mortality rate was high and the infection rate over 50%. He added, "By the time I became Chief Coroner, I had had the unpleasant experience of seeing the bodies of some dozens of young women who had died as a result of these amateur abortions."


title: Abortion in Canada

text: Chief Coroner Morton Shulman decided to publicize deaths from illegal abortions. He instructed his coroners to call a public inquest into each abortion death. He describes one case that he believes was the turning point, that of 34-year-old Lottie Leanne Clarke, a mother of three children, who died of a massive infection in 1964 after an illegal abortion in spite of medical treatment and antibiotics. At the inquest into her death, the jury recommended that the laws about therapeutic abortion be revised. Shulman added that a federal government committee should review the question of abortion and the law. Newspapers published editorials recommending the reform of the abortion law. In 1965, the Minister of Justice, Guy Favreau, wrote to Shulman that the recommendation would be considered in the program to amend the Criminal Code. The eventual amendment closely followed the recommendations of the coroners' juries.


title: Abortion in Canada

text: In 1967, Justice Minister Pierre Trudeau introduced a bill which included an amendment to the provision of the "Criminal Code" which prohibited abortions. The bill, known as the "Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1968–69", continued the basic prohibition on abortions, with the potential life sentence. However, the bill made an exception for abortions performed in a hospital with the approval of that hospital's three-doctor therapeutic abortion committee. The committee would have to certify that the pregnancy would be likely to endanger the life or health of the pregnant woman. The term health was not defined, and therapeutic abortion committees were free to develop their own theories as to when a likely danger to "health" (which might include psychological health) would justify a therapeutic abortion.


title: Abortion in Canada

text: This same bill also legalized homosexuality and contraception, and would be the subject of one of Trudeau's most famous quotations: "The state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation."


title: Abortion in Canada

text: When he introduced the bill in 1967, Trudeau was Minister of Justice in the government of Prime Minister Lester Pearson. In 1968, Pearson retired and Trudeau succeeded him as prime minister. The bill did not pass before the 1968 election, but was re-introduced by John Turner, Minister of Justice in the Trudeau government. Parliament passed the bill in 1969. In the 1970 federal statute revision, the provision was re-numbered as s. 251 of the "Criminal Code".


title: Abortion in Canada

text: In 1975, a Committee on the Operation of the Abortion Law was appointed "to conduct a study to determine whether the procedure provided in the Criminal Code for obtaining therapeutic abortions [was] operating equitably across Canada", and to make recommendations "on the operation of this law rather than recommendations on the underlying policy". The Committee, known as the Badgley Committee after its Chair, Dr. Robin F. Badgley, reported in January 1977. It found, quite simply, that "the procedures set out for the operation of Abortion Law are not working equitably across Canada". In large part, this was because the intent of the law was neither clear nor agreed upon. Access to abortion as set out in the Criminal Code was not available for many women due to variations in distribution of hospitals and doctors, and in whether Therapeutic Abortion Committees were set up and in doctors' interpretations of "health" for women, ages of consent, and parental notification requirements. The report recommended better family planning to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies, but their main conclusion was that abortion services were not being delivered as required.


title: Abortion in Canada

text: By 1982, there were 66,319 legal abortions in Canada. Interpretation of the 1969 law varied widely between doctors and hospitals, leading to uneven access. The standard was the physical or mental well-being of the woman, to be decided by a hospital's Therapeutic Abortion Committee. However, there was no requirement for a hospital to have a TAC to evaluate women. Only about one-third of hospitals had one. Some committees took a liberal stance and allowed most requests, while others blocked almost all requests. Access to legal abortions was easy in major metropolitan areas, but much harder outside large cities. In the province of Prince Edward Island, the lone Therapeutic Abortion Committee shut down, and there were no legal abortions in the province after 1982. The Therapeutic Abortion Committees often took days or weeks to make their decisions, pushing a pregnancy further along than it would have been otherwise. The women were not seen by the committee, and had no right to appeal a decision. Advocates for abortion rights believed that the choice should be made by the woman, rather than a panel of doctors.


title: Abortion in Canada

text: Because of the lack of facilities in smaller provinces and rural areas, women were often forced to travel to major cities at their own expense. In Newfoundland, there was only a single gynaecologist who performed abortions. Many women had to buy expensive plane tickets to Toronto or Montreal to get an abortion. Other women chose to travel to the United States, where abortions became available at many private clinics after the "Roe v. Wade" decision in 1973. In 1982, 4,311 Canadian women travelled to the United States for an abortion.


title: Abortion in Canada

text: In defiance of the law, Dr. Henry Morgentaler began performing abortions at his clinic in Montreal without approval of a therapeutic abortion committee. He challenged the constitutionality of the abortion law on two separate occasions. The Supreme Court of Canada dismissed his first constitutional challenge in 1975, brought under the division of powers and the "Canadian Bill of Rights", but in 1988, the Supreme Court allowed his second challenge, brought under the "Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms". The Court held that the abortion law was inoperative. Morgentaler eventually brought a third constitutional challenge, to a provincial law restricting access to abortions. He was successful in that challenge as well.


title: Abortion in Canada

text: Morgentaler's struggle prompted a nationwide movement to reform Canada's abortion laws. In 1970, as part of the Abortion Caravan, 35 women chained themselves to the parliamentary gallery in the House of Commons, closing Parliament for the first time in Canadian history.


title: Abortion in Canada

text: In 1973, Morgentaler stated publicly that he had performed 5,000 abortions without the permission of the three-doctor committees, even going so far as to videotape himself performing operations.


title: Abortion in Canada

text: The Crown prosecution service of Quebec prosecuted Morgentaler three times, and each time juries refused to convict him despite his outright admission that he had performed many abortions. The Crown appealed the first acquittal. In 1974, the Quebec Court of Appeal overturned the jury's verdict of acquittal in the first case, substituted a guilty verdict, and returned the matter to the trial judge for sentencing.


title: Abortion in Canada

text: In 1975, the Supreme Court dismissed his appeal by a 6–3 decision: "Morgentaler v The Queen". The Court was unanimous that the provision was valid criminal law, and therefore within the constitutional authority of the federal Parliament; it did not intrude on provincial jurisdiction over health. The Court also held unanimously that the law did not infringe the "Canadian Bill of Rights".


title: Abortion in Canada

text: The Court gave those rulings from the bench, with written reasons on these points later given by Chief Justice Laskin. However, the Court split 6–3 on the issues of necessity and s. 45 of the "Criminal Code", which provided that a medical doctor who performed a surgery according to reasonable medical standards was immune from criminal liability:


title: Abortion in Canada

text: As a result, the Supreme Court upheld the conviction entered by the Court of Appeal and remitted the matter to the trial judge for sentencing. The trial judge imposed a sentence of eighteen months imprisonment.


title: Abortion in Canada

text: Public outcry over the decision caused the federal government to introduce an amendment to the "Criminal Code" (commonly known as the Morgentaler Amendment) taking away the jurisdiction of appeal courts to substitute a conviction for a jury's verdict of acquittal.


title: Abortion in Canada

text: Following the third jury acquittal, the Quebec government declared that the law was unenforceable and no further charges were brought.


title: Abortion in Canada

text: Upon his release from prison in Quebec, Morgentaler decided to challenge the federal abortion law in other provinces. Over the next ten years, he opened and operated private abortion clinics across the country in direct violation of the law. Following a fourth jury acquittal in 1984, the Ontario government appealed the decision. The Ontario Court of Appeal set aside the acquittal and ordered a re-trial.


title: Abortion in Canada

text: Morgentaler, in turn, appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada. In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court declared in 1988 the entirety of the country's abortion law to be unconstitutional: "R. v. Morgentaler". By a 5-2 decision, the Court held that section 251 of the Criminal Code was of no force or effect because it violated section 7 of the "Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms". Section 7 states that: "Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and the security of the person, and the right not to be deprived thereof, except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice." The Court also held that the infringement could not be justified under s. 1 of the "Charter", which in some cases allows a government to provide a reasonable justification for an infringement.


title: Abortion in Canada

text: There was no single majority judgment. Chief Justice Dickson, Justice Beetz, and Justice Wilson all wrote decisions finding the law to be unconstitutional, but for varying reasons in support. Justice McIntyre wrote the dissenting opinion.


title: Abortion in Canada

text: Chief Justice Dickson held that "[f]orcing a woman, by threat of criminal sanction, to carry a fetus to term unless she meets certain criteria unrelated to her own priorities and aspirations" infringed the woman's right to security of the person, as protected by s. 7 of the "Charter". Justice Wilson found that the law "asserts that the woman's capacity to reproduce is to be subject, not to her own control, but to that of the state" which similarly breached the right to security of the person.


title: Abortion in Canada

text: Having found that law infringed the right to security of the person, the majority then considered whether that infringement was consistent with the principles of fundamental justice, which is the second branch of s. 7 of the "Charter". The judges in the majority agreed that the procedural requirements to obtain an abortion, as set forth in the law, were especially troublesome. Only accredited or approved hospitals could perform abortions, which imposed a barrier to local access. The law also specified that women wanting an abortion were required to obtain approval from a "therapeutic abortion committee" in a hospital. The committee was composed of at least three physicians appointed by the hospital's board of members, and did not include the practitioner who was to perform the procedure. The court found that the committee requirement was deeply flawed, in part because of the long delays caused by the committees and that in many hospitals, the committees were merely committees on paper and did not actually approve abortions.


title: Abortion in Canada

text: Chief Justice Dickson held that "the structure -- the system regulating access to therapeutic abortions -- is manifestly unfair. It contains so many potential barriers to its own operation that the defence it creates will in many circumstances be practically unavailable to women who would "prima facie" qualify..." Noted barriers included a lack of hospitals with committees, doctors who did not wish to refer matters to committees, the lack of a standard meaning for "health" leading to inconsistent standards among committees, and geographical and financial differentials in treatment. He concluded the provision violated the principles of fundamental justice.


title: Abortion in Canada

text: The majority of the court in "Morgentaler" did not find it necessary to consider whether there was a substantive right to abortion under Section 7. Justice Wilson was of the opinion that such a right existed, but the other judges in the majority made their decision on procedural grounds, relating to the insufficiencies in the committee process.


title: Abortion in Canada

text: Following the 1988 Supreme Court decision, the Mulroney government made two attempts to enact a new abortion law.


title: Abortion in Canada

text: In the spring of 1988, the government first attempted to find a compromise solution that would give easy access to abortion in the early stages of pregnancy and criminalize late term ones. The motion in the House of Commons was defeated 147 to 76, voted against by both MPs who opposed easy access to abortions and those who opposed adding any abortion rules to the Criminal Code.


title: Abortion in Canada

text: The Supreme Court decision became an important issue in the 1988 federal election later that fall. Both the Progressive Conservative and Liberal parties were sharply divided on the issue and neither party advanced a concrete platform on the abortion issue. Prime Minister Brian Mulroney declared he was opposed to "abortion on demand", but gave no details on what that meant legally. Liberal leader John Turner stated that MPs should be allowed to vote their conscience, but refused to give his own opinion on the issue. NDP leader Ed Broadbent had a firm position that abortion is a medical matter, not a criminal one, and should be left to a woman and her doctor. The Mulroney government was returned in the 1988 election.


title: Abortion in Canada

text: In 1989, the government introduced a much stricter bill in the House of Commons. If enacted, it would ban all abortions unless a doctor ruled the woman's life or health would be threatened. Anyone found in violation of the law could be imprisoned for up to two years. The House of Commons passed the new bill by nine votes, with the cabinet being whipped in favour and most anti-abortion members supporting it. In June 1990, a teenager from Kitchener, Ontario, was injured during a botched abortion performed in a man's home. Several days later, a Toronto woman, Yvonne Jurewicz, died from a self-induced, coat-hanger abortion.


title: Abortion in Canada

text: These cases were reported in the news and the latter case was discussed at multiple levels of government. Speaking in the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia, New Democratic MLA Darlene Marzari pointed out:


title: Abortion in Canada

text: For our purposes, though technically speaking the bill has not been proclaimed, Bill C-43 is, in the minds of the public and in the minds of women, now law. In fact, while we're dancing on the head of a pin and counting ourselves as angels, a woman in Toronto has died—she bled to death—three weeks ago. Her name was Yvonne Jurewicz, she was 20 years old and was probably afraid to go to the doctor and afraid to go to the hospital after she tried to abort herself. This is the sad fact of Bill C-43. While we debate the minor points of whether or not the Lieutenant Governor or the Governor-General of Canada has picked it up, we know that young women in this country are under the impression they will be considered criminals if they show up in an emergency ward door hemorrhaging.


title: Abortion in Canada

text: Reform Party MP Deborah Grey, who supported the bill, denied that this death, the first known death from illegal abortion in Ontario in twenty years, could have anything to do with the publicity surrounding the passing of Bill C-43. But in Ontario, the connection was made. Richard Johnston, MPP suggested to Premier David Peterson that Ontario announce it would not start any third-party prosecutions against women or doctors, to prevent any further tragedies and to reassure doctors that they could go on providing services to the women of Ontario.


title: Abortion in Canada

text: A few months later, the bill failed in the Senate on a tie vote. Under the rules of the Senate, a tie meant the measure was defeated. The defeat was somewhat unexpected since it was the first time since 1941 that the Senate, whose members are appointed, had outright defeated legislation passed by the House. Eike-Henner Kluge the director of the Canadian Medical Association ethics and legal affairs viewed that the bill was flawed ethically. Kluge drafted an analysis for a Senate committee about Bill C-43 and his presentation may have swayed two votes to change resulting in a tie vote which resulted in the Senate not passing the Bill C-43.


title: Abortion in Canada

text: In the wake of the controversy surrounding passage of the Goods and Services Tax the Progressive Conservative government did not wish to provoke a contest of wills with the Senate and announced it would not re-introduce the legislation. The fact that no subsequent government has re-visited this decision has led to the unique situation of Canada having no abortion law whatsoever. Abortion is now treated like any other medical procedure, governed by provincial and medical regulations.


title: Abortion in Canada

text: The court in "Morgentaler" did not consider the question of whether the unborn were included in the "everyone" who have the right to life. At that time, another case before the courts would have raised that issue; it was brought by Joe Borowski, a former member of the Legislative Assembly of Manitoba. However, after the "Morgentaler" decision, the Supreme Court held, in "Borowski v Canada (AG)", that his case was moot since "Morgentaler" had struck down the provisions Borowski was challenging.


title: Abortion in Canada

text: Two further cases, "Tremblay v. Daigle" and "R. v. Sullivan", relied on the born alive rule, inherited from English common law, to determine that the fetus was not a person: Sullivan could not be charged with murder of a fetus and Tremblay could not seek standing in court as the guardian of a fetus. The 1989 Supreme Court of Canada case of "Tremblay v Daigle" is one of the most widely publicized cases concerning abortion in Canada after the law prohibiting abortions was overturned by the Supreme Court of Canada. Daigle's ex-boyfriend obtained a restraining order against her having an abortion. While the restraining order was issued in Quebec, it was legally restricting Canada-wide. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled that only the woman could make the choice; the man had no legal say in a woman's choice to terminate a pregnancy or carry it to completion.


title: Abortion in Canada

text: Daigle had already had a late second-term abortion before the Court ruled on her case. While the case was fast-tracked, the progress was so slow that Daigle would have been in the third-trimester had she waited for the ruling to be handed down. Daigle had an abortion in the United States while the case was before the Supreme Court of Canada. This was not made public until after the ruling, although it was not unexpected. This is in contrast to the "Roe v. Wade" case in the United States where Roe had carried the pregnancy to term. That case, however, was different from the "Tremblay" v. "Daigle" case in that it was about whether abortion was legal. In the "Tremblay" v. "Daigle" case, the question was whether a male partner has a say in whether a woman can obtain an abortion ruling.


title: Abortion in Canada

text: Two further cases addressed the "interest in the fetus". In "Dobson (Litigation Guardian of) v. Dobson", a grandfather attempted to act on behalf of a child born with cerebral palsy, supposedly resulting from a car accident in which the mother was the driver. He attempted to sue the mother with negligence in driving. The mother was in favor of the suit succeeding as it would have provided her with funds to raise her disabled child; her insurance company was defending the suit through subrogation. Citing the case of "Kamloops v. Nielsen", the Court decided that courts cannot impose a duty of care on a pregnant woman toward her fetus because it would interfere with the exercise of her autonomy rights during pregnancy and faced difficulty in defining a standard of care in pregnancy. Only a legislature can do this. In "Winnipeg Child & Family Services (Northwest Area) v. G. (D.F.)", the Supreme Court determined that a pregnant woman addicted to solvents could not be civilly committed for treatment.


title: Abortion in Canada

text: Surgical and non-invasive medical abortions in Canada are provided on request for any reason, are confidential for all ages and funded by Medicare; to those who are covered by provincial/territorial medical care plans (depending on the province or territory, this always includes Canadian citizens and permanent residents, but may vary on inclusion of international students, workers, and protected persons or refugee claimants). For those not covered by a medical care plan (e.g. Americans in states that prohibit abortion after the decision in "Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization"), the federal government has committed to letting them obtain abortions in Canada without restriction. However, this will be contingent on them being able to pay for travel costs and the procedure themselves.


title: Abortion in Canada

text: Nationally, abortion is legal through all nine months (40 weeks) of pregnancy, nevertheless no providers in Canada offer care beyond 23 weeks and 6 days. Restrictions are based on professional medical guidelines, resources available (equipment, trained personnel) and individual facility mandates makes access to all types of services vary by region within each province and territory. Each province and territory regulates and funds their own healthcare system. The federal government provides funding to each province and territory, provided they comply with the requirements of the "Canada Health Act". One of those requirements is comprehensiveness, which means that all insured health services defined by the Act must be covered by a provincial or territorial health plan for that province or territory to receive federal funds. Abortion is not specifically mentioned in the "Canada Health Act". It is simply included in the broad definition of "insured health services", just like other medical and surgical procedures.


title: Abortion in Canada

text: One-third of hospitals perform surgical abortions, and these perform two-thirds of surgical abortions in the country. The remaining surgical abortions are performed by public and private clinics. Medical abortions are available in Canada using medications such as methotrexate, or misoprostol, and/or mifepristone. Mifepristone used in combination with misoprostol (brand name Mifegymiso) was approved for use in Canada when prescribed by a doctor on July 29, 2015. In 2017 the approval expanded to include prescribing abilities to nurse practitioners, midwives and pharmacist based on provincial regulations, and it may be dispensed by pharmacists directly to the patient.


title: Abortion in Canada

text: Nationwide information is provided by advocacy associations such as the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada and National Abortion Federation that maintain detailed lists of abortion clinics by province and the maximum gestational period that the clinic will provide abortion types up to. These sites also provide information on how to obtain medication involving medical abortions, how to obtain financial support for travel/accommodation expenses, after-treatment supplies, child care and various other needs.


title: Abortion in Canada

text: As of 2020, all federally represented political parties in Canada, as well as their leaders, support continued legal abortion access in Canada. While elected members of the Bloc Québécois, New Democratic Party, the Liberal Party of Canada, and the Green Party of Canada nearly universally support abortion rights and all these parties' MPs would be expected to vote against any hypothetical Bills that would restrict or limit abortion rights in any way, the Conservative Party of Canada has both members who favour abortion rights and members who oppose them and has stated that members would be allowed to vote their conscience on any vote concerning abortion. In the past, more Conservative members have been against abortion.


title: Abortion in Canada

text: The Conservative Party has had to wrestle with combining the conflicting social policies of its two predecessor parties, the moderate Progressive Conservative Party and the more right-wing Canadian Alliance, which merged in 2003. Many socially conservative Alliance supporters were angered at the prospect of Belinda Stronach, who favoured abortion rights, winning the leadership election in early 2004, while in contrast some Progressive Conservative supporters objected during the 2004 federal election to the new party's perceived openness to legislation that would restrict abortion rights. In the March 2005 policy convention, in a narrow vote, the party voted to not introduce legislation on the subject of abortion (members can still introduce private members bills on the issue), although it condemns sex-selective abortions. The party's stance on abortion is frequently voted on at the party's policy conventions. Motion 312 was introduced by Conservative MP Stephen Woodworth in 2012, calling for a House of Commons committee to determine when human life begins, but was defeated 203–91. In 2013, Conservative MP Mark Warawa introduced a motion condemning discrimination against females through sex-selective abortion. In 2021, Conservative Cathay Wagantall introduced a private member's bill that would prohibit a medical practitioner from performing a sex-selective abortion. Although the bill was defeated 248-82, a majority of Conservative MPs voted in favour of the bill.


title: Abortion in Canada

text: Until recently, the Liberal Party had a few anti-abortion MPs, such as Liberal MP Paul Steckle introduced a bill that would have made abortion after 20 weeks gestation a criminal act in June 2006. Current Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau has required that all Liberal party candidates will have to vote according to the party's abortion-rights policy since he assumed leadership of the Liberal Party in 2013.


title: Abortion in Canada

text: Although the issue of abortion rights has popped up from time to time in federal elections as a wedge issue, the issue is consistently rated as a low priority for most Canadians. The Christian Heritage Party of Canada claims to be Canada's only stated anti-abortion federal political party, but has never had a member elected to parliament.


title: Abortion in Canada

text: On October 19, 2012, anti-abortion protester Patricia Maloney expressed concern over 491 cases of live-birth abortions between 2000 and 2009. The finding reported to Statistics Canada did not include detailed information on how long each fetus survived after removal or how many would have been possible to save. Canada, unlike the United States, does not specifically have a law confirming or denying the legal rights of a baby who survives abortion. On January 23, 2013, Conservative MPs Wladyslaw Lizon, Leon Benoit, and Maurice Vellacott wrote a letter requesting that the RCMP investigate how many of the 491 live-birth abortions meet the definition of homicide set forth in the Criminal Code. When CBC and The Canadian Press used the phrase "investigate all abortions performed after 19 weeks gestation", Vellacott accused the media outlets of false reporting and acknowledged that abortion in Canada is fully legal. The CBC / Canadian Press story was subsequently corrected. The move drew approval from Dr. Eike-Henner Kluge, former director of ethics and legal affairs for the Canadian Medical Association, who said that doctors should "do the best [they] can for what is now a person in the eyes of the law". However, Dr. Douglas Black, president of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, said that the situation is not one of homicide, but rather allowing fetuses "to pass away, depending on what the circumstances are, sometimes in their mom's arms".


title: Abortion in Canada

text: The abortion rights movement in Canada focuses on establishing abortion as a component of provincial health care plans, to ensure it is available in all regions, especially for those who couldn't afford it otherwise.


title: Abortion in Canada

text: Dr. Henry Morgentaler was widely seen as the one individual personifying the Canadian abortion rights movement, but organizations such as the Canadian Abortion Rights Action League (CARAL), Canadians for Choice, and the Pro-Choice Action Network also contributed significantly to advancing the abortion rights movement in Canada. CARAL folded, and has been replaced by the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada, whose focus is on the objectives mentioned above. Feminist or pro-feminism organizations also contribute to promote the abortion rights approach.


title: Abortion in Canada

text: The Canadian affiliate of Planned Parenthood, now known as the Canadian Federation for Sexual Health, is also in favour of abortion rights, and while it does refer pregnant women to abortion providers, it does not have a history (unlike its American counterpart) of engaging in widespread litigation in favour of legalized abortion.


title: Abortion in Canada

text: The anti-abortion movement, which self-identifies as the pro-life movement, disapproves of the lack of any legal restrictions on abortion in Canada and of abortions being funded by provincial health care programs, even if the abortion is not for therapeutic reasons. A medical reason for obtaining an abortion is no longer required in Canada since the 1988 removal of abortion from the Criminal Code.


title: Abortion in Canada

text: The anti-abortion movement in Canada is represented by the Catholic Church, Prolife Alberta, The Wilberforce Project, Campaign Life Coalition, REAL Women of Canada, We Need A Law, Abortion in Canada, Action Life (Ottawa), Inc., among other organizations. Anti-abortion rallies or Marches for Life occur annually in Ottawa and in some provincial capitals, drawing thousands of people, although many of these marches were cancelled because of the COVID-19 pandemic.


title: Ziaur Rahman

text: Lt. General Ziaur Rahman (19 January 1936 – 30 May 1981), was a Bangladeshi military officer and politician who served as the President of Bangladesh from 1977 to 1981. He was assassinated on 30 May 1981 in Chittagong in an army coup d'état.


title: Ziaur Rahman

text: Rahman was a Bangladesh Forces Commander of BDF Sector 1 initially, and from June as BDF commander of BDF Sector 11 of the Bangladesh Forces and the Brigade Commander of Z Force from mid-July during the country's Independence war from Pakistan in 1971. He originally broadcast the Bangladesh declaration of independence on 27 March from Kalurghat radio station in Chittagong. After the war of Independence, Rahman became a brigade commander in Bangladesh Army, and later the deputy chief of staff and chief of staff of Bangladesh Army. His ascent to leadership of the country resulted from a conspiracy that had begun with the killing of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founding president of Bangladesh, in a military coup d'état followed by a coup and counter-revolt within the military to gain control at the helm. Ziaur Rahman gained "de facto" power as head of the government already under martial law imposed by the Mushtaq government. He took over the presidency in 1977.


title: Ziaur Rahman

text: As president in 1978, Rahman founded the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (popularly known by its abbreviation BNP). He reinstated multi-party politics, freedom of the press, free speech and free markets and accountability. He initiated mass irrigation and food production programmes, including social programmes to uplift the lives of the people. His government initiated efforts to create a regional group in South Asia, which later became SAARC in 1985. He improved Bangladesh's relations with the West and China, and departed from Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's close alignment with India. Domestically, Rahman faced as many as twenty-one coup attempts for which trials were set up, and many soldiers and officers of the Bangladesh Armed Forces were executed, which were mostly claimed to be biased and false trials. He was criticized for passing the Indemnity Act and removing the ban on religion-based political parties.


title: Ziaur Rahman

text: Rahman was awarded two gallantry awards for two wars fought in South Asia. Hilal-i-Jurat for the Indo-Pak War in 1965, and Bir Uttom in 1972 for the Bangladesh Independence war 1971 for his wartime contributions.


title: Ziaur Rahman

text: According to the 1986 book "" written by Anthony Mascarenhas, Rahman retired from the Bangladesh Army as a Lt. General (promoted by himself) in 1978 with effect from 29 April.


title: Ziaur Rahman

text: The political party Rahman formed in 1978, the BNP, has remained one of the two dominant political parties of Bangladesh alongside its chief rival, the Awami League. Since Rahman's death, his wife, Khaleda Zia, has presided as chairperson of the party and served 2 full terms as prime minister during her tenure.He never draw the salaries as a President of Bangladesh.


title: Ziaur Rahman

text: Ziaur Rahman was born on 19 January 1936 to a Bengali Muslim family of Mandals in the village of Bagbari in Gabtali, Bogra District. His father, Mansur Rahman, was a chemist who specialised in paper and ink chemistry and worked for a government department at Writers' Building in Kolkata. His grandfather, Moulvi Kamaluddin Mandal, migrated from Mahishaban to Nashipur-Bagbari after marrying his grandmother Meherunnisa. Ziaur Rahman has Iranian ancestry through Meherunnisa, whose forefathers arrived in Ghoraghat during the Mughal period. His mother's name was Jahanara Khatun. Rahman was raised in his home village of Bagbari and studied in Bogra Zilla School. He had two younger brothers, Ahmed Kamal (d. 2017) and Khalilur Rahman (d. 2014).


title: Ziaur Rahman

text: In 1946, Mansur enrolled Rahman for a short stint in a boys school of Calcutta, Hare School, where he studied until the dissolution of the British Empire in India and partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. Mansur Rahman exercised his option to become a citizen of a Muslim majority Pakistan and in August 1947 moved to Karachi the first capital of Pakistan located in Sindh, West Pakistan. Zia, at the age of 11, had become a student in class six at the Academy School in Karachi in 1947. Rahman spent his adolescent years in Karachi and by age 16 completed his secondary education from that School in 1952.


title: Ziaur Rahman

text: In 1953, Rahman was admitted into the D. J. Sindh Government Science College. In the same year, he joined the Pakistan Military Academy at Kakul as a cadet.


title: Ziaur Rahman

text: In August 1960, his marriage was arranged to Khaleda Khanam Putul, the 15-year-old daughter of Iskandar Majumder and Taiyaba Majumder from the Feni District (part of then Noakhali District). Khaleda Khanam Putul, later known as Khaleda Zia, went on serve as the Prime Minister of Bangladesh three times. Rahman, a captain in the then Pakistan Army who was posted at that time as an Officer of the Defence Forces. His father, Mansur Rahman could not attend the marriage ceremony, as he was in Karachi. Zia's mother had died earlier.


title: Ziaur Rahman

text: Graduating from the Pakistan Military Academy at 12th PMA long course on 18 September 1955 in the top 10% of his class, Rahman was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Pakistan Army. In the army, he received commando training, became a paratrooper and received training in a special intelligence course.


title: Ziaur Rahman

text: Rahman went to East Pakistan on a short visit and was struck by the negative attitude of the Bengali middle class towards the military, which consumed a large chunk of the country's resources. The low representation of the Bengalis in the military was largely due to discrimination, but Rahman felt that the Bengali attitude towards the military perhaps prevented promising young Bengali from seeking military careers. As a Bengali army officer he advocated military careers for Bengali youth.


title: Ziaur Rahman

text: After serving for two years in Karachi, he was transferred to the East Bengal Regiment in 1957. He attended military training schools of British Army. He also worked in the military intelligence department from 1959 to 1964.


title: Ziaur Rahman

text: Ayub Khan's military rule from 1958 to 1968 convinced Rahman of the need for a fundamental change in the Bengali attitude towards the military. During the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965, Rahman saw combat in the Khemkaran sector in Punjab as the commander of a company (military unit) of 100–150 soldiers. Rahman was awarded Hilal-i-Jur'at for gallantry by the Pakistan government medal, Pakistan's second highest military award, and the first Battalion of the East Bengal Regiment (EBR) under which he fought won 3 Sitara-e-Jurat (Star of Courage) medals, and 8 Tamgha-i-Jurat (Medal of Courage) medals, for their role in the 1965 War with India. In 1966, Rahman was appointed military instructor at the Pakistan Military Academy, later going on to attend the Command and Staff College in Quetta, Pakistan, he completed a course in command and tactical warfare. Rahman helped raise two Bengali battalions called the 8th and 9th Bengals during his stint as instructor. Around the same time, his wife Khaleda Zia, now 24, gave birth to their first child Tarique Rahman on 20 November 1966. Rahman joined the 2nd East Bengal regiment as its second-in-command at Joydebpur in Gazipur district, near Dhaka, in 1969, and travelled to West Germany to receive advanced military and command training from the British Army of the Rhine and later spent a few months with the British Army.


title: Ziaur Rahman

text: Rahman returned to Pakistan the following year and was promoted to major. He transferred in October 1970 to be second-in-command of the 8th East Bengal regiment stationed in Chittagong. East Pakistan had been devastated by the 1970 Bhola cyclone, and the population had been embittered by the slow response of the central government and the political conflict between Pakistan's two major parties, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's Awami League, and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto's PPP. In the 1970 Pakistan Parliamentary elections the Awami League had won a majority and its leader Sheikh Mujib laid claim to form a government, but Pakistan President Yahya Khan postponed the convening of the legislature under pressure from Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's PPP party.


title: Ziaur Rahman

text: Following the failure of last-ditch talks, Yahya Khan declared martial law and ordered the army to crack down on Bengali political activities. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was arrested before midnight on 26 March 1971, taken to Tejgaon International Airport and flown to West Pakistan.


title: Ziaur Rahman

text: Zia, who already by then geared to revolt against the government of Pakistan revolted and later arrested and executed his commanding officer Lt. Col. Janjua. He was requested by the local Awami League supporters and leaders, to announce the Declaration of Independence that was earlier (in early hours of 26 March 1971) proclaimed by the undisputed Bengali leader Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, before his (Ziaur Rahman) arrest on 27 March 1971 from Kalurghat, Chittagong, as an Army officer's words would carry weight restoring people's trust in the 'Declaration of Independence', which read:.


title: Ziaur Rahman

text: "I, Major Ziaur Rahman, Provincial Head of the government, do hereby declare that Independence of the People's Republic of Bangladesh."


title: Ziaur Rahman

text: But his (Ziaur Rahman) proclamation as the ""Provincial Head"" of the government, was much criticized and rebuked by the political leaders present there and he realized his mistake.


title: Ziaur Rahman

text: "I, Major Ziaur Rahman, do hereby declare the Independence of Bangladesh in the name of our great leader Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman."


title: Ziaur Rahman

text: Rahman organised an infantry unit gathering all Bengali soldiers from military and EPR units in Chittagong. He designated it Sector No. 1 with its HQ in Sabroom. A few weeks later he was transferred to Teldhala where he organised and created Sector 11. All sectors were restructured officially under Bangladesh Forces as the sector in the Chittagong and Hill Tracts area, under Colonel M. A. G. Osmani, the Supreme Commander of Bangladesh Forces, of the Provisional Government of Bangladesh which had its headquarters on Theatre Road, Calcutta in India. On 30 July 1971 Rahman was appointed the commander of the first conventional brigade of the Bangladesh Forces, which was named "Z Force", after the first initial of his name. His brigade consisted of 1st, 3rd and 8th East Bengali regiments, enabling Rahman to launch major attacks on Pakistani forces. With the Z Force, Rahman "acquired a reputation for icy bravery" according to "The New York Times", and was awarded the Bir Uttom, the second-highest military honour (and the highest for living officers) by the Government of Bangladesh.


title: Ziaur Rahman

text: A deep conspiracy with the purpose of removing Sheikh Mujibur Rahman from the helm was well under way long before his assassination by outside forces and internal collaborators within Bangladesh. On 15 August 1975 President Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his family were assassinated in a gun fight with army personnel. One of Mujibur Rahman's cabinet ministers and a leading conspirator Khondaker Mostaq Ahmad gained the presidency and dismissed Major General K M Shafiullah, who had stayed neutral during the coup. Major General Ziaur Rahman (then deputy chief of army staff) was appointed as army chief of staff, after Shafiullah resigned. However, the coup of 15 August caused a period of instability and unrest in Bangladesh and amongst the rank and file of the armed forces. Brigadier Khaled Mosharraf and the 46th Brigade of Dhaka Cantonment under Colonel Shafaat Jamil revolted against Khandaker Mushtaq Ahmed's administration on 3 November 1975, and Ziaur Rahman was forced to relinquish his post and put under house arrest. This was followed on November 7 by ("Sipoy-Janata Biplob") Soldiers and People's Coup, a mutiny staged by the Jatiyo Samajtantrik Dal (JSD or National Socialist Party) under retired Lieutenant Colonel Abu Taher and a group of socialist military officers. Khaled Mosharraf was killed by his subordinate officers while he was sheltering with them from the mutineers. Shafaat Jamil escaped but was injured, while Rahman was freed by the 2nd Artillery regiment under Lt. Col. Rashid and re-appointed as army chief of staff with full support of the rank and file of the army.


title: Ziaur Rahman

text: Following a meeting at army headquarters, an interim government was formed with Justice Abu Sadat Mohammad Sayem as chief martial law administrator and Ziaur Rahman, Air Vice Marshal M. G. Tawab and Rear Admiral M. H. Khan as his deputies. However, discipline in the army had totally collapsed and it was difficult to disarm the soldiers supported by JSD and Lt. Col. Taher, as they plotted another coup to remove Rahman. Rahman realised that the disorder had to be suppressed firmly if discipline was to be restored in the Bangladesh Army. Rahman cracked down on the JSD and Gonobahini. Abu Taher was sentenced to death in July 1976 and other party figures received various terms of imprisonment. Taher was executed on 21 July 1976. Rahman became the chief martial law administrator following Justice Sayem's elevation to the presidency on 6 November 1975. He tried to integrate the armed forces, giving repatriates a status appropriate to their qualifications and seniority. While this angered some veterans of the independence war, who had rapidly reached high positions following independence in 1971, Rahman sent discontented officers on diplomatic missions abroad to defuse unrest.


title: Ziaur Rahman

text: Rahman became the President of Bangladesh on 21 April 1977. Years of disorder from the previous political administration of the Awami League and BAKSAL had left most of Bangladesh's state institutions in disarray, with constant internal and external threats. After becoming president in 1977, Rahman lifted martial law and introduced massive reforms for the development of the country.


title: Ziaur Rahman

text: In late September 1977, a failed coup against his administration occurred. A group of Japanese Red Army terrorists hijacked Japan Airlines Flight 472 from India armed with weapons and ammunition and forced it to land in Tejgaon International Airport. On 30 September, while the attention of the government was riveted on this crisis situation, due to spreading of panic and disinformation actions went under way in Bogra Cantonment where a revolt broke out. Although the revolt was quickly quelled on the night of 2 October, another revolt started in Dhaka cantonment, led by misinformed airmen of Bangladesh Air Force (BAF). Armed units from these army and air force personnel unsuccessfully attacked Zia's residence, captured Dhaka Radio for a short time and killed eleven air force officers and 30 airmen at Tejgaon International Airport, where they were gathered for negotiations with the hijackers. Wing Commander M. Hamidullah Khan TJ, SH, BP (BDF Commander Bangladesh Forces Sector 11), then BAF Ground Defence Commander, quickly put down the rebellion within the Air Force, while the government was severely shaken. Chief of Air Staff AVM AG Mahmud reappointed Wing Commander Hamidullah Khan as Provost Marshal of BAF. President Zia immediately appointed Wing Commander Hamidullah Khan as ZMLA (Dhaka) and Director of Martial Law Communications and Control at Tejgaon (present day PM's Office). Government intelligence had failed and President Rahman promptly dismissed the DG-NSI and the DFI chief, AVM Aminul Islam Khan, of 9th GD(P) formerly coursemate of AVM A. K. Khandkar of Pakistan Air Force. Under Zia's Presidential directive Hamidullah initiated the transfer of DFI at Old Bailey Road from the ministry of defence to Dhaka Cantonment under direct control of the president and reorganized as DGFI. In the aftermath at least 200 soldiers involved in the coup attempt were executed following a military trial. .


title: Ziaur Rahman

text: The size of Bangladesh police forces was doubled and the number of soldiers of the army increased from 50,000 to 90,000. In 1978 he appointed Hussain Muhammad Ershad as the new Chief of Army Staff, promoting him to the rank of lieutenant general. He was viewed as a professional soldier with no political aspirations because of his imprisonment in former West Pakistan during the Bangladesh War of Independence. Quietly Ershad rose to become Zia's close political and military counsellor.