title: Pope Pius VII

text: On 3 June 1816, Pius VII condemned the works of Melkite bishop Germanos Adam. Adam's writings supported conciliarism, the view that the authority of ecumenical councils was greater than that of the papacy.


title: Pope Pius VII

text: In 1822, Pius VII reached his 80th birthday and his health was visibly declining. On 6 July 1823, he fractured his hip in a fall in the papal apartments and was bedridden from that point onward. In his final weeks he would often lose consciousness and would mutter the names of the cities that he had been ferried away to by the French forces. With the Cardinal Secretary of State Ercole Consalvi at his side, Pius VII died on 20 August at 5 a.m.


title: Pope Pius VII

text: He was briefly interred in the Vatican grottoes but was later buried in a monument in Saint Peter's Basilica after his funeral on 25 August.


title: Pope Pius VII

text: An application to commence beatification proceedings were lodged to the Holy See on 10 July 2006 and received the approval of Cardinal Camillo Ruini (the Vicar of Rome) who transferred the request to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. The Congregation - on 24 February 2007 - approved the opening of the cause responding to the call of the Ligurian bishops.


title: Pope Pius VII

text: On 15 August 2007, the Holy See contacted the diocese of Savona-Noli with the news that Pope Benedict XVI had declared "nihil obstat" (nothing stands against) the cause of beatification of the late pontiff, thus opening the diocesan process for this pope's beatification. He now has the title of Servant of God. The official text declaring the opening of the cause was: ""Summus Pontifex Benedictus XVI declarat, ex parte Sanctae Sedis, nihil obstare quominus in Causa Beatificationis et Canonizationis Servi Dei Pii Barnabae Gregorii VII Chiaramonti"". Work on the cause commenced the following month in gathering documentation on the late pope.


title: Pope Pius VII

text: In late 2018 the Bishop of Savona announced that the cause for Pius VII would continue following the completion of initial preparation and investigation. The bishop named a new postulator and a diocesan tribunal which would begin work into the cause. The formal introduction to the cause (a diocesan investigation into the late pontiff's life) was held at a Mass celebrated in the Savona diocese on 31 October 2021.


title: Pope Pius VII

text: The first postulator for the cause was Father Giovanni Farris (2007–18) and the current postulator since 2018 is Fr. Giovanni Margara.


title: Pope Pius VII

text: Pope Pius VII's monument (1831) in St. Peter's Basilica, adorning his tomb, was created by the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen.


title: Jeff Horn

text: Jeffrey Christopher Horn Jr. (born 4 February 1988) is an Australian professional boxer who held the WBO welterweight title from 2017 to 2018. As an amateur he represented Australia at the 2012 Olympics, reaching the quarterfinals of the light-welterweight bracket.


title: Jeff Horn

text: As a relative newcomer to the sport, Horn won his first Australian title in 2009 and repeated the feat in 2011. He went on to win a silver medal at the Gee-Bee Tournament in Helsinki and compete at the 2011 AIBA World Boxing Championships in Baku where he lost to eventual champion Everton Lopes in the second round. In 2012, he picked up his third Australian title and first Oceania title to earn a spot at the London Olympics.


title: Jeff Horn

text: Horn made his professional debut in Melbourne on 1 March 2013, winning by second-round technical knockout. In just his seventh pro bout he outpointed two-time world title challenger and former IBF #1 contender Naoufel Ben Rabah. On 27 April 2016, Horn faced former two-division world champion Randall Bailey. After dropping Bailey in the second round, Horn was knocked down in the third round. Horn won by TKO after Bailey refused to get up from his corner before round eight. On 21 October 2016, Horn fought Rico Mueller and defeated the German by TKO in round nine. After the fight, the WBO ranked him the #2 welterweight in the world. On 10 December 2016, Horn faced former IBO welterweight champion Ali Funeka, whom he stopped in the sixth round. With Top Rank promoter Bob Arum in attendance, his win set up a potential showdown with eight-division world champion Manny Pacquiao.


title: Jeff Horn

text: Horn signed up to face WBO welterweight champion Manny Pacquiao in Brisbane on 23 April 2017. The announcement of the fight was met with relative surprise and disappointment due to Horn's limited exposure on the world stage, which led Pacquiao to comment "I don't know who Jeff Horn is". A tweet on 12 February by Pacquiao complicated negotiations when he said that he planned to fight in the United Arab Emirates. On 26 February, Pacquiao and Amir Khan announced that they had reached an agreement to fight, leaving Horn without an opponent. On 7 March the fight with Khan was called off and on 5 April a deal for the Pacquiao–Horn fight was reached. A press conference on 10 April signaled confirmation of the fight, which took place at Suncorp Stadium on 2 July 2017. Horn defeated Pacquiao via unanimous decision after 12 rounds. CompuBox stats showed that Pacquiao landed 182 out of 573 punches thrown (32%), whilst Horn landed only 92 of 625 thrown (15%). Many pundits, as well as many current and former boxers, believed Pacquiao had done enough to retain the WBO title.


title: Jeff Horn

text: Horn's win over Pacquiao was also criticized by some boxing analysts, sports journalists and fans alike, with some comparing the decision to that of the controversial Pacquiao vs. Timothy Bradley fight. In regards to the controversial scorecards, ESPN's Dan Rafael scored the fight 117–111 and ESPN analyst Teddy Atlas scored it 116–111, both for Pacquiao. "The Guardian" and the "International Business Times" both scored the fight in Pacquiao's favor as well, 117–111. BoxingScene had it 116–112 for Pacquiao, while CBS Sports scored the fight 114–114 even. BoxNation's Steve Bunce scored the fight 115–113 for Horn. In total, 12 of 15 media outlets scored the bout for Pacquiao, 2 of 15 outlets ruled in favor of Horn and 1 scored a draw.


title: Jeff Horn

text: Pacquiao claimed Horn got away with numerous dirty tactics in the fight, using illegal blows including elbows and headbutts.


title: Jeff Horn

text: In response to a formal request by the Philippine Games and Amusements Board, the WBO agreed to review the fight between Pacquiao and Horn. It was scored round-by-round by five anonymous judges, but the WBO stated that they do not have the power to reverse the original result of the fight. The WBO rescored the fight in favor of Horn winning seven rounds and Pacquiao winning five.


title: Jeff Horn

text: Initially, Horn was to give Pacquiao a rematch, but the rematch was delayed and did not eventuate. As a result, Horn instead made a voluntary defence of the WBO title against Gary Corcoran on 13 December 2017. Corcoran's corner decided to throw in the towel in the eleventh round, thus Horn retained the title via TKO. Both fighters were cut during the fight, but Horn was leading on the scorecards at the time of the stoppage.


title: Jeff Horn

text: Horn was challenged by Terence Crawford on 9 June 2018, for the WBO welterweight title. Crawford defeated Horn via technical knockout in the ninth round, becoming the new WBO welterweight champion.


title: Jeff Horn

text: Horn moved up to middleweight after the loss to Crawford and faced Anthony Mundine on 30 November 2018. He defeated Mundine in just 96 seconds.


title: Jeff Horn

text: Next, Horn faced Michael Zerafa on 31 August 2019 in Bendigo. For the second time in his career, Horn lost via technical knockout in the ninth round.


title: Jeff Horn

text: On 26 August, 2020, Horn faced one of Australia's best up-and-coming fighters Tim Tszyu. Tszyu was ranked #5 by the WBO at super welterweight. Tszyu dropped Horn twice, once in the third and once in the sixth round, and continued to dominate Horn until the end of the eighth round, when Horn's corner decided not to continue the fight.


title: Jeff Horn

text: Horn lives in Brisbane and his father, Jeff Horn Sr., is a builder. Horn's mother, Liza Dykstra, works for the Saint Vincent de Paul Society. His grandfather, Ray Horn, fought in exhibition boxing matches in the Queensland outback during the 1930s. His second cousin is Graham Quirk, the former Lord Mayor of Brisbane.


title: Jeff Horn

text: Horn holds a Bachelor of Education degree from Griffith University and formerly worked as a physical education teacher for Pallara State School in Brisbane.


title: Jeff Horn

text: In his youth, Horn had been a victim of bullying and cited this as the reason he started boxing, initially as a means to defend himself.


title: Noughts + Crosses

text: Noughts + Crosses is a British drama television series based on the "Noughts & Crosses" novel series by Malorie Blackman. The series is set in an alternative history where black "Cross" people rule over white "Noughts".


title: Noughts + Crosses

text: The first episode aired on BBC One on 5 March 2020, and the remaining episodes premiered on BBC iPlayer on the same day. In May 2021, the BBC announced that a second series had been commissioned.


title: Noughts + Crosses

text: The series differs from the book in several respects. Callum and Sephy are older than in the novels. Also, Callum and Jude's sister, Lynette McGregor, does not have a role.


title: Noughts + Crosses

text: The BBC synopsis reads: "Against a background of prejudice, distrust and powerful rebellion mounting on the streets, a passionate romance builds between Sephy and Callum which will lead them both into terrible danger".


title: Noughts + Crosses

text: The series takes place in present-day London in an alternative history where 700 years prior, several nations in (what is in our world known as) West Africa combined to form the powerful Aprican Empire and went on to colonise Europe. After a conflict known as the Great World War, control of Europe is split between different Aprican factions, with mainland Europe under control of the Malian Empire and the Moors, whereas Albion (comprising Great Britain and Ireland) and parts of Scandinavia remain under the thumb of the Aprican Empire.


title: Noughts + Crosses

text: Russia and the Balkans remain in active conflict with the Aprican colonisers, although since the Great World War their national borders have been pushed back. The Ottoman Empire also exists, still controlling parts of Middle East.


title: Noughts + Crosses

text: Albion appears to be a self-governing colony with its own (Cross) Prime Minister and executive leadership, an exclusively Cross police force, and a military only just opened up to a small number of Nought high-achievers. However, it is still accountable to the Aprican Empire based on the African continent. As of 1950, racial segregation is rigidly enforced in the colony between those of wealthy Aprican descent (known as Crosses or daggers) and the poorer native Europeans (known as Noughts or blankers).


title: Noughts + Crosses

text: In 2016, the BBC announced they were producing an adaptation, to be written by Levi David Addai and Matthew Graham. They had to bow out and Toby Whithouse took over in 2018. Jay Z's company Roc Nation and Participant Media co-produced the series. In November 2018, it was announced Jack Rowan and Masali Baduza were cast as Callum McGregor and Sephy Hadley respectively.


title: Noughts + Crosses

text: In New Zealand, the series is available on the free streaming service TVNZ On Demand, while in Australia it was first screened on pay television channel BBC First in September 2020 and is also distributed by Foxtel on their platform. The series premiered on ABC Television in November 2021, and became available on their free streaming platform, ABC iview.


title: Noughts + Crosses

text: The series was added to the Peacock streaming service in the United States in September 2020. The series is streaming on SonyLIV in India. In Hungary, the series is available on HBO GO.


title: Noughts + Crosses

text: The soundtrack, titled "Noughts + Crosses: The Soundtrack", was released on BBC Sounds on 10 February 2020, without track one being available.


title: Noughts + Crosses

text: "The Guardian" Josh Lee gave the television series four out of five stars, describing it as a "reverse-race love story that is vital viewing." Lee praised the series for highlighting the challenges that working-class white people and people of colour share in the real world through its depiction of racism in an alternative world dominated by African supremacy.


title: Ipomoea

text: Ipomoea () is the largest genus in the plant family Convolvulaceae, with over 600 species. It is a large and diverse group, with common names including morning glory, water convolvulus or water spinach, sweet potato, bindweed, moonflower, etc. The genus occurs throughout the tropical and subtropical regions of the world, and comprises annual and perennial herbaceous plants, lianas, shrubs, and small trees; most of the species are twining climbing plants.


title: Ipomoea

text: Their most widespread common name is morning glory, but some species in related genera bear that same common name and some "Ipomoea" species are known by different common names. Those formerly separated in "Calonyction" (Greek "good" and , , , "night") are called moonflowers. The name "Ipomoea" is derived from the Greek , (, ), meaning "woodworm", and (), meaning "resembling". It refers to their twining habit.


title: Ipomoea

text: Humans use "Ipomoea" spp. for their content of medical and psychoactive compounds, mainly alkaloids. Some species are renowned for their properties in folk medicine and herbalism; for example, Vera Cruz jalap ("I. jalapa") and Tampico jalap ("I. simulans") are used to produce jalap, a cathartic preparation accelerating the passage of stool. "Kiribadu ala" (giant potato, "I. mauritiana") is one of the many ingredients of "chyawanprash", the ancient Ayurvedic tonic called "the elixir of life" for its wide-ranging properties.


title: Ipomoea

text: The leaves of "I. batatas" are eaten as a vegetable, and have been shown to slow oxygenation of LDLs, with some similar potential health benefits to green tea and grape polyphenols.


title: Ipomoea

text: Other species were and still are used as potent entheogens. Seeds of Mexican morning glory ("tlitliltzin, I. tricolor") were thus used by Aztecs and Zapotecs in shamanistic and priestly divination rituals, and at least by the former also as a poison, to give the victim a "horror trip" (see also Aztec entheogenic complex). Beach moonflower ("I. violacea") was also used thusly, and the cultivars called 'Heavenly Blue', touted today for their psychoactive properties, seem to represent an indeterminable assembly of hybrids of these two species.Ergoline derivatives (lysergamides) are probably responsible for the entheogenic activity. Ergine (LSA), isoergine, -lysergic acid N-(α-hydroxyethyl)amide and lysergol have been isolated from "I. tricolor", "I. violacea" and/or purple morning glory ("I. purpurea"); although these are often assumed to be the cause of the plants' effects, this is not supported by scientific studies, which show although they are psychoactive, they are not notably hallucinogenic. Alexander Shulgin in "TiHKAL" suggests ergonovine is responsible, instead. It has verified psychoactive properties, though as yet other undiscovered lysergamides possibly are present in the seeds.


title: Ipomoea

text: Though most often noted as "recreational" drugs, the lysergamides are also of medical importance. Ergonovine enhances the action of oxytocin, used to still "post partum" bleeding. Ergine induces drowsiness and a relaxed state, so might be useful in treating anxiety disorder. Whether "Ipomoea" species are useful sources of these compounds remains to be determined. In any case, in some jurisdictions, certain "Ipomoea" are regulated, e.g. by the Louisiana State Act 159, which bans cultivation of "I. violacea" except for ornamental purposes.


title: Ipomoea

text: Many herbivores avoid morning glories such as "Ipomoea", as the high alkaloid content makes these plants unpalatable, if not toxic. Nonetheless, "Ipomoea" species are used as food plants by the caterpillars of certain Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths). For a selection of diseases of the sweet potato ("I. batatas"), many of which also infect other members of this genus, see List of sweet potato diseases.


title: Ipomoea

text: The species of "Ipomoea" interfere with each other's pollination. Pollen from different species compete in each other's reproductive processes, imposing a fitness cost.


title: Ed Currie

text: "Smokin" Ed Currie is an American chili pepper breeder, who is the founder and president of the PuckerButt Pepper Company. He is best known for breeding the hottest chili pepper in the world, the Carolina Reaper, as recognized by Guinness World Records.


title: Ed Currie

text: Currie was born in West Bloomfield Township, Michigan. He graduated from Central Michigan University In 2001, Currie moved to South Carolina, where he began growing his own peppers in the yard and experimenting with crossbreeds. He was featured in the episode "Chili Eating" in the 2020 Netflix documentary series, "We Are the Champions".


title: Ed Currie

text: Currie started The PuckerButt Pepper Company in Fort Mill, South Carolina in 2003. The company has over 500,000 pepper plants and sells peppers considered to be extremely hot. He sells seeds, pepper mash, and hot sauce to more than 95 countries. PuckerButt has annual revenues close to $1 million, and it is the largest organic pepper farm in the United States. Currie's hot sauce "The Last Dab" became known when it was featured on the YouTube show "Hot Ones."


title: Ed Currie

text: Currie crossbreeds his pepper plants by taking the pollen of one plant with a paintbrush and then delivering that pollen to a different plant. To create the Carolina Reaper, he took a pepper from Pakistan and combined it with one from Saint Vincent. In 2017, "Guinness World Records" gave the title of World's Hottest Chili to the Carolina Reaper.


title: Independent school (United Kingdom)

text: In the United Kingdom, independent schools () are fee-charging schools, some endowed and governed by a board of governors and some in private ownership. They are independent of many of the regulations and conditions that apply to state-funded schools. For example, pupils do not have to follow the National Curriculum, although, some schools do. They are commonly described as 'private schools' although historically the term referred to a school in private ownership, in contrast to an endowed school subject to a trust or of charitable status. Many of the older independent schools catering for the 13–18 age range in England and Wales are known as public schools, seven of which were the subject of the Public Schools Act 1868. The term "public school" derived from the fact that they were then open to pupils regardless of where they lived or their religion (while in the United States and most other English-speaking countries "public school" refers to a publicly-funded state school). Prep (preparatory) schools educate younger children up to the age of 13 to prepare them for entry to the public schools and other independent schools.


title: Independent school (United Kingdom)

text: Some former grammar schools converted to an independent fee-charging model following the 1965 Circular 10/65 and the subsequent cessation in 1975 of government funding support to direct grant grammar schools.


title: Independent school (United Kingdom)

text: There are around 2,600 independent schools in the UK, which educate around 615,000 children, some 7 per cent of all British children and 18 per cent of pupils over the age of 16. In addition to charging tuition fees, many also benefit from gifts, charitable endowments and charitable status. Many of these schools are members of the Independent Schools Council. In 2017, the average annual cost for private schooling was £14,102 for day school and £32,259 for boarding school.


title: Independent school (United Kingdom)

text: "The Independent Schools Yearbook" has been published annually since 1986. This was a name change of a publication that started in 1889 as "The Public Schools Yearbook"


title: Independent school (United Kingdom)

text: Some independent schools are particularly old, such as The King's School, Canterbury (founded 597), The King's School, Rochester (founded 604), St Peter's School, York (founded c. 627), Sherborne School (founded 705), Wells Cathedral School (founded 909), Warwick School (c. 914), The King's School, Ely (c. 970) and St Albans School (948). These schools were founded as part of the church and were under its complete dominion. During the late 14th and early 15th centuries the first schools independent of the church were founded. Winchester (1382) and Oswestry (1407) were the first of their kind, and such early "free grammar schools" founded by wealthy benefactors


title: Independent school (United Kingdom)

text: paved the way for the establishment of the modern "public school". These were typically established for male students from poor or disadvantaged backgrounds. English law has always regarded education as a charitable end in itself, irrespective of poverty.


title: Independent school (United Kingdom)

text: The transformation of free charitable foundations into institutions which sometimes charge fees came about readily: the foundation would only afford minimal facilities, so that further fees might be charged to lodge, clothe and otherwise maintain the scholars, to the private profit of the trustees or headmaster. Also, facilities already provided by the charitable foundation for a few students could profitably be extended to further paying pupils. Some schools still keep their foundation students in a separate house from other pupils.


title: Independent school (United Kingdom)

text: After a time, such fees eclipsed the original charitable income, and the original endowment would become a minor part of the capital benefactions enjoyed by the school. By 2009 senior boarding schools were charging fees of between £16,000 and nearly £30,000 per annum. Most of the independent schools today are still registered as a charity, and bursaries are available to students on a means test basis. Christ's Hospital in Horsham is an example: a large proportion of its students are funded by its charitable foundation or by various benefactors.


title: Independent school (United Kingdom)

text: The educational reforms of the 19th century were particularly important under first Thomas Arnold at Rugby, and then Samual Butler and later Benjamin Kennedy at Shrewsbury, the former emphasising team spirit and 'muscular Christianity' and the latter the importance of scholarship and competitive examinations. Edward Thring of Uppingham School introduced major reforms, focusing on the importance of the individual and competition, as well as the need for a "total curriculum" with academia, music, sport and drama being central to education. Most public schools developed significantly during the 18th and 19th centuries, and came to play an important role in the development of the Victorian social elite. Under a number of forward-looking headmasters leading public schools created a curriculum based heavily on classics and physical activity for boys and young men of the upper and upper middle classes.


title: Independent school (United Kingdom)

text: They were schools for the gentlemanly elite of Victorian politics, armed forces and colonial government. Often, successful businessmen would send their sons to a public school as a mark of participation in the elite. Much of the discipline was in the hands of senior pupils (usually known as prefects), which was not just a means to reduce staffing costs, but was also seen as vital preparation for those pupils' later roles in public or military service. More recently heads of public schools have been emphasising that senior pupils now play a much reduced role in disciplining.


title: Independent school (United Kingdom)

text: To an extent, the public school system influenced the school systems of the British Empire, and recognisably "public" schools can be found in many Commonwealth countries.


title: Independent school (United Kingdom)

text: Until 1975 there had been a group of 179 academically selective schools drawing on both private and state funding, the direct grant grammar schools. The Direct Grant Grammar Schools (Cessation of Grant) Regulations 1975 required these schools to choose between full state funding as comprehensive schools and full independence. As a result, 119 of these schools became independent.


title: Independent school (United Kingdom)

text: Pupil numbers at independent schools fell slightly during the mid-1970s recession. At the same time participation at all secondary schools grew dramatically, so that the share of the independent sector fell from a little under 8 per cent in 1964 to reach a low of 5.7 per cent in 1978. Both these trends were reversed during the 1980s, and the share of the independent schools reached 7.5 per cent by 1991. The changes since 1990 have been less dramatic, participation falling to 6.9 per cent by 1996 before increasing very slightly after 2000 to reach 7.2 per cent in 2012. In 2015, the figure has fallen back to 6.9 per cent with the absolute number of pupils attending independent schools falling everywhere in England apart from in the South East.


title: Independent school (United Kingdom)

text: In 2011 there were more than 2,500 independent schools in the UK educating some 628,000 children, comprising over 6.5 per cent of UK children, and more than 18 per cent of pupils over the age of 16.


title: Independent school (United Kingdom)

text: In England the schools account for a slightly higher percentage than in the UK as a whole. According to a 2010 study by Ryan & Sibetia, "the proportion of pupils attending independent schools in England is currently 7.2 per cent (considering full-time pupils only)".


title: Independent school (United Kingdom)

text: Most of the larger independent schools are either full or partial boarding schools, although many have now become predominantly day schools. By contrast there are only a few dozen state boarding schools. Boarding-school traditions give a distinctive character to British independent education, even in the case of day-pupils.


title: Independent school (United Kingdom)

text: A high proportion of independent schools, particularly the larger and older institutions, have charitable status.


title: Independent school (United Kingdom)

text: The Independent Schools Council (ISC), through seven affiliated organisations, represents 1,289 schools that together educate over 80 per cent of the pupils in the UK independent sector. Those schools in England which are members of the affiliated organisations of the ISC are inspected by the Independent Schools Inspectorate under a framework agreed between ISC, the Government's Department for Education (DfE) and the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted). Independent Schools not affiliated to the ISC in England may be inspected by either School Inspection Service or Bridge Schools' Trust. Independent schools accredited to the ISC in Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland or others in England out with the inspectorial bodies listed above are inspected through the national inspectorates in each country.


title: Independent school (United Kingdom)

text: Independent schools in Scotland educate about 31,000 children and often referred to as private schools. Although many of the Scottish independent schools are members of the ISC they are also represented by the Scottish Council of Independent Schools, recognised by the Scottish Parliament as the body representing private schools in Scotland. Unlike England, all Scottish independent schools are subject to the same regime of inspections by Education Scotland as local authority schools and they have to register with the Learning Directorate. The nine largest Scottish independent schools, with 1,000 or more pupils, are George Watson's College, Hutcheson's Grammar School, Robert Gordon's College, George Heriot's School, St Aloysius' College, The Glasgow Academy, Dollar Academy, the High School of Glasgow and the High School of Dundee.


title: Independent school (United Kingdom)

text: In Scotland, it was common for children destined for private schools to receive their primary education at a local school. This arose because of Scotland's long tradition of state-funded education, which was spearheaded by the Church of Scotland from the seventeenth century, long before such education was common in England. Independent prep schools only became more widespread in Scotland from the late 19th century (usually attached to an existing secondary private school, though exceptions such as Craigclowan Preparatory School and Cargilfield Preparatory School do exist), though they are still much less prevalent than in England. In modern times many secondary pupils in Scotland's private schools will have fed in from the school's own fee-paying primary school, therefore there is considerable competition facing pupils from state primary schools who seek to enter a private school at secondary stage, via entrance examinations.


title: Independent school (United Kingdom)

text: Independent schools, like state grammar schools, are free to select their pupils, subject to general legislation against discrimination. The principal forms of selection are financial, in that the pupil's family must be able to pay the school fees, and academic, with many administering their own entrance exams – some also require that the prospective student undergo an interview, and credit may also be given for musical, sporting or other talent. Entrance to some schools is more or less restricted to pupils whose parents practise a particular religion, or schools may require all pupils to attend religious services.


title: Independent school (United Kingdom)

text: Only a small minority of parents can afford school fees averaging over £23,000 per annum for boarding pupils and £11,000 for day pupils, with additional costs for uniform, equipment and extra-curricular facilities. Scholarships and means-tested bursaries to assist the education of the less well-off are usually awarded by a process which combines academic and other criteria.


title: Independent school (United Kingdom)

text: Independent schools are generally academically selective, using the competitive Common Entrance Examination at ages 11–13. Schools often offer scholarships to attract abler pupils (which improves their average results); the standard sometimes approaches the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) intended for age 16. Poorly-performing pupils may be required to leave, and following GCSE results can be replaced in the sixth form by a new infusion of high-performing sixth-form-only pupils, which may distort apparent results. On the other hand, pupils performing poorly cannot legally be excluded from a state school solely for poor performance.


title: Independent school (United Kingdom)

text: Independent schools, as compared with maintained schools, are generally characterised by more individual teaching; much lower pupil-teacher ratios at around 9:1; longer teaching hours (sometimes including Saturday morning teaching) and homework (known as prep), though shorter terms; more time for organised sports and extra-curricular activities; and a more emphasis on traditional academic subjects.


title: Independent school (United Kingdom)

text: As boarding schools are fully responsible for their pupils throughout term-time, pastoral care is an essential part of independent education, and many independent schools teach their own distinctive ethos, including social aspirations, manners and accents, associated with their own school traditions. Many pupils aspire to send their own children to their old schools over successive generations. Most offer sporting, musical, dramatic and art facilities, sometimes at extra charges.


title: Independent school (United Kingdom)

text: Educational achievement is generally very good. Independent school pupils are four times more likely to attain an A* at GCSE than their non-selective state sector counterparts and twice as likely to attain an A grade at A-level. A much higher proportion go to university. Some schools specialise in particular strengths, whether academic, although this is not as common as it is in the state sector.


title: Independent school (United Kingdom)

text: Independent schools are able to set their own discipline regime, with much greater freedom to exclude children, primarily exercised in the wider interests of the school. In England and Wales there are no requirements for teaching staff to have Qualified Teacher Status or to be registered with the General Teaching Council. In Scotland a teaching qualification and registration with the General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS) is mandatory for all teaching positions.


title: Independent school (United Kingdom)

text: In 2014 the Independent Schools Council commissioned a report to highlight the impact that independent schools have on the British economy. The report calculated that independent schools support an £11.7 billion contribution to gross value added (GVA) in Britain.


title: Independent school (United Kingdom)

text: Independent schools are often criticised for being elitist, and seen as lying outside the spirit of the state system. Many of the best-known public schools are extremely expensive, and many have entry criteria geared towards those who have been at private "feeder" preparatory schools. The Thatcher government introduced the Assisted Places Scheme in England and Wales in 1980, whereby the state paid the school fees for those pupils capable of gaining a place but unable to afford the fees. This was essentially a response to the decision of the previous Labour government in the mid-1970s to remove government funding of direct grant grammar schools, most of which then became independent schools; some Assisted Places pupils went to the former direct-grant schools such as Manchester Grammar School. The scheme was terminated by the Labour government in 1997, and since then the independent sector has moved to increase its own means-tested bursaries.


title: Independent school (United Kingdom)

text: The former classics-based curriculum was also criticised for not providing skills in sciences or engineering, but was perhaps in response to the requirement of classics for entry to Oxbridge until the early 1960s, as well as a hangover from centuries ago when "only" Latin and Greek were taught at many public schools. It was Martin Wiener's opposition to this tendency which inspired his 1981 book "English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit: 1850-1980". It became a huge influence on the Thatcher government's opposition to old-school gentlemanly Toryism. According to a 2010 report from the Department for Education, independent school pupils have "the highest rates of achieving grades A or B in A-level maths and sciences" compared to grammar, specialist and mainstream state schools, and pupils at independent schools account for a disproportionate number of the total number of A-levels in maths and sciences.


title: Independent school (United Kingdom)

text: Some parents complain that their rights and their children's are compromised by vague and one-sided contracts which allow Heads to use discretionary powers unfairly, such as in expulsion on non-disciplinary grounds. They believe independent schools have not embraced the principles of natural justice as adopted by the state sector, and private law as applied to Higher Education. This belief is reinforced by the fact that the legal rights of pupils are governed by a private contract, as opposed to rights implemented by the national government. For instance, a pupil seeking admission to a state school that is rejected is legally entitled to appeal, whereas at an independent school admissions are at the discretion of the governing body of the school.


title: Independent school (United Kingdom)

text: In 2006, pupils at fee-paying schools made up 43 per cent of those selected for places at Oxford University and 38 per cent of those granted places at Cambridge University (although such pupils represent only 18 per cent of the 16 years old plus school population).


title: Independent school (United Kingdom)

text: A major area of debate in recent years has centred around the continuing charitable status of independent schools, which means they are not charged business rates by local councils, amongst other benefits. This is estimated to save the schools about £200 per pupil and to cost the Exchequer about £100 million in tax breaks, assuming that an increase in fees would not result in any transfer of pupils from private to maintained sector.


title: Independent school (United Kingdom)

text: Since the Charities Act was passed in November 2006, charitable status is based on an organisation providing a "public benefit", as judged by the Charity Commission. In 2008, the Charity Commission published guidance, including guidance on public benefit and fee charging, setting out issues to be considered by charities charging high fees that many people could not afford. The Independent Schools Council was granted permission by the High Court to bring a judicial review of the Charity Commission’s public benefit guidance as it affected the independent education sector. This was heard by the Upper Tribunal at the same time as a reference by the Attorney General asking the Tribunal to consider how the public benefit requirement should operate in relation to fee-charging charitable schools. The Upper Tribunal's decision, published on 14 October 2011, concluded that in all cases there must be more than "de minimis" or token benefit for the poor, but that trustees of a charitable independent school should decide what was appropriate in their particular circumstances.


title: Independent school (United Kingdom)

text: In Scotland, under the Charities and Trustee Investment Act (Scotland), there is an entirely separate test of charitable status, overseen by the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator, which assesses the public benefit provided by each registered school charity.


title: Independent school (United Kingdom)

text: An investigation into official exam data by the BBC's Radio 4 Today programme, in 2017, showed that 20% of private school pupils were given extra time for their GCSE and A level exams, as compared with less than 12% of pupils in public sector schools. The most commonly given amount of extra exam time is 25%. Such 'exam access' arrangements are given for a range of disabilities and educational special needs such as dyslexia, dyspraxia and ADHD.


title: Independent school (United Kingdom)

text: In 2002 Jeremy Smith and Robin Naylor of the University of Warwick conducted a study into the determinants of degree performance at UK universities. Their study confirmed that the internationally recognized phenomenon whereby “children from more advantaged class backgrounds have higher levels of educational attainment than children from less-advantaged class backgrounds" persists at university level in the United Kingdom.


title: Independent school (United Kingdom)

text: The authors noted "a very well-determined and monotonically positive effect defined over Social Classes I to V" whereby, for both men and women, ""ceteris paribus", academic performance at university is better the more advantaged is the student's home background". but they also observed that a student educated at an independent school was on average 6 per cent less likely to receive a first or an upper second class degree than a student from the same social class background, of the same gender, who had achieved the same A-level score at a state school. The averaged effect was described as very variable across the social class and A-level attainment of the candidates; it was "small and not strongly significant for students with high A-level scores" (i.e. for students at the more selective universities) and "statistically significant mostly for students from lower occupationally-ranked social-class backgrounds". Additionally, the study could not take into account the effect of a slightly different and more traditional subject mix studied by independent students at university on university achievement. Despite these caveats, the paper attracted much press attention. The same study found wide variations between independent school, suggesting that students from a few of them were in fact significantly more likely to obtain the better degrees than state students of the same gender and class background having the same A-level score.


title: Independent school (United Kingdom)

text: In 2011, a subsequent study led by Richard Partington at Cambridge University showed that A-level performance is "overwhelmingly" the best predictor for exam performance in the earlier years ("Part I") of the undergraduate degree at Cambridge. Partington's summary specified that "questions of school background and gender" ... "make only a marginal difference and the pattern – particularly in relation to school background – is in any case inconsistent."


title: Independent school (United Kingdom)

text: A study commissioned by the Sutton Trust and published in 2010 focussed mainly on the possible use of US-style SAT tests as a way of detecting a candidate's academic potential. Its findings confirmed those of the Smith & Naylor study in that it found that privately educated pupils who, despite their educational advantages, have only secured a poor A-level score, and who therefore attend less selective universities, do less well than state educated degree candidates with the same low A-level attainment. In addition, as discussed in the 2010 Buckingham report "HMC Schools: a quantitative analysis", because students from state schools tended to be admitted on lower A-level entry grades, relative to entry grades it could be claimed that these students had improved more. A countervailing finding of the Sutton Trust study was that for students of a given level of A-level attainment it is almost twice as difficult to get a first at the most selective universities than at those on the other end of the scale. Independent sector schools regularly dominate the top of the A-level league tables, and their students are more likely to apply to the most selective universities; as a result independent sector students are particularly well represented at these institutions, and therefore only the very ablest of them are likely to secure the best degrees.


title: Independent school (United Kingdom)

text: In 2013 the Higher Education Funding Council for England published a study noting, amongst other things, that a greater percentage of students who had attended an independent school prior to university achieved a first or upper second class degree compared with students from state schools. Out of a starting cohort of 24,360 candidates having attended an independent school and 184,580 having attended a state school, 64.9 per cent of the former attained a first or upper second class degree, compared to 52.7 per cent of the latter. No statistical comparisons of the two groups (State vs Independent) were reported, with or without controls for student characteristics such as entry qualifications, so no inferences can be drawn on the relative performance of the two groups. The stand-out finding of the study was that Independent School students over-achieved in obtaining graduate jobs and study, even when student characteristics were allowed for (sex, ethnicity, school type, entry qualifications, area of study).


title: Independent school (United Kingdom)

text: In 2015, the UK press widely reported the outcome of research suggesting that graduates from state schools that have attained similar A level grades go on to achieve higher undergraduate degree classes than their independent school counterparts. The quoted figures, based on the degree results of all students who graduated in 2013/14, suggested that 82 per cent of state school pupils got firsts or upper seconds compared with 73 per cent of those from independent schools. Later, HEFCE admitted that it had made a transposition error, and that in fact, 73 per cent of state school graduates gained a first or upper second class degree compared with 82 per cent of independent school graduates. This admission attracted far less publicity than the original erroneous assertion.


title: Independent school (United Kingdom)

text: Across all English universities, state school students who scored two Bs and a C at A-level did on average eight per cent better at degree level than their privately educated counterparts. Two Bs and a C represents an entry tariff of 112, well below the average demanded by any of the UK's Russell Group universities.


title: Simone (2002 film)

text: Simone (stylized as S1M0̸NE) is a 2002 American satirical science fiction film written, produced, and directed by Andrew Niccol. It stars Al Pacino, Catherine Keener, Evan Rachel Wood, Rachel Roberts, Jay Mohr, and Winona Ryder. The story follows a fading director creating a virtual actress to star in his films and the attempts he makes to keep her non-presence a secret as she becomes more famous. "Simone" garnered mixed reviews from critics but was a minor box-office hit, grossing $19.6 million worldwide against its $10 million budget.


title: Simone (2002 film)

text: When Nicola Anders (Winona Ryder), the star of the new film by out-of-favor director Viktor Taransky (Al Pacino), refuses to finish it, Taransky is forced to find a replacement. Contractual requirements totally prevent using her image in the film, so he must re-shoot. Instead, Taransky experiments with a new computer program he inherits from late acquaintance Hank Aleno (Elias Koteas) which allows the creation of a computer-generated woman which he can easily animate to play the film's central character. Taransky names his virtual actor "Simone," a name derived from the computer program's title, Simulation One. Seamlessly incorporated into the film, Simone (Rachel Roberts) gives a fantastic performance, exactly controlled by Taransky. The film is immediately a huge success. The studio, and soon the world, ask "who is Simone?"


title: Simone (2002 film)

text: Taransky initially claims that Simone is a recluse and requests her privacy be respected, but that only intensifies media demands for her to appear. Taransky intends to reveal the secret of her non-existence after the second picture. To satisfy demand, he executes a number of progressively ambitious stunts relying on misdirection and cinematic special effects technology. Eventually, it escalates to simulated remote location video live interviews.


title: Simone (2002 film)

text: In one instance, two determined tabloid reporters discover Taransky used out-of-date stock photography as a background during an interview instead of being on that site as claimed, and they blackmail him into getting Simone to make a live appearance. He arranges her to perform a song at a stadium event appearing in a cloud of smoke and then using flawless holographic technology. The perception of being in person is reinforced with real-time visualization on the stadium's monitors. Simone becomes even more famous, simultaneously becoming a double winner for the Academy Award for Best Actress, tying with herself in the process.


title: Simone (2002 film)

text: Once Taransky grows tired of Simone constantly overshadowing him in the press, he decides to ruin her career. Simone's next film, "I Am Pig", is her "directorial debut" and a tasteless treatment about zoophilia intended to disgust audiences. Not only does it fail to achieve the desired effect of audience alienation, but it also serves to foster her credibility as a risk-taking, fearless and avant-garde artist. Taransky's subsequent attempts to discredit Simone—by having her drink, smoke, and curse at public appearances and use politically incorrect statements—similarly backfire when the press instead begins to see her as refreshingly honest. As a last resort, Taransky decides to dispose of Simone completely by using a computer virus to erase her, dumping the hard drive and floppy disks into a steamer trunk, burying the trunk at sea, and then announcing to the press that she has died of a rare virus contracted on her Goodwill Tour of the Third World. During the funeral, the police interrupt, open the coffin and find only a cardboard cutout of Simone. He is arrested and shown a security camera video where he loads a large trunk onto his yacht.


title: Simone (2002 film)

text: After being charged with her murder, he admits that Simone is not a person, but a computer program. The chest containing the computer data is brought up empty. Taransky's daughter Lainey and ex-wife Elaine enter his studio to try to help. They find Taransky's forgotten virus source disk ("Plague") and apply an anti-virus program to eradicate the computer virus. They restore Simone and have her appear on national television laughing while holding up a newspaper headline with her obituary. They pick up a confused Taransky, with whom Elaine asks to get back together. In the end, Simone and Taransky are remotely interviewed at home about their new (virtual) baby, used as a cover story for her absence. Simone is concerned about her child's future and decides to enter politics.


title: Simone (2002 film)

text: A post-credits scene reveals Viktor creating footage of Simone buying a calorie-laden meat pie TV dinner at a supermarket, while tabloid investigator character Max Sayer, who has an obsessive crush on Simone throughout the film, is thrilled to discover that she appears to love meat pies as much as he does.


title: Simone (2002 film)

text: Like Andrew Niccol's predecessor "Gattaca", "Simone" deals with themes of the problematic aspects of technological advances being used to attempt to attain perfection. Unlike the former, however, "Simone" was Niccol's first attempt at a comedic satire with lighter moments and over-the-top drama. Niccol's first attempt at non-satire had been the earlier and more successful "The Truman Show". Pruitt Taylor Vince and Jason Schwartzman were cast as obese tabloid investigator Max Sayer and his shady-looking but peculiarly childlike assistant, Milton, respectively. Rebecca Romijn was cast later in the role of Faith, Viktor's secretary who is so obsessed with Simone that she begins dressing like Simone, dying her hair like Simone and even trying to have sex with Viktor just so that she can hear him call her "Simone". These side-actors built up much of the side comedy surrounding the bizarre cultural phenomenon surrounding Simone. Footage of character Holly Golightly from "Breakfast At Tiffany's" was obtained from Paramount Studios to be used in the film for part of the basis of the Simone character, while scenic footage used for Simone's "remote interview" backgrounds was obtained from Getty Images. Stylized elements present throughout the film and its post-credits included the use of #1 in place of any letter 'I', and a #0 in place of any letter 'O', which occurs for the entire duration of the credits, including for all cast and crew names featured. Principal photography was done by Edward Lachman, while the entirety of the production was made in California, using the Getty stock footage to fill in for locations such as Egypt's Great Pyramids.


title: Simone (2002 film)

text: "Simone" featured a cover of (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman, which Simone sings during a concert scene via hologram, and which later plays over the end credits. Additional music was created by Carter Burwell, and was released on CD alongside the film's 2002 release.


title: Simone (2002 film)

text: The film shows how the fake is produced using the chroma key technique. A post-credits sequence shows Viktor creating fake footage of Simone in a supermarket, which one of her pursuers sees, believing it real.


title: Simone (2002 film)

text: The film opened at #9 on the North American box office chart, grossing US$3,813,463 in its opening weekend. The film grossed $19,576,023 worldwide.


title: Simone (2002 film)

text: "Simone" received mixed reviews from critics. Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes gave it a approval rating based on reviews, with an average rating of . The site's consensus reads: "The satire in "S1m0ne" lacks bite, and the plot isn't believable enough to feel relevant." Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average out of 100 top reviews from mainstream critics, calculated an average score of 49, based on 38 reviews, indicating "mixed or average reviews".


title: Simone (2002 film)

text: Roger Ebert was critical of Niccol wasting his premise by giving it a broad appeal with "sitcom simplicity" and his cast a narrow direction for their characters, saying: "He wants to edge it in the direction of a Hollywood comedy, but the satire is not sharp enough and the characters, including the ex-wife, are too routine." "The Guardian"s Peter Bradshaw wrote that "It's reasonable material, but there are no real plot twists or unexpected implications; it all just rolls out easily in a Hollywood that director Niccol makes appear so unreal as to be an easy target". Marc Savlov of "The Austin Chronicle" said, "What really irked me about "Simone" was that it stank of the very thing it appeared to be mocking: it's a big-budget, commercial film taking potshots at big-budget, commercial filmmaking (as well as overripe, over-earnest indies), and although it strives constantly for a sense of knowing, winking irony, the only thing ironic about it is how much it resembles its supposed target." Elvis Mitchell of "The New York Times" said, "The writer-director Mr. Niccol is satirizing the kinds of dazzling empties he himself has made. [Mr. Niccol is] fascinated with surfaces—the films he's been involved with (he wrote "The Truman Show" and wrote and directed "Gattaca") are a mix of populism and deconstruction. His newest effort, "Simone", goes beyond postmodern to post-entertainment—it's tepid and vapid."


title: Peroxisome

text: A peroxisome () is a membrane-bound organelle, a type of microbody, found in the cytoplasm of virtually all eukaryotic cells. Peroxisomes are oxidative organelles. Frequently, molecular oxygen serves as a co-substrate, from which hydrogen peroxide (HO) is then formed. Peroxisomes owe their name to hydrogen peroxide generating and scavenging activities. They perform key roles in lipid metabolism and the conversion of reactive oxygen species. Peroxisomes are involved in the catabolism of very long chain fatty acids, branched chain fatty acids, bile acid intermediates (in the liver), D-amino acids, and polyamines, the reduction of reactive oxygen species – specifically hydrogen peroxide – and the biosynthesis of plasmalogens, i.e., ether phospholipids critical for the normal function of mammalian brains and lungs. They also contain approximately 10% of the total activity of two enzymes (Glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase and 6-Phosphogluconate dehydrogenase) in the pentose phosphate pathway, which is important for energy metabolism. It is vigorously debated whether peroxisomes are involved in isoprenoid and cholesterol synthesis in animals. Other known peroxisomal functions include the glyoxylate cycle in germinating seeds ("glyoxysomes"), photorespiration in leaves, glycolysis in trypanosomes ("glycosomes"), and methanol and/or amine oxidation and assimilation in some yeasts.


title: Peroxisome

text: Peroxisomes (microbodies) were first described by a Swedish doctoral student, J. Rhodin in 1954. They were identified as organelles by the Belgian cytologist Christian de Duve in 1967. De Duve and co-workers discovered that peroxisomes contain several oxidases involved in the production of hydrogen peroxide (HO) as well as catalase involved in the decomposition of HO to oxygen and water. Due to their role in peroxide metabolism, De Duve named them “peroxisomes”, replacing the formerly used morphological term “microbodies”. Later, it was described that firefly luciferase is targeted to peroxisomes in mammalian cells, allowing the discovery of the import targeting signal for peroxisomes, and triggering many advances in the peroxisome biogenesis field.


title: Peroxisome

text: Peroxisomes are small (0.1–1 µm diameter) subcellular compartments (organelles) with a fine, granular matrix and surrounded by a single biomembrane which are located in the cytoplasm of a cell. Compartmentalization creates an optimized environment to promote various metabolic reactions within peroxisomes required to sustain cellular functions and viability of the organism.


title: Peroxisome

text: The number, size and protein composition of peroxisomes are variable and depend on cell type and environmental conditions. For example, in baker's yeast ("S. cerevisiae"), it has been observed that, with good glucose supply, only a few, small peroxisomes are present. In contrast, when the yeasts were supplied with long-chain fatty acids as sole carbon source up to 20 to 25 large peroxisomes can be formed.


title: Peroxisome

text: A major function of the peroxisome is the breakdown of very long chain fatty acids through beta oxidation. In animal cells, the long fatty acids are converted to medium chain fatty acids, which are subsequently shuttled to mitochondria where they eventually are broken down to carbon dioxide and water. In yeast and plant cells, this process is carried out exclusively in peroxisomes.


title: Peroxisome

text: The first reactions in the formation of plasmalogen in animal cells also occur in peroxisomes. Plasmalogen is the most abundant phospholipid in myelin. Deficiency of plasmalogens causes profound abnormalities in the myelination of nerve cells, which is one reason why many peroxisomal disorders affect the nervous system. Peroxisomes also play a role in the production of bile acids important for the absorption of fats and fat-soluble vitamins, such as vitamins A and K. Skin disorders are features of genetic disorders affecting peroxisome function as a result.


title: Peroxisome

text: Peroxisomes contain oxidative enzymes, such as D-amino acid oxidase and uric acid oxidase. However the last enzyme is absent in humans, explaining the disease known as gout, caused by the accumulation of uric acid. Certain enzymes within the peroxisome, by using molecular oxygen, remove hydrogen atoms from specific organic substrates (labeled as R), in an oxidative reaction, producing hydrogen peroxide (HO, itself toxic):


title: Peroxisome

text: Catalase, another peroxisomal enzyme, uses this HO to oxidize other substrates, including phenols, formic acid, formaldehyde, and alcohol, by means of the peroxidation reaction:


title: Peroxisome

text: This reaction is important in liver and kidney cells, where the peroxisomes detoxify various toxic substances that enter the blood. About 25% of the ethanol that humans consume by drinking alcoholic beverages is oxidized to acetaldehyde in this way. In addition, when excess HO accumulates in the cell, catalase converts it to HO through this reaction:


title: Peroxisome

text: In higher plants, peroxisomes contain also a complex battery of antioxidative enzymes such as superoxide dismutase, the components of the ascorbate-glutathione cycle, and the NADP-dehydrogenases of the pentose-phosphate pathway. It has been demonstrated that peroxisomes generate superoxide (O) and nitric oxide (NO) radicals.


title: Peroxisome

text: There is evidence now that those reactive oxygen species including peroxisomal HO are also important signalling molecules in plants and animals and contribute to healthy ageing and age-related disorders in humans.


title: Peroxisome

text: The peroxisome of plant cells is polarised when fighting fungal penetration. Infection causes a glucosinolate molecule to play an antifungal role to be made and delivered to the outside of the cell through the action of the peroxisomal proteins (PEN2 and PEN3).


title: Peroxisome

text: Peroxisomes can be derived from the smooth endoplasmic reticulum under certain experimental conditions and replicate by membrane growth and division out of pre-existing organelles. Peroxisome matrix proteins are translated in the cytoplasm prior to import. Specific amino acid sequences (PTS or peroxisomal targeting signal) at the "C-terminus" (PTS1) or "N-terminus" (PTS2) of peroxisomal matrix proteins signals them to be imported into the organelle by a targeting factor. There are currently 36 known proteins involved in peroxisome biogenesis and maintenance, called peroxins, which participate in the process of peroxisome assembly in different organisms. In mammalian cells there are 13 characterized peroxins. In contrast to protein import into the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) or mitochondria, proteins do not need to be unfolded to be imported into the peroxisome lumen. The matrix protein import receptors, the peroxins PEX5 and PEX7, accompany their cargoes (containing a PTS1 or a PTS2 amino acid sequence, respectively) all the way to the peroxisome where they release the cargo into the peroxisomal matrix and then return to the cytosol – a step named "recycling". A special way of peroxisomal protein targeting is called piggy backing. Proteins that are transported by this unique method do not have a canonical PTS, but rather bind on a PTS protein to be transported as a complex. A model describing the import cycle is referred to as the "extended shuttle mechanism". There is now evidence that ATP hydrolysis is required for the recycling of receptors to the cytosol. Also, ubiquitination is crucial for the export of PEX5 from the peroxisome to the cytosol. The biogenesis of the peroxisomal membrane and the insertion of peroxisomal membrane proteins (PMPs) requires the peroxins PEX19, PEX3, and PEX16. PEX19 is a PMP receptor and chaperone, which binds the PMPs and routes them to the peroxisomal membrane, where it interacts with PEX3, a peroxisomal integral membrane protein. PMPs are then inserted into the peroxisomal membrane.


title: Peroxisome

text: The diverse functions of peroxisomes require dynamic interactions and cooperation with many organelles involved in cellular lipid metabolism such as the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), mitochondria, lipid droplets, and lysosomes.


title: Peroxisome

text: Peroxisomes interact with mitochondria in several metabolic pathways, including β-oxidation of fatty acids and the metabolism of reactive oxygen species. Both organelles are in close contact with the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) and share several proteins, including organelle fission factors. Peroxisomes also interact with the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) and cooperate in the synthesis of ether lipids (plasmalogens) which are important for nerve cells (see above). In filamentous fungi, peroxisomes move on microtubules by 'hitchhiking,' a process involving contact with rapidly moving early endosomes. Physical contact between organelles is often mediated by membrane contact sites, where membranes of two organelles are physically tethered to enable rapid transfer of small molecules, enable organelle communication and are crucial for coordination of cellular functions and hence human health. Alterations of membrane contacts have been observed in various diseases.


title: Peroxisome

text: Peroxisomal disorders are a class of medical conditions that typically affect the human nervous system as well as many other organ systems. Two common examples are X-linked adrenoleukodystrophy and peroxisome biogenesis disorders.


title: Peroxisome

text: "PEX" genes encode the protein machinery ("peroxins") required for proper peroxisome assembly, as described above. Membrane assembly and maintenance requires three of these (peroxins 3, 16, and 19) and may occur without the import of the matrix (lumen) enzymes. Proliferation of the organelle is regulated by Pex11p.


title: Peroxisome

text: Genes that encode peroxin proteins include: PEX1, PEX2 (PXMP3), PEX3, PEX5, PEX6, PEX7, PEX9, PEX10, PEX11A, PEX11B, PEX11G, PEX12, PEX13, PEX14, PEX16, PEX19, PEX26, PEX28, PEX30, and PEX31. Between organisms, PEX numbering and function can differ.


title: Peroxisome

text: The protein content of peroxisomes varies across species or organism, but the presence of proteins common to many species has been used to suggest an endosymbiotic origin; that is, peroxisomes evolved from bacteria that invaded larger cells as parasites, and very gradually evolved a symbiotic relationship. However, this view has been challenged by recent discoveries. For example, peroxisome-less mutants can restore peroxisomes upon introduction of the wild-type gene.


title: Peroxisome

text: Two independent evolutionary analyses of the peroxisomal proteome found homologies between the peroxisomal import machinery and the ERAD pathway in the endoplasmic reticulum, along with a number of metabolic enzymes that were likely recruited from the mitochondria. Recently, it has been suggested that the peroxisome may have had an Actinomycetota origin; however, this is controversial.


title: Peroxisome

text: Other organelles of the microbody family related to peroxisomes include glyoxysomes of plants and filamentous fungi, glycosomes of kinetoplastids, and Woronin bodies of filamentous fungi.


title: Kayak (company)

text: Kayak (styled as KAYAK) is an American online travel agency and metasearch engine owned and operated by Booking Holdings.


title: Kayak (company)

text: Kayak's website and mobile apps are currently available in over 18 languages and more than 30 countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, India, China, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Russia, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, Australia, Ireland, Mexico, New Zealand, Belgium, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, and Singapore.


title: Kayak (company)

text: Kayak was founded in January 2004 by Steve Hafner and Paul M. English. Before Kayak, Steve Hafner, Kayak's current CEO, helped found Orbitz in November 1999 and led its business development, advertising sales, marketing, and product marketing activities.


title: Kayak (company)

text: The company was originally named Travel Search Company, Inc. and the name was changed to Kayak Software Corporation in August 2004.


title: Kayak (company)

text: In December 2007, Kayak raised $196 million in a new round of financing from a group of investors including General Catalyst, Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners, and Oak Investment Partners. Using that funding, Kayak acquired SideStep, another online travel agency.


title: Kayak (company)

text: In March 2011, Kayak began providing results in the U.S. version of Bing from multiple cities, airports and airlines in Bing's travel search section.


title: Kayak (company)

text: In April 2011, Kayak acquired all of the outstanding shares of JaBo Vertrieb-und Entwicklung GmbH, or JaBo Software, operator Checkfelix, a travel search engine in Austria.


title: Kayak (company)

text: On July 20, 2012, Kayak became a public company via an initial public offering. On its first day of trading, Kayak opened up at $26 per share and closed at $33.18 per share.


title: Kayak (company)

text: On May 21, 2013, Booking Holdings, then known as Priceline.com, acquired the company for $2.1 billion.


title: Kayak (company)

text: On September 25, 2013, it was announced that Connecticut would assist Kayak with a $2.5 million loan to help facilitate their move to the Harbor Point district of Stamford.


title: Kayak (company)

text: In July 2018, Kayak assumed leadership of Hotels Combined, which was acquired by parent Booking Holdings.


title: Kayak (company)

text: In September 2018, the company launched a feature to help travelers determine if their luggage fits in the overhead bin of planes.


title: Kayak (company)

text: In 2013, "Travel + Leisure" named Kayak's app in its list of the Best Apps for Business Travelers as well as its list for the Best Apps and Websites for Travelers.


title: Kayak (company)

text: Mashable included Kayak in first place for the website's list, "10 Budget Airfare Tools Every Traveler Should Know in 2012".


title: Kayak (company)

text: The World Travel Awards presented Kayak with the World's Leading Flight Comparison Website award in 2013 and the World's Leading Travel Search Website award in 2011.


title: Kayak (company)

text: In December 2011 Kayak announced that it would not renew a contract to advertise on the TLC reality television show "All-American Muslim". The decision followed a campaign by the Florida Family Association, a one-man fundamentalist organization focused on “defending American values". In a statement posted to the Kayak website, Kayak chief marketing officer Robert Birge wrote that TLC “was not upfront with us about the nature of the show”.


title: Parsley massacre

text: The Parsley massacre (Spanish: el corte "the cutting"; Creole: kout kouto-a "the stabbing") (; ; ) was a mass killing of Haitians living in the Dominican Republic's northwestern frontier and in certain parts of the contiguous Cibao region in October 1937.


title: Parsley massacre

text: carried out the massacre on the orders of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. As a result of the massacre, virtually the entire Haitian population in the Dominican frontier was either killed or forced to flee across the border. Some died while trying to flee to Haiti across the Dajabón River that divides the two countries on the island.


title: Parsley massacre

text: Dominican troops interrogated thousands of civilians demanding that each victim say the word "parsley". If the accused could not pronounce the word to the interrogators satisfaction, they were deemed to be Haitians and killed.


title: Parsley massacre

text: Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, a strong proponent of anti-Haitianism, made his intentions towards the Haitian community clear in a short speech he gave on 2 October 1937 during a celebration in his honor in the province of Dajabón.


title: Parsley massacre

text: Trujillo reportedly acted in response to reports of Haitians stealing cattle and crops from Dominican borderland residents. Trujillo commanded his army to kill all Haitians living in the Dominican Republic's northwestern frontier and in certain parts of the contiguous Cibao region. Between October 2 and October 8, hundreds of Dominican troops, who came mostly from other areas of the country, poured into the region. These armed forces killed Haitians with rifles, machetes, shovels, knives, and bayonets. Haitian children were reportedly thrown in the air and caught by soldiers' bayonets, then thrown on their mothers' corpses. Survivors who managed to cross the border and return to Haiti told stories of family members being hacked with machetes and strangled by the soldiers, and children bashed against rocks and tree trunks. The use of military units from outside the region was not always enough to expedite soldiers' killings of Haitians. U.S. legation informants reported that many soldiers "confessed that in order to perform such ghastly slaughter they had to get 'blind' drunk." Several months later, a barrage of killings and repatriations of Haitians occurred in the southern frontier.


title: Parsley massacre

text: Lauren Derby claims that a majority of those who died were born in the Dominican Republic and belonged to well-established Haitian communities in the borderlands.


title: Parsley massacre

text: Haitian-Dominican relations have long been strained by territorial disputes and competition for the resources of Hispaniola. Between the years of 1910–1930, there was an extensive migration of Haitians to their neighboring countries of the Dominican Republic and Cuba in search of work. The exact number of Haitian migration to the Dominican Republic is not readily available but it is more than the estimated 200,000 that emigrated to Cuba. Among several authors, the Haiti-Dominican Republic migration corridor is concurred as far more important than the Haiti-Cuba migration due to geographic proximity. On the other hand, the large influx of Haitians to the Dominican Republic further divided the complicated relationship between the two states. The Dominican Republic, formerly the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo, is the eastern portion of the island of Hispaniola and occupies five-eighths of the land while having ten million inhabitants. In contrast, Haiti, the former French colony of Saint-Domingue, is on the western three-eighths of the island and has almost exactly the same population, with an estimated 200 people per square kilometre.


title: Parsley massacre

text: Due to inadequate roadways connecting the borderlands to major cities, "Communication with Dominican markets was so limited that the small commercial surplus of the frontier slowly moved toward Haiti."


title: Parsley massacre

text: Furthermore, the Dominican government saw the loose borderlands as a liability in terms of possible formation of revolutionary groups that could flee across the border with ease, while at the same time amassing weapons and followers.


title: Parsley massacre

text: At first the Haitian president Sténio Vincent prohibited any discussion of the massacre and issued a statement on 15 October: "...it is declared that the good relations between Haiti and the Dominican Republic have not suffered any damage." Vincent's failure to initially press for justice for the slain workers prompted protests in Port-au-Prince after two years of relative silence. It was known that Vincent had a cooperative relationship and financial support from the Trujillo government. After a failed coup effort in December the Haitian president was eventually forced to seek an international investigation and mediation. Unwilling to submit to an inquiry, Trujillo offered instead an indemnity to Haiti.


title: Parsley massacre

text: In the end, the Democrat U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt and Haitian president Sténio Vincent sought reparations of $750,000, of which the Dominican government paid $525,000 (US$ in dollars), or around $30 per victim. Due to the corruption deeply embedded within the Haitian bureaucracy however, survivors on average received only 2 cents each. In the agreement signed in Washington, D.C. on 31 January 1938, the Dominican government defended the massacre as a response to illegal immigration by "undesirable" Haitians, and recognized "no responsibility whatsoever" for the killings with Trujillo stating how the agreement established new laws prohibiting migration between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Trujillo's regime thus used a moment of international inquiry to legitimize his anti-Haitian policies.


title: Parsley massacre

text: Thereafter, Trujillo began to develop the borderlands to link them more closely with the main cities and urban areas of Dominican Republic. These areas were modernized, with the addition of modern hospitals, schools, political headquarters, military barracks, and housing projects—as well as a highway to connect the borderlands to major cities. Additionally, after 1937, quotas restricted the number of Haitians permitted to enter the Dominican Republic, and a strict and often discriminatory border policy was enacted. Dominicans continued to deport and kill Haitians in southern frontier regions—as refugees died of exposure, malaria and influenza.


title: Parsley massacre

text: Despite attempts to blame Dominican civilians, it has been confirmed by U.S. sources that "bullets from Krag rifles were found in Haitian bodies, and only Dominican soldiers had access to this type of rifle." Therefore, the Haitian Massacre, which is still referred to as ""el corte"" (the cutting) by Dominicans and as "kouto-a" (the knife) by Haitians, was, "...a calculated action on the part of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo to homogenize the furthest stretches of the country in order to bring the region into the social, political and economic fold," and rid his republic of Haitians.


title: Parsley massacre

text: Condemnation of the massacres was not limited to international sources, as a number of Trujillo's exiled political opponents also publicly spoke out against the events. In November 1937, four anti-Trujillistas were declared "unworthy Dominicans" and "traitors to the Homeland" for their comments—Rafael Brache, José Manuel Jimenes, Juan Isidro Jimenes Grullón, and Buenaventura Sánchez.


title: Parsley massacre

text: The popular name for the massacre came from the shibboleth that the dictatorial Trujillo had his soldiers apply to determine whether or not those living on the border were native Afro-Dominicans or immigrant Afro-Haitians. Dominican soldiers would hold up a sprig of parsley to someone and ask what it was. How the person pronounced the Spanish word for parsley ("perejil") determined their fate. The Haitian languages, French and Haitian Creole, pronounce the "r" as a uvular approximant or a voiced velar fricative, respectively so their speakers can have difficulty pronouncing the alveolar tap or the alveolar trill of Spanish, the language of the Dominican Republic. Also, only Spanish but not French or Haitian Creole pronounces the "j" as the voiceless velar fricative. If they could pronounce it the Spanish way the soldiers considered them Dominican and let them live, but if they pronounced it the French or Creole way they considered them Haitian and executed them.


title: Parsley massacre

text: The term "parsley massacre" was used frequently in the English-speaking media 75 years after the event, but most scholars recognize that it is a misconception, as research by Lauren Derby shows that the explanation is based more on myth than on personal accounts.


title: Parsley massacre

text: According to some sources, the massacre killed an estimated 20,000 Haitians living in the northern frontier—clearly at Trujillo's direct order. However, the exact number is impossible to calculate for many reasons. Among them is the fact that, although the Dominican Army murdered many of the victims in public view, they carried out most of the slayings en masse in isolated areas, leaving either no witnesses or just a few survivors. Another reason why the number of victims is unknown is that an untold but very great number of their bodies ended up either in the sea, where sharks consumed their remains, or in mass graves, where acidic soil degraded them, leaving nothing for forensic investigators to exhume.


title: Parsley massacre

text: Haitian President Élie Lescot put the death toll at 12,168; Haitian historian Jean Price-Mars cited 12,136 deaths and 2,419 injuries. The Dominican Republic's interim Foreign Minister put the number of dead at 17,000. Dominican historian Bernardo Vega estimated as many as 35,000.


title: Darkness at Noon

text: Darkness at Noon () is a novel by Hungarian-born novelist Arthur Koestler, first published in 1940. His best known work, it is the tale of Rubashov, an Old Bolshevik who is arrested, imprisoned, and tried for treason against the government that he helped to create.


title: Darkness at Noon

text: The novel is set between 1938 and 1940, after the Stalinist Great Purge and Moscow show trials. Despite being based on real events, the novel does not name either Russia or the Soviets, and tends to use generic terms to describe people and organizations: for example the Soviet government is referred to as "the Party" and Nazi Germany is referred to as "the Dictatorship". Joseph Stalin is represented by "Number One", a menacing dictator. The novel expresses the author's disillusionment with the Bolshevik ideology of the Soviet Union at the outset of World War II.


title: Darkness at Noon

text: In 1998, the Modern Library ranked "Darkness at Noon" number eight on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century, even though Koestler wrote it in German.


title: Darkness at Noon

text: Koestler wrote "Darkness at Noon" as the second part of a trilogy: the first volume was "The Gladiators" (1939), first published in Hungarian. It was a novel about the subversion of the Spartacus revolt. The third novel was "Arrival and Departure" (1943), about a refugee during World War II. Koestler, who was by then living in London, rewrote that novel in English after the original German version had been lost.


title: Darkness at Noon

text: "Darkness at Noon" was commenced in German while Koestler was living in Paris, and as he describes in the first chapter of Scum of the Earth, completed in the summer of 1939 just outside the village of Belvédère in the Alpes-Maritimes where he was staying with his companion, the sculptor Daphne Hardy, who translated it into English while she was living with him. For decades the German text was thought to have been lost during the escape of Koestler and Hardy from Paris in May 1940, just before the German occupation of France. However, a copy had been sent to Swiss publisher Emil Oprecht. Rupert Hart-Davis, Koestler's editor at Jonathan Cape in London had misgivings about the English text but agreed to publish it when a request to Oprecht for his copy went unanswered. At Hart-Davis' prompting, and unable to reach Koestler, Hardy changed the title from "The Vicious Circle" to "Darkness at Noon". The new title is a reference to Job 5:14: ""They meet with darkness in the daytime, and grope in the noonday as in the night"—" a description of the moral dilemmas faced by the book's protagonist, as well as Koestler's own escape from the Nazis. In August 2015, Oprecht's copy was identified in a Zurich library by a doctoral candidate of the University of Kassel. The original German manuscript was published as "Sonnenfinsternis" ("Solar Eclipse") in May 2018 by Elsinor Verlag. A new professional English translation based on the newfound text was published in 2019.


title: Darkness at Noon

text: In his introduction to the 2019 translation, Koestler biographer Michael Scammell writes that a fresh translation was desirable because Hardy's, though "serving the novel well for over seven decades", had difficulties. "She had been forced by circumstances to work in haste, with no dictionaries or other resources available for consultation, which exposed her understandable lack of familiarity with the Soviet and Nazi machinery of totalitarianism... The text she worked on was not quite final either... It seemed that a fresh and up-to-date translation of the novel would be helpful, preferably by a seasoned translator with the knowledge and experience to clarify the jargon of Marxism–Leninism and present it in terminology that is both accurate and makes sense to an English-speaking reader". Philip Boehm, Scammell writes, "proved the ideal choice for the job".


title: Darkness at Noon

text: In his autobiographical "The Invisible Writing" (1954), Koestler states that he finished "Darkness at Noon" in April 1940, after many troublesome months of 1939, caused mainly by financial difficulties and the later outbreak of World War II. Koestler notes:


title: Darkness at Noon

text: Koestler, then, describes the unfolding of what he calls 'Kafkaesque events' in his life; spending four months in the concentration camp in the Pyrenees and being released in January 1940, only to be continuously harassed by the police. "During the next three months I finished the novel in the hours snatched between interrogations and searches of my flat, in the constant fear that I would be arrested again and the manuscript of "Darkness at Noon" confiscated".


title: Darkness at Noon

text: After Hardy mailed her translation to London in May 1940, she fled to London. Meanwhile, Koestler joined the French Foreign Legion, deserted it in North Africa, and made his way to Portugal.


title: Darkness at Noon

text: Waiting in Lisbon for passage to Great Britain, Koestler heard a false report that the ship taking Hardy to England had been torpedoed and all persons lost (along with his only manuscript); he attempted suicide. (He wrote about this incident in "Scum of the Earth" (1941), his memoir of that period.) Koestler finally arrived in London, and the book was published there in early 1941.


title: Darkness at Noon

text: "Darkness at Noon" is an allegory set in the USSR (not named) during the 1938 purges as Stalin consolidated his dictatorship by eliminating potential rivals within the Communist Party: the military, and also the professionals. None of this is identified explicitly in the book. Most of the novel occurs within an unnamed prison and in the recollections of the main character, Rubashov.


title: Darkness at Noon

text: Koestler drew on the experience of being imprisoned by Francisco Franco's officials during the Spanish Civil War, which he described in his memoir, "Dialogue with Death". He was kept in solitary confinement and expected to be executed. He was permitted to walk in the courtyard in the company of other prisoners. Though he was not beaten, he believed that other prisoners were.


title: Darkness at Noon

text: The main character is Nikolai Salmanovich Rubashov, a man in his fifties whose character is based on "a number of men who were the victims of the so-called Moscow trials", several of whom "were personally known to the author". Rubashov is a stand-in for the Old Bolsheviks as a group, and Koestler uses him to explore their actions at the 1938 Moscow Show Trials.


title: Darkness at Noon

text: "Darkness at Noon" is divided into four parts: The First Hearing, The Second Hearing, The Third Hearing, and The Grammatical Fiction. In the original English translation, Koestler's word that Hardy translated as "Hearing" was "Verhör". In the 2019 translation, Boehm translated it as "Interrogation". In his introduction to that translation, Michael Scammell writes that "hearing" made the Soviet and Nazi "regimes look somewhat softer and more civilized than they really were".


title: Darkness at Noon

text: The line "Nobody can rule guiltlessly", by Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, appears as the epigraph. The action begins with Rubashov's arrest in the middle of the night by two men from the secret police (in the USSR, this would be the NKVD). When they came for Rubashov they woke him from a recurring dream, a replay of the first time he was arrested by the Gestapo. One of the men is about Rubashov's age, the other is somewhat younger. The older man is formal and courteous, the younger is brutal.


title: Darkness at Noon

text: Imprisoned, Rubashov is at first relieved to be finished with the anxiety of dread during mass arrests. He is expecting to be kept in solitary confinement until he is shot. He begins to communicate with No. 402, the man in the adjacent cell, by using a tap code. Unlike Rubashov, No. 402 is not an intellectual, but rather a Tsarist army officer, who hates communists. Their relationship begins on a sour note as No. 402 expresses delight at Rubashov's political misfortune; however No. 402 has non-political urges too, and when he pleads for Rubashov to give him details about the last time he slept with a woman, once Rubashov does so No. 402 warms up to him. The two grow closer over time and exchange information about the prison and its inmates.


title: Darkness at Noon

text: Rubashov thinks of the Old Bolsheviks, Number One, and the Marxist interpretation of history. Throughout the novel Rubashov, Ivanov, and Gletkin speculate about historical processes and how individuals and groups are affected by them. Each hopes that, no matter how vile his actions may seem to their contemporaries, history will eventually absolve them. This is the faith that makes the abuses of the regime tolerable as the men consider the suffering of a few thousand, or a few million people against the happiness of future generations. They believe that gaining the socialist utopia, which they believe is possible, will cause the imposed suffering to be forgiven.


title: Darkness at Noon

text: Rubashov meditates on his life: since joining the Party as a teenager, Rubashov has officered soldiers in the field, won a commendation for "fearlessness", repeatedly volunteered for hazardous assignments, endured torture, betrayed other communists who deviated from the Party line, and proven that he is loyal to its policies and goals. Recently he has had doubts. Despite 20 years of power, in which the government caused the deliberate deaths and executions of millions, the Party does not seem to be any closer to achieving the goal of a socialist utopia. That vision seems to be receding. Rubashov is in a quandary, between a lifetime of devotion to the Party on the one hand, and his conscience and the increasing evidence of his own experience on the other.


title: Darkness at Noon

text: From this point, the narrative switches back and forth between his current life as a political prisoner and his past life as one of the Party elite. He recalls his first visit to Berlin about 1933, after Adolf Hitler gained power. Rubashov was to purge and reorganise the German communists. He met with Richard, a young German communist cell leader who had distributed material contrary to the Party line. In a museum, underneath a picture of the "Pietà," Rubashov explains to Richard that he has violated Party discipline, become "objectively harmful", and must be expelled from the Party. A Gestapo man hovers in the background with his girlfriend on his arm. Too late, Richard realises that Rubashov has betrayed him to the secret police. He begs Rubashov not to "throw him to the wolves", but Rubashov leaves him quickly. Getting into a taxicab, he realises that the taxicab driver is also a communist. The taxicab driver, implied to be a communist, offers to give him free fare, but Rubashov pays the fare. As he travels by train, he dreams that Richard and the taxicab driver are trying to run him over with a train.


title: Darkness at Noon

text: This scene introduces the second and third major themes of "Darkness at Noon". The second, suggested repeatedly by the "Pieta" and other Christian imagery, is the contrast between the brutality and modernity of communism on the one hand, and the gentleness, simplicity, and tradition of Christianity. Although Koestler is not suggesting a return to Christian faith, he implies that communism is the worse of the two alternatives.


title: Darkness at Noon

text: The third theme is the contrast between the trust of the rank and file communists, and the ruthlessness of the Party elite. The rank and file trust and admire men like Rubashov, but the elite betrays and uses them with little thought. As Rubashov confronts the immorality of his actions as a party chief, his abscessed tooth begins to bother him, sometimes reducing him to immobility.


title: Darkness at Noon

text: Rubashov recalls being arrested soon after by the Gestapo and imprisoned for two years. Although repeatedly tortured, he never breaks down. After the Nazis finally release him, he returns to his country to a hero's welcome. Number One's increasing power makes him uncomfortable but he does not act in opposition; he requests a foreign assignment. Number One is suspicious but grants the request. Rubashov is sent to Belgium to enforce Party discipline among the dock workers. After the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, the League of Nations and the Party condemned Italy and imposed an international embargo on strategic resources, especially oil, which the Italians needed. The Belgian dock workers are determined not to allow any shipments for Italy to pass through their port. As his government intends to supply the Italians with oil and other resources secretly, Rubashov must convince the dock workers that, despite the official policy, as communists they must unload the materials and not send them to the Italians.


title: Darkness at Noon

text: Their cell leader, a German communist immigrant nicknamed Little Loewy, tells Rubashov his life's story. He is a communist who has sacrificed much for the Party, but is still completely dedicated. When all the workers have gathered, Rubashov explains the situation. They react with disgust and refuse his instructions. Several days later, Party publications denounce the entire cell by name, virtually guaranteeing arrest by the Belgian authorities, who were trying to suppress communism. Little Loewy hangs himself. Rubashov then begins a new assignment.


title: Darkness at Noon

text: In the novel, after about a week in prison, he is brought in for the first examination or hearing, which is conducted by Ivanov, an old friend. Also a veteran of the Civil War, he is an Old Bolshevik who shares Rubashov's opinion of the Revolution. Rubashov had then convinced Ivanov not to commit suicide after his leg was amputated due to war wounds. Ivanov says that if he can persuade Rubashov to confess to the charges, he will have repaid his debt. With confession, Rubashov can lessen his sentence, to five or 10 years in a labour camp, instead of execution. He simply has to co-operate. The charges are hardly discussed, as both men understand they are not relevant. Rubashov says that he is "tired" and does not "want to play this kind of game anymore". Ivanov sends him back to his cell, asking him to think about it. Ivanov implies that Rubashov can perhaps live to see the socialist utopia they have both worked so hard to create, and gives Rubashov two weeks to think matters over.


title: Darkness at Noon

text: The next section of the book begins with an entry in Rubashov's diary; he struggles to find his place and that of the other Old Bolsheviks, within the Marxist interpretation of history.


title: Darkness at Noon

text: Ivanov and a junior examiner, Gletkin, discuss Rubashov's fate. Gletkin urges using harsh, physical methods to demoralise the prisoner and force his confession, while Ivanov insists that Rubashov will confess after realising it is the only "logical" thing to do, given his situation and also his past commitment to the party. Gletkin recalls that, during the collectivisation of the peasants, they could not be persuaded to surrender their individual crops until they were tortured (and killed). Since that helped enable the ultimate goal of a socialist utopia, it was both the logical and the virtuous thing to do. Ivanov is disgusted but cannot refute Gletkin's reasoning. Ivanov believes in taking harsh actions to achieve the goal, but he is troubled by the suffering he causes. Gletkin says the older man must not believe in the coming utopia. He characterises Ivanov as a cynic and claims to be an idealist.


title: Darkness at Noon

text: Their conversation continues the theme of the new generation taking power over the old: Ivanov is portrayed as intellectual, ironical, and at bottom humane, while Gletkin is unsophisticated, straightforward, and unconcerned with others' suffering. Being also a Civil War veteran, Gletkin has his own experience of withstanding torture, yet still advocates its use. Ivanov has not been convinced by the younger man's arguments. Rubashov continues in solitary.


title: Darkness at Noon

text: News is tapped through to Rubashov that a prisoner is about to be executed. The condemned man is Michael Bogrov, the one-time distinguished revolutionary naval commander, who had a personal friendship with Rubashov. As Bogrov is carried off crying and screaming, all the prisoners, as is their tradition, drum along the walls to signal their brotherhood. Bogrov, as he passes Rubashov's cell, despairingly calls out his name; Rubashov, having watched him pass by through the spy-hole in the door, is shocked at the pathetic figure Bogrov has become.


title: Darkness at Noon

text: Some time later Ivanov visits Rubashov in his cell. He tells Rubashov that every aspect of Bogrov's execution had been orchestrated by Gletkin to weaken Rubashov's resolve, but that he (Ivanov) knows it will have the opposite effect. Ivanov tells Rubashov that he knows Rubashov will only confess if he resists his growing urge to sentimentality and instead remains rational, “[f]or when you have thought the whole thing to a conclusion – then, and only then, will you capitulate”. The two men have a discussion about politics and ethics. Afterwards Ivanov visits Gletkin in his office and insultingly tells him he was able to undo the damage that Gletkin's scheme would have done.


title: Darkness at Noon

text: Rubashov continues to write in his diary, his views very much in line with Ivanov's. He tells No. 402 that he intends to capitulate, and when No. 402 scolds him they get into a dispute over what honor is and break off contact with each other. Rubashov signs a letter to the state authorities in which he pledges "utterly to renounce [my] oppositional attitude and to denounce publicly [my] errors".


title: Darkness at Noon

text: Gletkin takes over the interrogation of Rubashov, using physical stresses such as sleep deprivation and forcing Rubashov to sit under a glaring lamp for hours, to wear him down. Later, when Gletkin refers to Ivanov in the past tense, Rubashov inquires about it, and Gletkin informs him that Ivanov has been executed. Rubashov notices that news of Ivanov's fate has not made a meaningful impression on him, as he has evidently reached a state that precludes any deep emotion. Rubashov finally capitulates.


title: Darkness at Noon

text: As he confesses to the false charges, Rubashov thinks of the many times he betrayed agents in the past: Richard, the young German; Little Loewy in Belgium; and Orlova, his secretary-mistress. He recognises that he is being treated with the same ruthlessness. His commitment to following his logic to its final conclusion—and his own lingering dedication to the Party—causes him to confess fully and publicly.


title: Darkness at Noon

text: The final section of the novel begins with a four-line quotation ("Show us not the aim without the way...") by the German socialist Ferdinand Lassalle. Rubashov has a final tapped conversation with No. 402, and then is led away from his cell as the other prisoners, from behind the walls, drum in fraternity. The novel ends with Rubashov's execution.


title: Darkness at Noon

text: "Darkness at Noon" was very successful, selling half a million copies in France alone. Kingsley Martin described the novel as "one of the few books written in this epoch which will survive it". "The New York Times" described "Darkness at Noon" as "a splendid novel, an effective explanation of the riddle of the Moscow treason trials...written with such dramatic power, with such warmth of feeling and with such persuasive simplicity that it is absorbing as melodrama".


title: Darkness at Noon

text: George Steiner said it was one of the few books that may have "changed history", while George Orwell, who reviewed the book for the "New Statesman" in 1941, stated: