title: Meltdown (security vulnerability)

text: On 8 May 1995, a paper called "The Intel 80x86 Processor Architecture: Pitfalls for Secure Systems" published at the 1995 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy warned against a covert timing channel in the CPU cache and translation lookaside buffer (TLB). This analysis was performed under the auspices of the National Security Agency's Trusted Products Evaluation Program (TPEP).


title: Meltdown (security vulnerability)

text: In July 2012, Apple's XNU kernel (used in macOS, iOS and tvOS, among others) adopted kernel address space layout randomization (KASLR) with the release of OS X Mountain Lion 10.8. In essence, the base of the system, including its kernel extensions (kexts) and memory zones, is randomly relocated during the boot process in an effort to reduce the operating system's vulnerability to attacks.


title: Meltdown (security vulnerability)

text: On 8 August 2016, Anders Fogh and Daniel Gruss presented "Using Undocumented CPU Behavior to See Into Kernel Mode and Break KASLR in the Process" at the Black Hat 2016 conference.


title: Meltdown (security vulnerability)

text: On 10 August 2016, Moritz Lipp et al. of TU Graz published "ARMageddon: Cache Attacks on Mobile Devices" in the proceedings of the 25th USENIX security symposium. Even though focused on ARM, it laid the groundwork for the attack vector.


title: Meltdown (security vulnerability)

text: On 27 December 2016, at 33C3, Clémentine Maurice and Moritz Lipp of TU Graz presented their talk "What could possibly go wrong with <insert x86 instruction here>?


title: Meltdown (security vulnerability)

text: Side effects include side-channel attacks and bypassing kernel ASLR" which outlined already what was coming.


title: Meltdown (security vulnerability)

text: On 27 February 2017, Bosman et al. of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam published their findings of how address space layout randomization (ASLR) could be abused on cache-based architectures at the NDSS Symposium.


title: Meltdown (security vulnerability)

text: On 27 March 2017, researchers at Graz University of Technology in Austria developed a proof-of-concept that could grab RSA keys from Intel SGX enclaves running on the same system within five minutes by using certain CPU instructions in lieu of a fine-grained timer to exploit cache DRAM side-channels.


title: Meltdown (security vulnerability)

text: In June 2017, KASLR was found to have a large class of new vulnerabilities. Research at Graz University of Technology showed how to solve these vulnerabilities by preventing all access to unauthorized pages. A presentation on the resulting KAISER technique was submitted for the Black Hat congress in July 2017, but was rejected by the organizers. Nevertheless, this work led to kernel page-table isolation (KPTI, originally known as KAISER) in 2017, which was confirmed to eliminate a large class of security bugs, including some limited protection against the not-yet-discovered Meltdown – a fact confirmed by the Meltdown authors.


title: Meltdown (security vulnerability)

text: In July 2017, research made public on the CyberWTF website by security researcher Anders Fogh outlined the use of a cache timing attack to read kernel space data by observing the results of speculative operations conditioned on data fetched with invalid privileges.


title: Meltdown (security vulnerability)

text: Meltdown was discovered independently by Jann Horn from Google's Project Zero, Werner Haas and Thomas Prescher from Cyberus Technology, and Daniel Gruss, Moritz Lipp, Stefan Mangard and Michael Schwarz from Graz University of Technology. The same research teams that discovered Meltdown also discovered Spectre.


title: Meltdown (security vulnerability)

text: In October 2017, Kernel ASLR support on amd64 was added to NetBSD-current, making NetBSD the first totally open-source BSD system to support kernel address space layout randomization (KASLR). However, the partially open-source Apple Darwin, which forms the foundation of macOS and iOS (among others), is based on FreeBSD; KASLR was added to its XNU kernel in 2012 as noted above.


title: Meltdown (security vulnerability)

text: On 14 November 2017, security researcher Alex Ionescu publicly mentioned changes in the new version of Windows 10 that would cause some speed degradation without explaining the necessity for the changes, just referring to similar changes in Linux.


title: Meltdown (security vulnerability)

text: After affected hardware and software vendors had been made aware of the issue on 28 July 2017, the two vulnerabilities were made public jointly, on 3 January 2018, several days ahead of the coordinated release date of 9 January 2018 as news sites started reporting about commits to the Linux kernel and mails to its mailing list. As a result, patches were not available for some platforms, such as Ubuntu, when the vulnerabilities were disclosed.


title: Meltdown (security vulnerability)

text: On 28 January 2018, Intel was reported to have shared news of the Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities with Chinese technology companies before notifying the U.S. government of the flaws.


title: Meltdown (security vulnerability)

text: The security vulnerability was called Meltdown because "the vulnerability basically melts security boundaries which are normally enforced by the hardware".


title: Meltdown (security vulnerability)

text: On 8 October 2018, Intel was reported to have added hardware and firmware mitigations regarding Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities to its latest processors.


title: Meltdown (security vulnerability)

text: In November 2018, two new variants of the attacks were revealed. Researchers attempted to compromise CPU protection mechanisms using code to exploit weaknesses in memory protection and the instruction. They also attempted but failed to exploit CPU operations for memory alignment, division by zero, supervisor modes, segment limits, invalid opcodes, and non-executable code.


title: Meltdown (security vulnerability)

text: Meltdown relies on a CPU race condition that can arise between instruction execution and privilege checking. Put briefly, the instruction execution leaves side effects that constitute information not hidden to the process by the privilege check. The process carrying out Meltdown then uses these side effects to infer the values of memory mapped data, bypassing the privilege check. The following provides an overview of the exploit, and the memory mapping that is its target. The attack is described in terms of an Intel processor running Microsoft Windows or Linux, the main test targets used in the original paper, but it also affects other processors and operating systems, including macOS (aka OS X), iOS, and Android.


title: Meltdown (security vulnerability)

text: Modern computer processors use a variety of techniques to gain high levels of efficiency. Four widely used features are particularly relevant to Meltdown:


title: Meltdown (security vulnerability)

text: Ordinarily, the mechanisms described above are considered secure. They provide the basis for most modern operating systems and processors. Meltdown exploits the way these features interact to bypass the CPU's fundamental privilege controls and access privileged and sensitive data from the operating system and other processes. To understand Meltdown, consider the data that is mapped in virtual memory (much of which the process is not supposed to be able to access) and how the CPU responds when a process attempts to access unauthorized memory. The process is running on a vulnerable version of Windows, Linux, or macOS, on a 64-bit processor of a vulnerable type. This is a very common combination across almost all desktop computers, notebooks, laptops, servers and mobile devices.


title: Meltdown (security vulnerability)

text: Meltdown uses this technique in sequence to read every address of interest at high speed, and depending on other running processes, the result may contain passwords, encryption data, and any other sensitive information, from any address of any process that exists in its memory map. In practice, because cache side-channel attacks are slow, it is faster to extract data one bit at a time (only attacks needed to read a byte, rather than if it tried to read all 8 bits at once).


title: Meltdown (security vulnerability)

text: The impact of Meltdown depends on the design of the CPU, the design of the operating system (specifically how it uses memory paging), and the ability of a malicious party to get any code run on that system, as well as the value of any data it could read if able to execute.


title: Meltdown (security vulnerability)

text: The specific impact depends on the implementation of the address translation mechanism in the OS and the underlying hardware architecture. The attack can reveal the content of any memory that is mapped into a user address space, even if otherwise protected. For example, before kernel page-table isolation was introduced, most versions of Linux mapped all physical memory into the address space of every user-space process; the mapped addresses are (mostly) protected, making them unreadable from user-space and accessible only when transitioned into the kernel. The existence of these mappings makes transitioning to and from the kernel faster, but is unsafe in the presence of the Meltdown vulnerability, as the contents of all physical memory (which may contain sensitive information such as passwords belonging to other processes or the kernel) can then be obtained via the above method by any unprivileged process from user-space.


title: Meltdown (security vulnerability)

text: According to researchers, "every Intel processor that implements out-of-order execution is potentially affected, which is effectively every processor since 1995 (except Intel Itanium and Intel Atom before 2013)." Intel responded to the reported security vulnerabilities with an official statement.


title: Meltdown (security vulnerability)

text: The vulnerability is expected to impact major cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform. Cloud providers allow users to execute programs on the same physical servers where sensitive data might be stored, and rely on safeguards provided by the CPU to prevent unauthorized access to the privileged memory locations where that data is stored, a feature that the Meltdown exploit circumvents.


title: Meltdown (security vulnerability)

text: The original paper reports that paravirtualization (Xen) and containers such as Docker, LXC, and OpenVZ, are affected. They report that the attack on a fully virtualized machine allows the guest user space to read from the guest kernel memory, but not read from the host kernel space.


title: Meltdown (security vulnerability)

text: The Meltdown vulnerability primarily affects Intel microprocessors, but the ARM Cortex-A75 and IBM's Power microprocessors are also affected. The vulnerability does not affect AMD microprocessors. When the effect of Meltdown was first made public, Intel countered that the flaws affect all processors, but AMD denied this, saying "we believe AMD processors are not susceptible due to our use of privilege level protections within paging architecture".


title: Meltdown (security vulnerability)

text: Researchers have indicated that the Meltdown vulnerability is exclusive to Intel processors, while the Spectre vulnerability can possibly affect some Intel, AMD, and ARM processors. However, ARM announced that some of their processors were vulnerable to Meltdown. Google has reported that any Intel processor since 1995 with out-of-order execution is potentially vulnerable to the Meltdown vulnerability (this excludes Itanium and pre-2013 Intel Atom CPUs). Intel introduced speculative execution to their processors with Intel's P6 family microarchitecture with the Pentium Pro IA-32 microprocessor in 1995.


title: Meltdown (security vulnerability)

text: ARM has reported that the majority of their processors are not vulnerable, and published a list of the specific processors that are affected. The ARM Cortex-A75 core is affected directly by both Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, and Cortex-R7, Cortex-R8, Cortex-A8, Cortex-A9, Cortex-A15, Cortex-A17, Cortex-A57, Cortex-A72 and Cortex-A73 cores are affected only by the Spectre vulnerability. This contradicts some early statements made about the Meltdown vulnerability as being Intel-only.


title: Meltdown (security vulnerability)

text: A large portion of the then-current mid-range Android handsets use the Cortex-A53 or Cortex-A55 in an octa-core arrangement and are not affected by either the Meltdown or Spectre vulnerability as they do not perform out-of-order execution. This includes devices with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 630, Snapdragon 626, Snapdragon 625, and all Snapdragon 4xx processors based on A53 or A55 cores. Also, no Raspberry Pi computers are vulnerable to either Meltdown or Spectre, except the newly-released Raspberry Pi 4, which uses the ARM Cortex-A72 CPU.


title: Meltdown (security vulnerability)

text: IBM has also confirmed that its Power CPUs are affected by both CPU attacks. Red Hat has publicly announced that the exploits are also for IBM System Z, POWER8, and POWER9 systems.


title: Meltdown (security vulnerability)

text: Oracle has stated that V9-based SPARC systems (T5, M5, M6, S7, M7, M8, M10, M12 processors) are not affected by Meltdown, though older SPARC processors that are no longer supported may be impacted.


title: Meltdown (security vulnerability)

text: Mitigation of the vulnerability requires changes to operating system kernel code, including increased isolation of kernel memory from user-mode processes. Linux kernel developers have referred to this measure as kernel page-table isolation (KPTI). KPTI patches have been developed for Linux kernel 4.15, and have been released as a backport in kernels 4.14.11, 4.9.75. Red Hat released kernel updates to their Red Hat Enterprise Linux distributions version 6 and version 7. CentOS also already released their kernel updates to CentOS 6 and CentOS 7.


title: Meltdown (security vulnerability)

text: Apple included mitigations in macOS 10.13.2, iOS 11.2, and tvOS 11.2. These were released a month before the vulnerabilities were made public. Apple has stated that watchOS and the Apple Watch are not affected. Additional mitigations were included in a Safari update as well a supplemental update to macOS 10.13, and iOS 11.2.2.


title: Meltdown (security vulnerability)

text: Microsoft released an emergency update to Windows 10, 8.1, and 7 SP1 to address the vulnerability on 3 January 2018, as well as Windows Server (including Server 2008 R2, Server 2012 R2, and Server 2016) and Windows Embedded Industry. These patches are incompatible with third-party antivirus software that use unsupported kernel calls; systems running incompatible antivirus software will not receive this or any future Windows security updates until it is patched, and the software adds a special registry key affirming its compatibility. The update was found to have caused issues on systems running certain AMD CPUs, with some users reporting that their Windows installations did not boot at all after installation. On 9 January 2018, Microsoft paused the distribution of the update to systems with affected CPUs while it investigated and addressed this bug.


title: Meltdown (security vulnerability)

text: It was reported that implementation of KPTI may lead to a reduction in CPU performance, with some researchers claiming up to 30% loss in performance, depending on usage, though Intel considered this to be an exaggeration. It was reported that Intel processor generations that support process-context identifiers (PCID), a feature introduced with Westmere and available on all chips from the Haswell architecture onward, were not as susceptible to performance losses under KPTI as older generations that lack it. This is because the selective translation lookaside buffer (TLB) flushing enabled by PCID (also called address space number or ASN under the Alpha architecture) enables the shared TLB behavior crucial to the exploit to be isolated across processes, without constantly flushing the entire cache – the primary reason for the cost of mitigation.


title: Meltdown (security vulnerability)

text: A statement by Intel said that "any performance impacts are workload-dependent, and, for the average computer user, should not be significant and will be mitigated over time". Phoronix benchmarked several popular PC games on a Linux system with Intel's Coffee Lake Core i7-8700K CPU and KPTI patches installed, and found that any performance impact was small to non-existent. In other tests, including synthetic I/O benchmarks and databases such as PostgreSQL and Redis, an impact in performance was found, accounting even to tens of percent for some workloads. More recently, related tests, involving AMD's FX and Intel's Sandybridge and Ivybridge CPUs, have been reported.


title: Meltdown (security vulnerability)

text: Several procedures to help protect home computers and related devices from the Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities have been published. Meltdown patches may produce performance loss. On 18 January 2018, unwanted reboots, even for newer Intel chips, due to Meltdown and Spectre patches, were reported. According to Dell: "No 'real-world' exploits of these vulnerabilities [ie, Meltdown and Spectre] have been reported to date [26 January 2018], though researchers have produced proof-of-concepts." Further, recommended preventions include: "promptly adopting software updates, avoiding unrecognized hyperlinks and websites, not downloading files or applications from unknown sources ... following secure password protocols ... [using] security software to help protect against malware (advanced threat prevention software or anti-virus)."


title: Meltdown (security vulnerability)

text: On 25 January 2018, the current status and possible future considerations in solving the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities were presented. In March 2018, Intel announced that it had designed hardware fixes for future processors for Meltdown and Spectre-V2 only, but not Spectre-V1. The vulnerabilities were mitigated by a new partitioning system that improves process and privilege-level separation. The company also announced it had developed Intel Microcode workarounds for processors dating back to 2013, and that it had plans to develop them for most processors dating back to 2007 including the Core 2 Duo; however, a month later in April 2018, it announced it was backing off that plan for a number of processor families and that no processor earlier than 2008 would have a patch available.


title: Meltdown (security vulnerability)

text: On 8 October 2018, Intel was reported to have added hardware and firmware mitigations regarding Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities to its latest processors.


title: Al-Alaq

text: Al-ʻAlaq or The Clot (, "al-ʻalaq", also known as "The Clinging Thing" or "The Embryo"), is the 96th chapter (sūrah) of the Qur'an. It is composed of 19 "āyāt" or verses. It is sometimes also known as Sūrat Iqrā (, "Read").


title: Al-Alaq

text: Chapter 96 is traditionally believed to have been Muhammad's first revelation. While on retreat in the Cave of Hira, located at Mountain Jabal al-Nour near Mecca, Gabriel appears before Muhammad and commands him to “Read!”. He responded, “But I cannot read!”. Then the angel Gabriel embraced him tightly and then revealed to him the first lines, “Read: In the name of your Lord Who created, (1) Created human from a clot. (2) Read: And your Lord is the Most Generous, (3) Who taught by the pen, (4) Taught human that which he knew not.” (Bukhari 4953). It is traditionally understood the first five ayats (1–5) of Surah Alaq were revealed; however, this is not the first fully complete Surah to be revealed and was actually revealed in 3 parts.


title: Al-Alaq

text: اقْرَأْ بِاسْمِ رَبِّكَ الَّذِي خَلَقَ ﴿١﴾ خَلَقَ الْإِنسَانَ مِنْ عَلَقٍ ﴿٢﴾ اقْرَأْ وَرَبُّكَ الْأَكْرَمُ ﴿٣﴾ الَّذِي عَلَّمَ بِالْقَلَمِ ﴿٤﴾ عَلَّمَ الْإِنسَانَ مَا لَمْ يَعْلَمْ ﴿٥


title: Al-Alaq

text: The first five verses of this sura are believed by some to be the first verses of the Qur'an claimed to be related by Muhammad. He received them while on a retreat in a mountain cave at Hira, just outside the city of Makkah in 610 CE. A few commentators disagree with this account, claiming that the first revelation was the beginning of surat al-Muddaththir or surat al-Fatiha, but theirs is a minority position. Moreover, the term ‘Insan’ which is translated to man or human appears 65 times in the Qur'an, applying to both sexes of mankind, a generic ‘man’.


title: Al-Alaq

text: The remainder of the surah, claimed to have been revealed later, questions the morality and beliefs of mankind, who "thinks himself self-sufficient", unaware that all things will return to their Lord. Once man becomes self-satisfied, he has the tendency to transgress. These ayahs were revealed shortly after Muhammed started to pray publicly, as many people questioned his actions. The text continues, addressing the impiety of "the man who forbids Our servant to pray". These later lines are thought to date from the time when Muhammad began to pray the salat in the Kaaba. Abu Jahl attempted to interrupt the prayer by trampling on Muhammad's neck while he was prostrated. "Does he not realize that God sees all?"


title: Al-Alaq

text: The Qur'an commands Muhammad (and by inference all believers) to continue the prayer regardless, as those who persecute the faithful are unaware that God sees what they do. After the first 8 ayahs were revealed, Muhammed left the cave at Hira, and then surahs Ad-Duha, Nashra, and the second part of this surah were revealed after 6 months.


title: Al-Alaq

text: More specifically, ayahs 9–14 were revealed when Muhammed first began praying publicly near the Ka’Bah because the Meccans didn't comprehend what he was doing. These were directed towards people who tried to stop others from making devotions toward Allah. Once Abu Jahl (member of the Quraish) saw Muhammed praying publicly, he thought that Muhammed had adopted a new religion and tried to drive him away from the Ka’Bah. He gathered a crowd and asked: “Is Muhammed setting his face on the ground in front of you (praying)?” When they replied in affirmative he said: “by the gods Al-Lat and Al-Uzza, if I ever catch him in that act of worship (salah), I will set my foot on his neck and rub his face in the dust.” Abu Jahl wanted to follow through on his threat, but when he saw Muhammed he stepped forward, motioned to put his foot on his neck, but then became frightened and left. When asked about it later, he said that he had seen a vision of a ditch right in front of Muhammed, filled with fire and a ghoul with fiery wings. After Muhammed heard about the remark, he said: “if he would have come near me, the angels would have struck him down and torn him into pieces.”


title: Al-Alaq

text: More specifically, ayahs 15–19 were about when Abu Jahl saw Muhammed pray again near the Ka’Bah, and said “Didn’t I tell you not to do this!” The prophet scolded him and said that he had the right to pray here, because he was a born citizen of Makkah. Abu Jahl said “you dare to scold me! By God, with one call I can fill this valley with supporters!” This passage was revealed: “If (Abu Jahl) would have called upon his men, the angel of punishment would have seized him.” These ayahs are more about the punishment that Abu Jahl (or any transgressor) would encounter, if he would have interrupted Muhammed (or a devotee) during prayer.


title: Al-Alaq

text: The translated words ‘bow down’ in verse 19 comes from the word ‘Sujud’ which refers to the position in Muslim prayer where the head, hands, knees, and toes are on the ground.


title: Al-Alaq

text: The linguistic definition of "ʻalaq" (singular ʻalaqah ) is "leech", "medicinal leech", "coagulated blood", "blood clot", or "the early stage of the embryo". "ʻAlaq" is also a derivative of "ʻalaqa" which means "attached and hanging to something." Professor Abdul Haleem mentions that ""ʻalaq"” can also mean anything that clings: a clot of blood, a leech, even a lump of mud. All these meanings involve the basic idea of clinging or sticking."


title: Al-Alaq

text: The term "ʻalaqah" is the second stage of human prenatal development (sura Al-Mu’minoon 23:12–14) which "descriptively encompasses the primary external and internal features" of the early embryo. The term "ʻalaqah" also occurs in several languages related to Arabic. In Hebrew there is alûqāh (or alukah), the generic name for any blood-sucking worm or leech, and in Aramaic and Syriac there are words with apparently similar meanings.


title: Al-Alaq

text: The first and foremost exegesis/tafsir of the Qur'an is found in hadith of Muhammad. Although scholars including ibn Taymiyyah claim that Muhammad has commented on the whole of the Qur'an, others including Ghazali cite the limited amount of narratives, thus indicating that he has commented only on a portion of the Qur'an. Ḥadīth (حديث) is literally "speech" or "report", that is a recorded saying or tradition of Muhammad validated by isnad; with Sirah Rasul Allah these comprise the sunnah and reveal shariah. According to Aishah, the life of Prophet Muhammad was the practical implementation of Qur'an. Therefore, higher count of hadith elevates the importance of the pertinent surah from a certain perspective. According to hadith, first 5 ayaat of this surah were first revelation of whole of the Quran.


title: Al-Alaq

text: 1–3: These verses are talking about how God created human beings from Alaq (The Clot of blood or The Clinging Thing). After this verse was revealed, Muhammed responded by saying that he didn't know how to read. After angel Jibraeel squeezed Muhammed's chest a few times, and the 3rd verse was revealed, Muhammed read even though he did not know how to read or write.


title: Al-Alaq

text: 4–5: These verse stress the importance of an education for a Muslim. As time goes on, things progress and advance, and everything comes from God. God opens peoples brains to new things, and this verse stresses the importance of furthering your education. This hadeeth in relation to this ayah was revealed which says: “a person who reads is handsome in the eyes of God.”


title: Al-Alaq

text: 6–8: Even though God does so many things for us we still disobey him. Some people say that they do not need Allah. It does not matter because everyone will return to him on the Day of Judgement for reckoning.


title: Al-Alaq

text: 9–10: In this verse “the one who discourages” references Abu Jahl when he tried to stop Muhammed from making devotions towards Allah, and anyone else for that matter.


title: Al-Alaq

text: 11–14: These verses question whether the “one who discourages” is being “guided” or even “concerned” about god. They also emphasize that if someone is praying not to stop them because Allah is always watching.


title: Al-Alaq

text: 15–19: These verse explain why the person who interrupts someone in prayer is said that they will be dragged from their “lying, sinful, forelock.” This phrase comes from Abu Jahl, who in the battle of Badr was killed by the hands of 2 child orphans of Medinah. His body was thrown into a well and they dragged him by his hair, which is specifically in reference to verse 15.


title: Al-Alaq

text: This sura has two parts: the first consists of vv. 1–5, and the second of vv. 6–19. The majority of Islamic scholars agreed that the first part forms the first revelation to be sent down to Muhammad in 610. In this regard, the Hadith from Aisha, which Ibn Hanbal, Bukhari, Muslim and other traditionists have related with several chains of authorities, is one of the most authentic Hadith on the subject. In it Aisha narrates the full story of the beginning of revelation as she herself heard it from Muhammad. Besides, Ibn Abbas, Abu Musa al-Ashari and a group of the Companions also are reported to have stated that these were the very first verses of the Quran to be revealed to Muhammad.


title: Al-Alaq

text: The second part was revealed later, when Muhammad began to perform the prescribed prayer in the precincts of the Kaaba, and Abu Jahl tried to prevent him from this with threats.


title: The Iron Bridge

text: The Iron Bridge is a cast iron arch bridge that crosses the River Severn in Shropshire, England. Opened in 1781, it was the first major bridge in the world to be made of cast iron. Its success inspired the widespread use of cast iron as a structural material, and today the bridge is celebrated as a symbol of the Industrial Revolution.


title: The Iron Bridge

text: The geography of the deep Ironbridge Gorge, formed by glacial action during the last ice age, meant that there are industrially useful deposits of coal, iron ore, limestone and fire clay present near the surface where they are readily mined, but also that it was difficult to build a bridge across the river at this location. To cope with the instability of the banks and the need to maintain a navigable channel in the river, a single span iron bridge was proposed by Thomas Farnolls Pritchard. After initial uncertainty about the use of iron, construction took place over 2 years, with Abraham Darby III responsible for the ironworks. The bridge crosses the Ironbridge Gorge with a main span of , allowing sufficient clearance for boats to pass underneath.


title: The Iron Bridge

text: In 1934 it was designated a scheduled monument and closed to vehicular traffic. Tolls for pedestrians were collected until 1950, when the bridge was transferred into public ownership. After being in a poor state of repair for much of its life, extensive restoration works in the latter half of the 20th century have protected the bridge. The bridge, the adjacent settlement of Ironbridge and the Ironbridge Gorge form the UNESCO Ironbridge Gorge World Heritage Site.


title: The Iron Bridge

text: The Ironbridge Gorge was formed at the end of the last ice age by the overflowing of Lake Lapworth, which resulted in the exposure of useful deposits of resources such as coal, iron ore, fire clay and limestone near the surface where they were readily mined. With the river providing a means of transport, the local area was an important centre of the emerging Industrial Revolution.


title: The Iron Bridge

text: Abraham Darby I first smelted local iron ore with coke made from Coalbrookdale coal in 1709, and in the coming decades Shropshire became a centre for industry due to the low price of fuel from local mines. The River Severn was used as a key trading route, but it was also a barrier to travel around the deep Ironbridge Gorge, especially between the then important industrial parishes of Broseley and Madeley, the nearest bridge being at Buildwas away. The Iron Bridge was therefore proposed to link the industrial town of Broseley with the smaller mining town of Madeley and the industrial centre of Coalbrookdale. The use of the river by boat traffic and the steep sides of the gorge meant that any bridge should ideally be of a single span, and sufficiently high to allow tall ships to pass underneath. The steepness and instability of the banks was problematic for building a bridge, and there was no point where roads on opposite sides of the river converged.


title: The Iron Bridge

text: The Iron Bridge was the first of its kind to be constructed, although not the first to be considered nor the first iron bridge of any kind. An iron bridge was partly constructed at Lyons in 1755, but was abandoned for reasons of cost, and a span wrought iron footbridge over an ornamental waterway was erected in Kirklees, Yorkshire, in 1769.


title: The Iron Bridge

text: In 1773, architect Thomas Farnolls Pritchard wrote to his 'iron mad' friend and local ironmaster, John Wilkinson of Broseley, to suggest building a bridge out of cast iron. Although he specialised in the design of chimneypieces and other items of interior decoration, and in funerary monuments, he had also previously designed both wooden and stone bridges.


title: The Iron Bridge

text: During the winter of 1773–74, local newspapers advertised a proposal to petition Parliament for leave to construct an iron bridge with a single span. In 1775, a subscription raised funds of between £3000 to £4000 (equivalent to £ to £ in 2016), and Abraham Darby III, the grandson of Abraham Darby I and an ironmaster working at Coalbrookdale, was appointed treasurer to the project.


title: The Iron Bridge

text: In March 1776, the Act to build a bridge received Royal assent. It had been drafted by Thomas Addenbrooke, secretary of the trustees, and John Harries, a London barrister, then presented to the House of Commons by Charles Baldwyn, MP for Shropshire. Abraham Darby III was commissioned to cast and build the bridge. In May 1776, the trustees withdrew Darby's commission, and instead advertised for plans for a single arch bridge to be built in "stone, brick or timber". No satisfactory proposal was made, and the trustees agreed to proceed with Pritchard's design, but there was continued uncertainty about the use of iron, and conditions were set on the cost and duration of the construction. In July 1777 the span of the bridge was decreased to , and then increased again to , possibly in order to accommodate a towpath.


title: The Iron Bridge

text: The site, adjacent to where a ferry had run between Madeley and Benthall, was chosen for its high approaches on each side and the relative solidity of the ground. The Act of Parliament described how the bridge was to be built from a point in Benthall parish near the house of Samuel Barnett to a point on the opposite shore near the house of Thomas Crumpton. Pritchard died on 21 December 1777 in his towerhouse at Eyton on Severn, only a month after work had begun, having been ill for over a year.


title: The Iron Bridge

text: The bridge is built from five sectional cast-iron ribs that give a span of . The construction of the bridge used of iron, and there are almost 1,700 individual components, the heaviest weighing . Components were cast individually to fit with each other, rather than being of standard sizes, with discrepancies of up to several centimetres between 'identical' components in different locations.


title: The Iron Bridge

text: The masonry and abutments were constructed between 1777 and 1778, and the ribs were lifted into place in the summer of 1779. The bridge first spanned the river on 2 July 1779, and it was opened to traffic on 1 January 1781.


title: The Iron Bridge

text: In 1997, a watercolour by Elias Martin was discovered in a Stockholm museum, which showed the bridge under construction in 1779. The painting shows a moveable wooden scaffold consisting of derrick poles standing in the river bed being used as a crane to position the half-ribs of the bridge, which had been taken to the site by boat from Darby's foundry downstream. Using the approach depicted in the painting, a half-size replica of the main section of the bridge was built in 2001 as part of the research for the BBC's "Timewatch" programme, which was shown the following year.


title: The Iron Bridge

text: Decorative rings and ogees between the structural ribs of the bridge suggest that the final design was Pritchard's, as the same elements appear in a gazebo he rebuilt. A foreman at the foundry, Thomas Gregory, drew the detailed designs for the members, resulting in the use of carpentry jointing details such as mortise and tenon joints and dovetails.


title: The Iron Bridge

text: The two outer ribs are engraved with the words: "This bridge was cast at Coalbrook-Dale and erected in the year MDCCLXXIX".


title: The Iron Bridge

text: Two supplemental arches, of similar cast iron construction, carry a towpath on the southern bank and also act as flood arches. A stone arch with a brick vault carries a small path on the northern (town side) bank.


title: The Iron Bridge

text: The Iron Bridge is made of cast iron. This is immensely strong in compression, but performs less well than steel and wrought iron when subjected to tension or bending moments, because of its brittleness and lower tensile strength. Analysis of an arch and a strut from the Iron Bridge revealed the following elemental compositions:


title: The Iron Bridge

text: The presence of 0.1% sulphur in cast iron is at the upper limit of what is acceptable, but the presence of sufficient manganese leads to the formation of harmless manganese sulphide.


title: The Iron Bridge

text: Puddled wrought iron was a much better structural material than cast iron but not widely available until after 1800, eventually becoming the preferred material for bridges, rails, ships and buildings until new steel making processes such as the Bessemer process were developed in the late 19th century.


title: The Iron Bridge

text: Darby had agreed to construct the bridge with a budget of £3,250 () and this was raised by subscribers to the project, mostly from Broseley. While the actual cost of the bridge is unknown, contemporary records suggest it was as high as £6,000 (), and Darby, who was already indebted from other ventures, agreed to cover the excess. However, by the mid-1790s the bridge was highly profitable, and tolls were giving the shareholders an annual dividend of 8 per cent.


title: The Iron Bridge

text: The opening of the bridge resulted in changes in the pattern of settlement in the gorge, and roads around the bridge were improved in the years after its construction. The town of Ironbridge, taking its name from the bridge, developed at the northern end. The trustees, as well as local hotel keepers and coach operators, promoted interest in the bridge among members of high society.


title: The Iron Bridge

text: In July 1783, a wall was built in order to prevent the north bank from slipping into the river. Cracks were found in the stone land arch on the south side in December 1784, and the neighbouring abutment showed signs of movement. The Gorge is very prone to landslides, and over 20 are recorded in the British Geological Survey's National Landslide Database in the area. It was suspected that the sides of the gorge were moving towards the river, forcing the feet of the arch towards each other, and consequently repairs were carried out in 1784, 1791 and 1792.


title: The Iron Bridge

text: It was the only bridge on the River Severn to survive the flood of February 1795 undamaged, due to its strength and small profile against the floodwaters. The medieval bridge at Buildwas was replaced with a cast iron bridge by Thomas Telford, which, by virtue of superior design, required half the quantity of iron despite a longer span of . The Buildwas Bridge survived until 1906.


title: The Iron Bridge

text: In 1800 the trustees commissioned repairs which lasted for several years, which involved the replacement of the stone land arches with wooden ones to relieve pressure on the main span. A proposal to build a rigid support between the abutments to keep them apart was found to be impossible with the available technology, but was achieved during the later restoration of the bridge in the 1970s. In 1812, its construction was described as "very bad" by Charles Hutton, and he predicted that it would not last for long, "though not from any deficiency in the iron-work", but due to cracks that had appeared in the stonework. The timber arches were replaced with cast iron ones in December 1820, and further repairs were necessary throughout the remainder of the 19th century.


title: The Iron Bridge

text: Around 1870, "Sir B. Baker stated that it had required patching for ninety years, because the arch and the high side arches would not work together. Expansion and contraction broke the high arch and the connexions between the arches. When it broke they fished it. Then the bolts sheared or the ironwork broke in a new place. He advised that there was nothing unsafe; it was perfectly strong and the stress in vital parts moderate. All that needed to be done was to fish the fractured ribs of the high arches, put oval holes in the fishes, and not screw up the bolts too tight."


title: The Iron Bridge

text: On 24 August 1902, a length of parapet collapsed into the river, and a section of deck plate weighing around fell from the bridge in July 1903. The opening of a toll-free concrete bridge in 1909 caused concern among the trustees, but it continued to be used by vehicles and pedestrians.


title: The Iron Bridge

text: A 1923 report by engineering consultants Mott, Hay and Anderson suggested that other than the paintwork, the main span of the bridge was in good condition. It was suggested that the metal deck of the bridge was dangerously heavy, and that after removing the dead weight the bridge should be reopened to vehicles no heavier than 2 tons and restricted to the centre of the roadway. A weight limit of 4 tons was imposed, but the housing boom of the 1930s meant that drivers distributing tiles produced at Jackfield were insistent that they should be allowed to use the bridge, so the trustees took the decision to close it to vehicular traffic with effect from 18 June 1934. Tolls for pedestrians were collected until 1950, when ownership of the bridge was transferred to Shropshire County Council. The tolls collected only marginally covered the cost of collection, leaving no budget for conservation, and the bridge had not been cleaned or painted for many years. Due to its poor condition, between the 1940s and 1970s a number of suggestions were made to scrap and replace the bridge, or move it to a different location. In 1956 the County Council made a proposal to demolish the bridge and replace it with a new one, but this plan did not come to fruition. The Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust was set up in 1967 with the aim of protecting industrial heritage in the Ironbridge Gorge, and was able to secure funding from the council to carry out repairs.


title: The Iron Bridge

text: With funding from Shropshire County Council, the Historic Buildings Council for England, and the nascent Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust, a programme of repairs took place on the foundations of the bridge at a cost of £147,000 between 1972 and 1975. The consulting engineers Sandford, Fawcett, Wilton and Bell decided to place a ferro-concrete inverted arch under the river to counter inward movement of the bridge abutments. The arch was built by the Tarmac Construction Company, starting in the spring of 1973, but unusually high summer floods washed over the cofferdam, frustrating hopes that the work could be done in a single summer. Filling material was removed from the south abutment to reduce its weight, and the arch through it was reinforced with concrete. The road surface was replaced with a lighter tarmac, the stone of the abutments was renewed and the toll-house was restored as an information centre. In 1980, the structure was painted for the first time in the 20th century, and the work was complete for the bicentenary of the opening, which was celebrated on 1 January 1981.


title: The Iron Bridge

text: Between 1999 and 2000, the bridge was scaffolded to allow examination by English Heritage. The bridge was also repainted and minor repairs were carried out. In January 2017 English Heritage announced a £1.2 million restoration project on the Iron Bridge, starting in September 2017, the "biggest ever conservation project" undertaken by English Heritage. The cost was quoted in 2018 at £3.6 million, with English Heritage describing it as "an ambitious conservation of its ribs and arches, its stonework and decking." The project was created after extensive surveys of the area revealed that the historic structure was under threat due to stresses in the ironwork dating from the original construction, ground movement over the centuries, and an earthquake in the 19th century. Apart from the structural restoration, the bridge was also reverted from blue-grey to its original red-brown colour after forensic analysis revealed this was how the bridge looked when it was first erected.


title: The Iron Bridge

text: The project was partly funded through the use of crowdfunding in which £47,545 was raised. It also received a €1,000,000 donation from the Hermann Reemtsma Foundation, a German foundation which mainly promotes cultural and social projects in northern Germany. This would also be the foundation's first funding in the United Kingdom. Following the works the bridge was reopened on 6 December 2018.


title: The Iron Bridge

text: The bridge, the adjacent settlement of Ironbridge and the Ironbridge Gorge form the UNESCO Ironbridge Gorge World Heritage Site, which was created in 1986. The bridge is a Grade I listed building, and is owned by Telford and Wrekin Council.


title: The Iron Bridge

text: In 1934 it was designated a Scheduled Ancient Monument, and in 1979, the bridge was recognised by the American Society of Civil Engineers as an International Civil Engineering Landmark.


title: The Iron Bridge

text: In 2020 the conservation and restoration work on the bridge was honoured in the European Heritage Awards/Europa Nostra Awards, which includes up to 30 of the most outstanding heritage projects from all parts of Europe within the EU and EEA.


title: The Iron Bridge

text: The bridge, as the first bridge of significant size built of metal, had "considerable influence on developments in the fields of technology and architecture".


title: The Iron Bridge

text: The successful use of cast iron in 1781 pioneered the choice of that material for many subsequent bridges, and cast iron arches of considerable span were constructed late in the 18th and early in the 19th century.


title: The Iron Bridge

text: Over fifty painters and engravers came to the area around Coalbrookdale between 1750 and 1830 to witness and record the rise of industry and changing landscape. One of the first artists to depict the bridge was William Williams, who was paid 10 guineas () in October 1780 by Darby for a drawing of the bridge. An engraving by Michael Angelo Rooker proved popular, and a copy was purchased by Thomas Jefferson where it was displayed in the dining room of Monticello.


title: The Iron Bridge

text: In 1979, the Royal Academy of Arts held an exhibition entitled "A View from the Iron Bridge" to commemorate the bicentenary of the bridge.


title: The Joker (Steve Miller Band song)

text: "The Joker" is a song by the Steve Miller Band from their 1973 album "The Joker". Released as a single in October 1973, the song topped the US "Billboard" Hot 100 in early 1974 and reached the top 20 in Australia, Canada, and the Netherlands. More than 16 years later, in September 1990, "The Joker" reached number one on the UK Singles Chart for two weeks after being used in "Great Deal", a Hugh Johnson-directed television advertisement for Levi's, thus holding the record for the longest gap between transatlantic chart-toppers. This reissue of "The Joker" also topped the Irish Singles Chart, the New Zealand Singles Chart, the Dutch Nationale Top 100, and the Dutch Top 40.


title: The Joker (Steve Miller Band song)

text: English musician Fatboy Slim covered "The Joker" and released it as a single on February 28, 2005. This version reached number 32 on the UK Singles Chart and number 29 in Ireland.


title: The Joker (Steve Miller Band song)

text: Miller borrowed from the hit song "Lovey Dovey", which shares the lyric, "You're the cutest thing that I ever did see / I really love your peaches, wanna shake your tree / Lovey dovey, lovey dovey, lovey dovey all the time". Ahmet Ertegun wrote the song, and the Clovers had the highest charting version in 1954.


title: The Joker (Steve Miller Band song)

text: It is one of two Steve Miller Band songs that feature the nonce word "pompatus". The first line of the lyrics is a reference to the song "Space Cowboy" from Miller's "Brave New World" album. The following lines refer to two other songs: "Gangster of Love" from "Sailor" and "Enter Maurice" from "Recall the Beginning...A Journey from Eden". The line "some people call me Maurice / 'Cause I speak of the pompatus of love" was written after Miller heard the song "The Letter" by the Medallions. In "The Letter", writer Vernon Green made up the word "puppetutes", meaning a paper-doll erotic fantasy figure; however, Miller misheard the word and wrote "pompatus" instead.


title: The Joker (Steve Miller Band song)

text: "Cash Box" said that "The Joker" "is going all the way to become [Miller's] most successful release ever."


title: The Joker (Steve Miller Band song)

text: "The Joker" topped the UK Singles Chart upon its reissue in 1990 despite selling exactly the same number of copies as that week's number-two single, "Groove Is in the Heart" by Deee-Lite. Due to a ruling that the higher position should go to the single that had increased its sales most over the week, "The Joker" controversially secured top spot, having grown its sales by 57% compared to Deee-Lite's 37%. It later transpired that a rounding discrepancy had initially caused the tie, with "The Joker" selling eight more copies and topping the charts on merit.


title: Alfie Deyes

text: Alfred Sidney Deyes (born 17 September 1993) is an English YouTuber, vlogger and businessman. On 4 September 2014, he released his first book, "The Pointless Book". Since 2014, he has released three books in the "Pointless Book" series and one autobiography.


title: Alfie Deyes

text: Deyes started his PointlessBlog YouTube channel in 2009. , the channel has over 4.6 million subscribers and over 510 million views on YouTube. His vlogging channel has 3.6 million subscribers and over 1 billion views, while his gaming channel has over 1.5 million subscribers and over 216 million views. He also has a following of 4.8 million followers on Twitter and 3.7 million followers on Instagram. He was named by Yahoo! News as one of "12 Web-savvy entrepreneurs to watch" in December 2013, and was featured on the cover of the January 2014 edition of "Company" magazine for the "Generation YouTube" feature.


title: Alfie Deyes

text: Deyes has collaborated with a number of other YouTubers; including Tanya Burr, Louis Cole, Louise Pentland, Grace Helbig, Tyler Oakley, Troye Sivan, Miranda Sings, Joe Sugg, Zoe Sugg and Jim Chapman. He also created a couple of videos with Ariana Grande for the You Generation network on YouTube. He currently stars, along with a number of other YouTubers, in the Style Haul series "The Crew", described by teen website Sugarscape.com as "the male version of Loose Women, but a bit less pervy".


title: Alfie Deyes

text: In 2013, Deyes was a member of the "Guinness World Records OMG!" channel (GWRomg) and held a number of world records, including "Most bangles put on in 30 seconds by a team of two", along with YouTubers Marcus Butler and 'Laurbubble' (which they still hold); and "Most party poppers popped in 30 seconds" with a count of 29, beating the previously set record by 1 (he subsequently lost this to Ashrita Furman in October 2013), and filling the most pancakes in one minute, with chocolate sauce and bananas, which was 7.


title: Alfie Deyes

text: Deyes was included in the 2015 "Debrett's 500", listing the most influential people in Britain, under the New Media category.


title: Alfie Deyes

text: Deyes signed a book deal with Blink Publishing in 2014, with his debut book "The Pointless Book" due for release in September of the same year. The book is part journal, part activity book and includes a free downloadable app and social media integration. It has been unfavourably compared to Keri Smith's 2007 book "Wreck This Journal", which contained some similar ideas. Rhik Samadder, for "The Guardian", stated "It's a bit like the activity sheets given to children in museums and on planes to keep them quiet. Most of the pages are largely blank, containing instructions to "Draw a selfie" or "Fill this page in with whatever you want!", and found that while "It may not be "Moby Dick"", he stated that "the "Pointless Book" is a canny piece of merchandising."


title: Alfie Deyes

text: A sequel to "The Pointless Book", "The Pointless Book 2", was released on 26 March 2015 and features similar content. It became the second best selling non-fiction book in its first week of release.


title: Alfie Deyes

text: In 2017, Deyes announced a third and final book in the "Pointless Book" series titled "The Pointless Book 3". It was released on 13 July 2017.


title: Alfie Deyes

text: Deyes appeared on the 2014 single "Do They Know It's Christmas?" as part of the Band Aid 30 charity supergroup, raising money for the Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa.


title: Alfie Deyes

text: Deyes is director of PointlessBlog Ltd and Pointless Holdings Ltd, alongside Dominic Smales (CEO of Gleam Futures, a digital talent management company). In October 2020, Deyes and Sugg were announced as "ambassadors" promoting A Good Company, a maker of sustainable products.


title: Alfie Deyes

text: In 2018, Deyes uploaded a video to his YouTube channel called "Living on £1 for 24 hours" in which his aim was to spend only £1 for a full day. He received criticism from viewers and the media who claimed that Deyes was making a mockery of poverty, both in his language used and the fact he did things such as going shopping for clothes during the video, continuing to use luxury items such as his car, and was given free food after being recognised. On 18 June 2018, Deyes uploaded a video to his vlogging channel titled "Lets talk about the £1 video" in which he apologised for his actions in the video and claimed he didn't mean to mock poverty. He subsequently removed the "Living on £1 for 24 hours" video from YouTube and donated all revenue from that video to charity.


title: Alfie Deyes

text: Deyes was born in the London Borough of Enfield. His family relocated to Brighton, East Sussex when he was four years old. Deyes was educated at Varndean School in Brighton and then attended Varndean College, achieving the grades he needed to go to university. Despite being offered a place, Deyes chose to defer university and take a gap year in order to spend time travelling. Subsequently, at the end of his gap year, he chose not to attend university and continue pursuing his successful YouTube career. From age 11 to 14, Deyes participated in competitive gymnastics.


title: Alfie Deyes

text: He has been in a relationship with fellow YouTube star Zoe Sugg, known publicly as Zoella, since October 2012. In early 2013, Deyes moved into a flat in London, with YouTuber Caspar Lee. Deyes moved back to Brighton in autumn 2013, eventually moving into a house with Sugg in October 2014. Shortly after moving in together, Deyes and Sugg bought a black pug named Nala. In June 2017, the couple upgraded to a larger five-bedroom house, which had been purchased in July 2015 and renovated over several months. Sugg and Deyes have one child, born in August 2021.


title: Hunter × Hunter: The Last Mission

text: The film begins before the plot of Hunter x Hunter, some decades ago, when the chairman of the Hunters Association, Isaac Netero, defeats a powerful enemy known as Jed. Back to the present, a group of cloaked men storm into a prison and free the captives there, recruiting them for their plan. Some time later, Gon and Killua take a break from their expeditions with Kite to pay another visit at Heaven's Arena and cheer for their friend Zushi in the Battle Olympia Tournament with Wing and Biscuit. Meanwhile, Leorio, who is also bound to meet them, is attacked and knocked out by the cloaked men. Before the tournament begins, Gon and Killua pay a visit to Netero, who is also at the building, but the Arena is taken over by the mysterious men, with one of them, Gaki, replacing Zushi's first opponent and defeating him, another one, Shura, taking over the security system and a third one, Rengoku, stabbing herself and putting a curse on Netero to seal his Nen and immobilizing him. The ringleader then appears and knocks Gon and Killua down from the tower, but the duo manage to avoid the fall and return to the building, several floors below.


title: Hunter × Hunter: The Last Mission

text: Netero recognizes the ringleader as Jed, and it is revealed that Jed was once Netero's friend and leader of "Shadow", the Hunter Association's black ops squad, that was destroyed by the chairman after they began to make use of "On", a cursed power that is opposite to Nen and is fueled by the user's pure hatred. Jed and his companions' objective is to force the Hunter Association to disclose the "Black Report", a record of the crimes against the descendants of "Shadow" to the public, that had peacefully settled after the organization was destroyed, but some time later were wrongly pursued and hunted down by the government, with three survivors, Gaki, Shura and Rengoku, to use their hatred to revive Jed, who taught them to use On. Meanwhile, Gon and Killua fight their way up the tower until Gaki appears to fight them, and Kurapika, who was present at the tournament to escort his employer, Neon, confronts Shura. Amidst the chaos, Leorio rises from the sewers inside the building and is helped by Hisoka, who also was inside the building to reunite with Kurapika. Once Gon and Killua defeat Geki, he self-destructs as his covenant states that losing to a Hunter will cost his life. Kurapika also defeats Shura with Leorio's help, but before dying, Shura infects Kurapika with Jed's blood, sealing his Nen and claiming that he will die unless he embraces On instead.


title: Hunter × Hunter: The Last Mission

text: Once reunited with the others, Gon and Killua decide to confront Jed at the roof while Leorio stays behind to take care of Kurapika. In the occasion, Gon is also infected by his blood and decides to embrace On to keep fighting him, while Killua convinces Rengoku to give up on her hatred and she dies, freeing Netero from her curse. Netero confronts Jed, but instead of attacking him, he decides to defend all his attacks until the hatred on him subsides. Jed is ultimately defeated when Gon purifies the On in his body with his own Nen and does the same to him, allowing him to finally die in peace. After the remaining members of Shadow are defeated, Heaven's Arena returns to normal and the Battle Olympia Tournament is finally allowed to begin.


title: Hunter × Hunter: The Last Mission

text: "Hunter × Hunter: The Last Mission" was announced on January 12, 2013 as a teaser trailer at the end of the first film, "". In August, the release date and basic plot outline were given in the year's 37 issue of "Weekly Shōnen Jump". The first trailer for the film was released over a week later. Like the previous film, music duo Yuzu provides the theme song, . A second full trailer was released in November. A novel adaptation of the film, written by Hajime Tanaka, was released on December 27, 2013.


title: Hunter × Hunter: The Last Mission

text: In the first ten days, the film earned ¥571 million ($5.47 million) at the Japanese box office. By its third week, the film earned ¥689,924,282 ($6,614,304). By the end of its run, the film grossed () at the Japanese box office.


title: Hunter × Hunter: The Last Mission

text: The home video DVD of the film was released on July 23, 2014, selling 3,367 copies its first week for seventh place on Oricon's Japan Animation DVD chart. It sold 5,196 copies in four weeks before falling off the chart.


title: Hunter × Hunter: The Last Mission

text: Like the first film, "Hunter × Hunter: The Last Mission" received its United States premiere at the Japan Film Festival of San Francisco on July 26, 2014.


title: Hunter × Hunter: The Last Mission

text: At Anime NYC in November 2018, Viz Media announced that an English dub would screen in select United States theaters on January 30, 2019. They released the film on home video in North America on March 12, 2019.


title: Natalie Hemby

text: Natalie Nicole Hemby Wrucke (born March 24, 1977) is an American country music songwriter and singer. She has written songs for Lee Ann Womack, Eli Young Band, Toby Keith, Miranda Lambert, Sunny Sweeney, Little Big Town, Jon Pardi, Kacey Musgraves, and Lady Gaga. In 2019, she joined the quartet The Highwomen alongside Brandi Carlile, Amanda Shires and Maren Morris.


title: Natalie Hemby

text: Hemby has accumulated eight No. 1 "Billboard" singles during her career. Hemby's cuts include "White Liar" and "Only Prettier" by Miranda Lambert, "Pontoon" and "Tornado" by Little Big Town, "Drinks After Work" by Toby Keith and "Automatic" by Miranda Lambert. She is currently a writer at Universal Music Group Nashville (UMPG), and has formerly been affiliated with EMI Publishing and Carnival Music.


title: Natalie Hemby

text: On January 13, 2017, Hemby released her first studio album, "Puxico", named after the Missouri town where her grandfather lived, via the label GetWrucke Productions which she runs with her husband, music producer Mike Wrucke.


title: Natalie Hemby

text: In February 2021, Hemby signed with Fantasy Records. Produced by Mike Wrucke, her first album on Fantasy, "Pins and Needles", was released on October 8, 2021.


title: Natalie Hemby

text: Hemby was revealed as the final member of The Highwomen, a country music group that already featured Brandi Carlile, Maren Morris and Amanda Shires, on April 1, 2019, when the group performed live for the first time at the Bridgestone Arena as part of an 87th birthday tribute concert for Loretta Lynn. "Redesigning Women" was released on July 19, 2019, as the first single from their self-titled debut album set for release on September 6, 2019.


title: Vespidae

text: The Vespidae are a large (nearly 5000 species), diverse, cosmopolitan family of wasps, including nearly all the known eusocial wasps (such as "Polistes fuscatus", "Vespa orientalis", and "Vespula germanica") and many solitary wasps. Each social wasp colony includes a queen and a number of female workers with varying degrees of sterility relative to the queen. In temperate social species, colonies usually last only one year, dying at the onset of winter. New queens and males (drones) are produced towards the end of the summer, and after mating, the queens hibernate over winter in cracks or other sheltered locations. The nests of most species are constructed out of mud, but polistines and vespines use plant fibers, chewed to form a sort of paper (also true of some stenogastrines). Many species are pollen vectors contributing to the pollination of several plants, being potential or even effective pollinators, while others are notable predators of pest insect species.


title: Vespidae

text: The subfamilies Polistinae and Vespinae are composed solely of eusocial species, while the Eumeninae, Euparagiinae, Gayellinae, Masarinae and Zethinae are all solitary with the exception of a few communal and several subsocial species. The Stenogastrinae are facultatively eusocial, considering nests may have one or several adult females; in cases where the nest is shared by multiple females (typically, a mother and her daughters) there is reproductive division of labor and cooperative brood care.


title: Vespidae

text: In the Polistinae and Vespinae, rather than consuming prey directly, prey are premasticated and fed to the larvae, which in return, produce a clear liquid (with high amino acid content) for the adults to consume; the exact amino acid composition varies considerably among species, but it is considered to contribute substantially to adult nutrition.


title: Vespidae

text: Fossils are known since Aptian of the Early Cretaceous, with several described species from Cretaceous amber.


title: The Kids of Degrassi Street

text: The Kids of Degrassi Street is a Canadian children's television series and the first in the "Degrassi" franchise created by Kit Hood and Linda Schuyler. It follows the lives of a group of children living on De Grassi Street in Toronto. It originated from a series of standalone short films that aired on CBC Television annually starting with "Ida Makes a Movie" on December 8, 1979. The CBC ordered five more episodes in 1982, effectively turning it into a television series.


title: The Kids of Degrassi Street

text: While considered the first entry in the franchise, it is unrelated to the other four series, which focus on teenagers attending middle and high school. It is notable for featuring several actors who would later star in "Degrassi Junior High" and "Degrassi High" playing different characters.


title: The Kids of Degrassi Street

text: Linda Schuyler, a seventh and eighth grade teacher at Earl Grey Senior Public School in Toronto, formed the company Playing With Time with Kit Hood in 1976. At the time, Schuyler had been teaching her students an early version of media studies, which included filmmaking with Super-8 film. Discovering that there was a lack of resources on the subject, Earl Grey librarian Bruce Mackey ordered several books about filmmaking, one of which was the picture book "Ida Makes a Movie", which was written by Kay Chorao.


title: The Kids of Degrassi Street

text: Neither were aware that "Ida Makes A Movie" was a preschool book, in which the titular character was a cat. Nonetheless, Schuyler felt the story was powerful, and became interested in making a live-action adaptation, featuring children instead of cats. She sought the advice of then-lawyer and future Epitome Pictures co-founder Stephen Stohn, who advised her to forego a lawyer, and instead propose the deal herself. Schuyler flew to New York, where she met with Chorao and secured a $200 deal to adapt the book into a movie. Yan Moore, who would eventually become "Degrassi Junior High" and "Degrassi High"'s head writer, became a writer for the series after he rectified problems with the story of the episode "Casey Draws The Line".


title: The Kids of Degrassi Street

text: The opening sequence consists of a short piano piece, set to black and white stills of the Leslieville neighbourhood.


title: The Kids of Degrassi Street

text: Wendy Watson and Lewis Manne, who later composed the music for "Degrassi Junior High" and "Degrassi High", composed the music for "The Kids Of Degrassi Street", with John Forbes initially performing the music on a Fairlight CMI.


title: The Kids of Degrassi Street

text: "The Kids of Degrassi Street" featured many of the same actors who would later appear on "Degrassi Junior High" and "Degrassi High", including Stacie Mistysyn, Neil Hope, Anais Granofsky, Sarah Charlesworth, John Ioannou, in different unrelated roles.


title: The Kids of Degrassi Street

text: Ida Makes A Movie premiered on CBC on December 8, 1979. By 1982, the CBC, enamored with the short films that Hood and Schuyler were producing, ordered five more, effectively turning the annual movies into a television series. In the lead-up to Degrassi Junior High, the series was re-run on Sundays at 5:00pm, until it was replaced by its successor in the same timeslot. In the United Kingdom, the series debuted on BBC One on July 9, 1984, with the final episode airing on June 16, 1986. In Australia, the series debuted at 6:00pm on February 2, 1987 on ABC TV.


title: The Kids of Degrassi Street

text: In late 1986, James Lorimer & Company published a series of illustrated paperback books based on the television series, written by Schuyler and Hood with the assistance of author Eve Jennings.


title: The Kids of Degrassi Street

text: On July 31, 2007, WGBH Boston Home Video released "The Kids of Degrassi Street: The Complete Series" on DVD in Region 1.


title: The Kids of Degrassi Street

text: In Region 4, Beyond Home Entertainment released the entire series on DVD in Australia on March 12, 2008.


title: Walter Stadnick

text: Wolodumir "Walter" Stadnick (born 3 August 1952), also known as "Nurget", is a Canadian outlaw biker and gangster who was the third national president of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club in Canada. Stadnick is generally credited with turning the Hells Angels into the dominant outlaw biker club in Canada. The journalists Michel Auger and Peter Edwards wrote that much about Stadnick is mysterious, ranging from what is the meaning of his sobriquet "Nurget", to how a unilingual Anglo Canadian from Hamilton became the leader of the then largely French-Canadian Hells Angels. In 2004, the journalist Tu Thanh Ha wrote that Stadnick is "a secretive man little known to the public", but "he is one of Canada's most pivotal organized-crime figures."


title: Walter Stadnick

text: Wolodumir Stadnik was born on the "upper side" of Hamilton atop of "the Mountain", as locals call the Niagara Escarpment, to a family of Ukrainian immigrants. His parents were Andriy and Valentina Stadnik, who lived at 98 East 16th Street, in a working-class neighborhood known for its high rate of petty crime. In elementary school, he changed the spelling of his surname to Stadnick and preferred to be called Walter rather than Wolodumir. As a child, he regularly attended the local Uniate Catholic church and was described as quiet and well-behaved. One former teacher said about him: "He clearly had a great deal of natural intelligence, but he was impossible to motivate. It was almost like he didn't want to succeed".


title: Walter Stadnick

text: As a teenager, Stadnick was known as the resident drug dealer at his high school, and by 1970, he was already known by his nickname "Nurget". It remains a mystery why Stadnick's nickname is "Nurget"; one Hamilton police officer says it goes back to his high school days when as the neighborhood hash dealer, Stadnick always had a "nugget" of hash to sell. As a high school student, he began a lifelong practice of dressing flamboyantly by wearing bright jewelry such as rings and chains. Stadnick did well in auto shop at the Hill Park Secondary School, but was otherwise an indifferent student. Those who knew him in high school considered Stadnick to be a "tough little guy" who, despite his short stature, was known as a fighter. He was very ambitious; joining a biker gang as a teenager in Hamilton called the Cossacks, who were noted for their habit of growing their hair long and drilling holes in their bike helmets, into which they would run their hair through. Stadnick named the gang the Cossacks as a reference to his Ukrainian heritage.


title: Walter Stadnick

text: On 23 October 1970, Stadnick was arrested after a police officer found LSD tablets in his pocket. Stadnick was charged, but made bail. Subsequently, Stadnick was arrested for the second time for the possession of hash with the intention to distribute. On 6 January 1971 when the preliminary hearing was held to decide whatever Stadnick's case would go to trial or not, Stadnick's biker friends showed up and misbehaved in court, leading the judge to expel them from the courtroom. Outside the courtroom, Stadnick's biker associates began to swear at and threaten one of the policeman scheduled to testify against him, leading to a brawl in the hallway. Standick was convicted of drug possession with the intention to sell.


title: Walter Stadnick

text: For a time, Stadnick was friendly with his future archenemy, Mario "the Wop" Parente, the president of the Hamilton chapter of Satan's Choice outlaw biker gang, but the two reportedly fell out when Parente vetoed the 5'4 Stadnick's attempt to join Satan's Choice under the grounds that he was too short. Satan's Choice were the most powerful outlaw biker club in Ontario in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1973, the Hells Angels offered Bernie Guindon, the national president of Satan's Choice, the opportunity to have his club "patch over" to become Hells Angels, an offer the Canadian nationalist Guindon promptly rejected, saying he rather keep his club Canadian. Unable to join Satan's Choice, Stadnick instead joined the Wild Ones outlaw biker club in 1977. As the Wild Ones were more a senior club than the Cossacks, being allowed to join was a step-up for Stadnick. Stadnick was known for being quiet, for never smoking or doing drugs, and for drinking in moderation.


title: Walter Stadnick

text: One Satan's Choice biker, Cecil Kirby, who first saw Stadnick at a bikers' convention in Wasaga Beach in 1977, recalled that Stadnick seemed to be trying too hard to pass himself as a "hardcore" biker, remembering: "I didn't like him. I thought he was a sort of a poser". On 1 July 1977, Parente together with the rest of the Hamilton chapter of the Satan's Choice "patched over" to join the Outlaws, who wanted to expand into Canada. On 5 December 1977, the Popeyes of Montreal, generally considered to be the most violent of all of Quebec's many outlaw biker clubs, "patched over" to become the first Hells Angels chapter in Canada. On 17 February 1978, a biker war began between the Outlaws and the Hells Angels. The conflict was started when the Hells Angel Yves "Apache" Trudeau shot two Outlaws in Montreal, killing one.


title: Walter Stadnick

text: By 1978, Stadnick had become the leader of the Wild Ones. In the 1970s, outlaw biker clubs were very much subordinate to the Mafia and other organized crime groups like the West End Gang, who employed outlaw bikers to do "dirty work" that they did not wish to do themselves. The Wild Ones worked as subcontractors for the Mafia, being used to bomb businesses that refused to pay extortion money. A Hamilton police detective, Ken Roberston, who investigated the bombings, stated: "It was quite a sophisticated operation". Another Hamilton police officer, John Gordon Harris, said of Stadnick: "He was a little short guy. He certainly wasn't the most visible member of the gang. He was just a face in the crowd. He was almost invisible – but he did have a head on his shoulders". The journalists Julien Sher and William Marsden called Harris the "nemesis" of Stadnick who pursued him from the 1970s onward. The private detective Alex Caine, who met Stadnick several times, described him as "a vindictive little man with the charisma of a hockey puck" who appeared to be trying to over-compensate due to his diminutive stature. The journalist Peter Edwards wrote that Stadnick seemed to have a Napoleon complex as despite his short stature that "there was something undeniably huge about the man". The Wild Ones were considered to be one of the lesser outlaw biker clubs in Hamilton, and the Outlaws chapter tolerated their existence as they were not seen to be a threat.


title: Walter Stadnick

text: In 1978, Stadnick contacted Yves Buteau, the national president of Hells Angels Canada, to discuss having the Wild Ones "patch over" to become the first Hells Angels chapter in Ontario. John Gordon Harris of the Hamilton police told the journalist Jerry Langton: "As soon as the Wild Ones began to associate with the Hells Angels, the Outlaws told them they shouldn't do that. And they probably shouldn't have, as it led to several deaths". The Hamilton chapter of the Outlaws started killing the Wild Ones, and after five members of the Wild Ones were killed over the course of 1978, the gang disbanded themselves. Harris stated that as the Wild Ones kept being killed: "A lot of them are thinking, 'you know what, maybe I don't want to be a biker anymore'. But the hard-core ones, they're still thinking they want to be Hells Angels. I think Stadnick thought, 'this will never happen to me. I'm too smart for this. The ones we're losing were the careless one'".


title: Walter Stadnick

text: In October 1978, Stadnick went to Montreal to meet Buteau and the other Hells Angels leaders. During his trip to Montreal, Stadnick survived "Le Tourbillion" massacre on 12 October 1978 when the Outlaws stormed into "Le Tourbillion" bar to shoot the Angels and Wild Ones who were meeting there, killing one of the Angels and two of the Wild Ones. Two American Outlaws, one from Miami and the other from Detroit, had entered the bar after following the Angels around. One Angel, Louis "Ti-Oui" Lapierre, rose to confront the two American Outlaws, only to be gunned down when one of the Outlaws pulled out his handgun while the other pulled out a sawed-off shotgun and opened fire on the party in the booth. One of the Angels, Jean Brochu, was killed, while Lapierre and another Angel, Bruno Coulombe, were badly wounded. Of the Wild Ones, George "Chico" Mousseau and Gary "Gator" Davies were killed. Stadnick survived by hiding under the table. Buteau learned that the man who hired the two American Outlaws was Roland "Roxy" Dutemple of the Outlaws' Montreal chapter, and sent his ace assassin, Yves Trudeau, after him. Trudeau killed Dutemple with a car bomb on 29 March 1979. Upon his return to Hamilton, Stadnick found that his gang had voted themselves out of existence, he chose to continue as a Hells Angel, operating in Montreal and alone in Hamilton.


title: Walter Stadnick

text: Despite not speaking any French, Stadnick joined the Montreal South "mother chapter" of the Hells Angels and quickly rose through the ranks. He received his full patch on 26 May 1982. In December 1982, Stadnick returned to Hamilton after living in Montreal for a number of years together with another Wild One turned Hells Angel, Noel "Frenchy" Mailloux, who had served as Stadnick's translator during his time in Montreal. Despite orders from Stadnick not to attract attention, Mailloux together with his stripper girlfriend Connie Augustin went on a lengthy cocaine binge. On 17 February 1983, in a moment of cocaine-induced paranoia, Mailloux attempted to murder Augustin, shooting her several times, while at the same time killing her four-year son Stewart Hawley and her best friend Cindy Lee Thompson. Mailloux was found afterwards wandering the streets of Hamilton, high on cocaine, blabbing nonsense, and trying to fire his empty gun at anybody he met on the streets. The incident badly damaged the image of the Hells Angels in Ontario, making them look to be out of control and dangerous, and Stadnick was forced to suspend his efforts at trying to set up a Hells Angels chapter in Ontario for some time. In July 1983, Buteau established the first Angel chapters outside of Quebec when he persuaded the three-chapter-strong Satan's Angels biker gang, based in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia and on Vancouver Island, to "patch over" to join the Hells Angels. On 17 July 1983, while riding through northern Ontario, Parente happened to see two Hells Angels from Montreal, Michel "Jinx" Genest and Jean-Marc Nadeau, on the bus to Vancouver to attend the ceremony. Enraged, Parente and the other Outlaws proceeded to shoot up the bus when it stopped at the Mr. Mugs coffee and doughnut shop in Wawa in an attempt to kill the two Hells Angels. Although no one was killed, the Wawa incident showed strongly Parente felt about Hells Angels moving into Ontario. On 21 July 1983, the "patch over" took place in Vancouver, establishing the Hells Angels in British Columbia.


title: Walter Stadnick

text: On 8 September 1983, Stadnick's patron Buteau was assassinated by an Outlaw, Gino Goudreau, in Longueuil, which many assumed at the time would be the end of Stadnick's career as he did not speak any French while being a member of what was then a predominately French-Canadian outlaw biker club. At the time of his assassination, Buteau was meeting Guy Gilbert, an emissary of the Kitchener chapter of Satan's Choice, who was also killed by Goudreau, to discuss "patching over" to become Hells Angels. Buteau's successor as national president, Michel "Sky" Langlois, together with his right-hand man, Réjean "Zig Zag" Lessard, both decided that Stadnick offered their best hope of establishing the Hells Angels in Ontario. It was around this time that Stadnick started wearing a "Filthy Few" patch that the police say is awarded to those who kill for the gang. The underworld of Hamilton at that time was dominated by the three Mafia families, the Papalia crime family, the Musitano crime family and the Luppino crime family, together with the local Outlaws chapter, which made Hamilton a dangerous place for Stadnick and required him to keep a low profile. The leader of the Papalia family, Johnny "the Enforcer" Papalia, one of the most feared man in the Canadian Mafia, was well known for his dislike of outlaw bikers, and made it clear he did not want a Hells Angels chapter in Hamilton.


title: Walter Stadnick

text: On 8 September 1984, Stadnick was badly injured in a traffic incident that saw him run his motorcycle into a car driven by a Catholic priest in Drummondville, Quebec. Stadnick was on his way to attend a memorial service for Buteau, who was killed on that day in 1983, when a Catholic priest who was speeding on his way to Montreal to see Pope John Paul II, who was visiting Canada, led to the traffic incident. The fire caused by the traffic incident left much of Stadnick's body covered with third-degree burns. Stadnick's face was badly burned, leaving him with what were described as "horrific" scars to his face. As a result of the burns to his body, Stadnick lost much of his nose and half of two of his fingers. Initially, Stadnick went to a hospital in Montreal, but as none of the nurses spoke English, he transferred over to a hospital in his hometown. Lessard arranged for members of the 13th Tribe biker gang from Halifax led by David "Wolf" Carroll, who were hoping to join the Hells Angels, to guard Stadnick. Stadnick went to St. Joseph's Hospital in Hamilton, and believing that his archenemy Parente would try to kill him, asked the Hamilton police to guard him during his stay at St. Joseph's. Harris was opposed to the police guarding Stadnick, saying: "I didn't like it. I thought we were compromising our integrity. They said he was a citizen like anybody else. 'Yeah', I said, but let remember who he is and what he belongs to". Stadnick had some doubts about the competence of the 13th Tribe to guard him in the daytime and instead the Hamilton police protected him in the nighttime as he recovered. A nurse recalled: "It was crazy; most of the day there were these big, burly bikers outside his room. And the rest of the time it was these big, burly cops-it was like he was a rock star or something. You could tell these bikers were small-town boys; they weren't used to the cops like what we had here in Hamilton. They used to taunt and tease the bikers all the time-trying to start a fight, eh?" The policeman called Stadnick a "French fry" while the bikers called the Hamilton policemen the "dougnut gang"; several times Harris warned that he would have Carroll and the rest all arrested if they persisted with their disruptive behavior. As a reward for guarding Stadnick, the 13th Tribe were allowed to join the Hells Angels on 5 December 1984, becoming the first Angel chapter in Atlantic Canada. As a result of his face becoming grotesquely deformed, Stadnick was described by Harris as becoming more introverted than before.


title: Walter Stadnick

text: By 1986, Stadnick was living in a trailer park in the Hamilton suburb of Carlisle. One of his neighbors recalled: "He never caused any problems; he was always friendly. I didn't even know he was a biker – he always drove a car up here". In the summer of 1986, one of Stadnick's neighbors found a plastic container full of amphetamines. Detective Harris stated "it was full of amphetamines and we knew it was his. So we put the container back where it was found and kept an eye on it". However, Stadnick stayed away from the container, leading Harris to say: "He was pretty smart. If nothing else, he had the ability to keep himself out of trouble". Harris described Stadnick as being "civil enough, but he never had a sense of humor". Stadnick was careful enough to always hold his discussions with other bikers outside to avoid police bugs. Stadnick did not own, but was described as running, the Rebel Roadhouse bar in Hamilton. One Hamilton police officer stated: "He had an office in the back, through the kitchen. It was good place to entertain visiting Angels". Stadnick used the Rebel Roadhouse as a place to conduct his business. The Outlaws planned to assassinate Stadnick by firing a rocket launcher at the Rebel Roadhouse, but the police arrested those involved in the plot before the attack occurred. Detective Harris stated about the failed plot: "When Parente was running the show, they would had done it; but after he went to prison they didn't have the guts". During his frequent visits to meet the Hells Angels national leaders at the "mother chapter" in Montreal, Stadnick first met in 1986 another Hells Angel, Maurice "Mom" Boucher. Despite the fact that Stadnick spoke no French and Boucher no English, forcing them to use translators, the two men became friends. From 1987 onward, Stadnick was closely associated with Boucher who had become a "full patch" Hells Angel on 1 May 1987.


title: Walter Stadnick

text: In 1987, Stadnick went to Toronto to try to persuade an outlaw biker club, the Vagabonds, to "patch over" to become Hells Angels. The Vagabonds had about 70 members and were active in the Toronto drug trade. The president of the Vagabonds, Donald "Snorkel" Melanson, wanted to "patch over" to join to the Hells Angels and, as a prelude, agreed to buy his cocaine only from the Montreal "mother chapter" of the Hells Angels. However, Melanson – who owed his nickname to his practice of snorting cocaine with a snorkel – consumed much of the cocaine he was supposed to sell and he was soon $80,000 in debt to the Hells Angels. After remortgaging his house, Melanson contacted the Hells Angels to say he had some $50,000 in cash of the $80,000 that he owed and he would meet them in a room in a hotel on Yonge Street to hand it over, promising he would pay off the remaining $30,000 soon. On the night of 2 September 1987, Melanson went to the hotel to hand over the money to the Hells Angels. The following morning, the cleaners at the hotel discovered Melanson's corpse with two bullets in his head while the money was gone. The murder of Melanson created much ill will towards the Hells Angels in the Vagabonds for some time, and the plans to "patch over" were aborted. On 5 November 1987, Stadnick was arrested for the first time since 1971. However, the offense was merely drunk driving, for which he was fined $750 dollars. Aiding Stadnick was the conviction in 1988 of his archenemy, Parente, who had become the national president of the Outlaws, of manslaughter in connection with the shooting death of Jimmy Lewis.


title: Walter Stadnick

text: In 1988, Stadnick become the national president of the Canadian Hells Angels. In the spring of 1988, Langlois fled to Morocco to escape charges of first-degree murder in connection with his role in the Lennoxville massacre of 1985, and Stadnick was chosen to be his successor. After the Lennoxville massacre, the Angels' ace assassin, Yves Trudeau, had turned Crown's evidence, testifying against dozens of Hells Angels. In 1988, the Canadian Hells Angels were in decline; of the 50 members of the club in Quebec, 19 were in prison after being convicted of murder on the basis of Trudeau's testimony; 13, including the previous national president Langlois, were on the run to escape murder charges; and another five were in jail facing charges of murder. The Angels seemed to have chosen Stadnick as their president as the best man to turn around the fortunes of the club and allowed the Angels to expand into the other provinces. Harris stated: "He got it by default. He was the last guy that had some seniority and some smarts". At the time, most of the Angels' chapters were in Quebec, although there were also three chapters in British Columbia and one chapter in Nova Scotia.


title: Walter Stadnick

text: As national president, Stadnick immediately appointed Boucher his Quebec lieutenant and informed him that he would largely run Hells Angels operations in Quebec, while Stadnick focused on expanding the Angels into the rest of Canada. In one of his first acts as president, Stadnick together with Boucher went to Quebec City on 28 May 1988 to meet the leaders of an outlaw biker club called the Vikings. The meeting went so well that the Vikings agreed to "patch over" to become Hells Angels' Quebec City chapter the same night. On 23 August 1988, Stadnick was arrested at the home of Douglas Freeborn, a former Satan's Choice member and a prominent drug dealer in Hamilton. Found with him were eleven ounces of hash, which led the police to charge him with intention to sell drugs, but the charges were dropped as Freeborn sworn in court that the hash belonged to him and Stadnick had nothing to do with his drug-dealing. Stadnick denied being the national president, saying "Ah, just because you get more attention than the others, all of a sudden you're named president by the media". Harris noted when Stadnick became the Hells Angel national president, he started to own a Jaguar automobile with Quebec license plates, which stood out in the working class city of Hamilton.


title: Walter Stadnick

text: By 1990, Stadnick was being monitored by the police in both Quebec and Ontario, who considered him to be one of the most dangerous Hells Angels in Canada. For Standick, the two most important provinces to expand into were Manitoba and Ontario. Southern Ontario, especially the "Golden Horseshoe" area, as the greater Toronto area is known, was the wealthiest part of Canada and hence the most lucrative area for an outlaw biker club to operate in. The journalists Julian Sher and William Marsden wrote that Manitoba was crucial because it was "the axis of distribution for any drugs moving east and west in the country". Caine described Stadnick as the superior strategist compared to Parente as Stadnick saw establishing the Angels in Winnipeg as important to creating a national club, while Parente was only focused on Ontario. Caine described Parente as a traditional biker leader, the working-class tough guy, while Stadnick was a modern biker leader who was more alike to a corporate CEO. Since Stadnick had connections across the country, he became the Hells Angels' ambassador, traveling all over the country to recruit bikers and proceed with drug sales. The modern Hells Angels organization in Canada was largely Stadnick's work. Jean-Pierre Lévesque of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) said of Stadnick: "He travelled the country. He knew almost everybody. He had a country-wide vision. He knows it's good for business – the bigger the name, the better the business". In the underworld circles, Stadnick was considered to be an excellent judge of talent, and he was well known for recruiting the ablest criminals into the Hells Angels. Most outlaw biker clubs welcomed a chance to meet the president of the Canadian Hells Angels, the best known outlaw biker club in the world. Ernie Dew, the president of los Bravos outlaw biker club in Winnipeg, which later became the first Hells Angel chapter in Manitoba, said of the Angels: "This "was" the club. You've gone from the farm team to the major leagues".


title: Walter Stadnick

text: Unlike his Quebec lieutenant "Mom" Boucher, who sought to annihilate the rival Rock Machine in the Quebec biker war, Stadnick had a more diplomatic and conciliatory approach, favoring having the majority of the other Canadian outlaw biker clubs "patching over" to become Hells Angels while leaving the rest to "wither on the vine and die". The journalist Jerry Langton stated: "An informant told me that if he could boil down Walter's philosophy to one sentence, it would be: 'He would rather buy his rival a drink than kick his head in.'" There are three ways to expand an outlaw biker club – recruiting local criminals to found a new chapter; having members of an existing chapter move to a new city to establish another chapter; or having an outlaw biker club "patch over" to join another club. Stadnick tried a variety of all three, but tended to prefer "patching over" most of all. Throughout the 1990s, he worked hard to establish a network of drug dealers in northern Ontario that served as the basis for expanding the Hells Angels into southern Ontario. Stadnick chose northern Ontario because of the relative smaller number of outlaw biker clubs there as compared to southern Ontario, and because of the lack of competition. In the process, Stadnick recruited a criminal from Thunder Bay into the Hells Angels, Donald "Bam Bam" Magnussen, a huge, hulking, muscular man notorious in the Thunder Bay underworld for his brutality and aggressiveness. When Bernie "the Frog" Guindon, the national president of Satan's Choice, was released from prison in 1991, Stadnick was one of the first to greet him upon his release and asked if he was willing to have Satan's Choice "patch over" to join the Hells Angels, an offer Guindon rejected.


title: Walter Stadnick

text: Stadnick was known in the 1990s for his flamboyant way of dressing, wearing a full-length coat made from wolf's fur and a snakeskin belt with a solid gold belt buckle in the form of the Hells Angels' winged death's head that was hollowed inside to allow him to carry cash. On 26 June 1992, Stadnick was arrested at the Winnipeg International Airport with over $80,000 worth of cash being found on him, and charged with living off the proceeds of organised crime. Of the $80,000 he was carrying, $15,000 was hidden inside of an opening carved into the gold belt buckle. In August 1992, Stadnick and Magnussen were involved in a brawl with two off-duty Winnipeg police officers that led them to be charged with assault, but the charges were dropped. In June 1993, Stadnick went to Wasaga Beach to attend a convention of the Loners outlaw biker gang and to meet their leader, Frank "Cisco" Lenti, to discuss having the Loners "patch over" to become Hells Angels. Stadnick disliked Lenti, but he know that the Loners were one of the strongest outlaw biker clubs in Ontario, making them the ideal candidates to become Hells Angels. However, the meeting ended badly, with Lenti rejecting Stadnick's offer. Stadnick continued to offer Lenti a chance to "patch over" several times in 1993 and 1994, but he declined, instead offering Stadnick a chance to join the Loners. Although the Loners refused to "patch over" to the Hells Angels, Stadnick is reported to have become their chief supplier of drugs from 1993 onward and to have been behind the rumors that Lenti was stealing from his own club, which led to Lenti being expelled in 1994. Besides for Lenti, Stadnick stayed in contact with Guindon in attempts to persuade the Satan's Choice to "patch over" to the Hells Angels. Stadnick had more success with bringing the four Hells Angels chapters in British Columbia under the control of the Montreal "mother chapter", and by 1993 had ensured that all of the Angel chapters in Canada answered to Montreal.


title: Walter Stadnick

text: Shortly before his trial for living off the proceeds of crime was due to start on 4 October 1993, the "Winnipeg Sun" ran an article on Stadnick, which led his lawyer to ask for the charges to be dropped, claiming the story by the journalist Melanie Verhaeghe had jeopardised his ability to get a fair trial. Verhaeghe found that Magnussen was following her around in an attempt to intimidate her, while Stadnick's lawyer went to court to try to force her to reveal her sources. Stadnick's lawyer told Verhaghe that he had a "file" on her, saying Stadnick had hired a private detective to investigate her. Stadnick was unable to force Verhaege to reveal her sources and the judge rejected the attempt to stay the proceedings, but the effort had delayed his trial for 15 months. Charges were dropped when he settled on forfeiting the money.


title: Walter Stadnick

text: Stadnick spent much of the 1990s living in Winnipeg, where he courted and was courted by the city's two biggest outlaw biker clubs, the Spartans under Darwin Sylvester and los Bravos under Ernie Dew. In 1984, a pact had been signed by the Satan's Choice chapter in Thunder Bay, the Grim Reapers outlaw biker gang in Alberta and los Bravos gang to keep the Hells Angels out of western Canada. Stadnick regarded Winnipeg as the weakest point in the alliance, and believed that if he could establish the Angels there, his club could expand into western Canada. Unlike Thunder Bay and the Albertan cities that the Grim Reapers were active in, Winnipeg had two outlaw biker clubs and moreover, both the Spartans and los Bravos largely engaged in auto theft. Stadnick offered them the possibility of selling cocaine, which required less work and was more profitable than auto theft, to the two Winnipeg outlaw biker clubs. Most of the cocaine in Canada arrived in Montreal, and Stadnick sold both clubs cocaine at prices that allowed them to make handsome profits. Stadnick used the rivalry between the Spartans and los Bravos as a way to gradually establish Hells Angels influence in Winnipeg, becoming powerful enough by 1993 to impose a truce and end the biker war in Winnipeg that began in 1991. Between 1991 and 1993, the biker war between los Bravos and the Spartans caused at least 31 acts of violence in Winnipeg. Initially, Stadnick favored the Spartans over los Bravos, which caused the latter gang to reach out to him to gain his favor. In November 1993, in what appeared to be an attempt to undermine Guindon's leadership of Satan's Choice, Stadnick met in Thunder Bay with several Satan's Choice chapter presidents, most notably Andre Wattel of the Kitchener chapter.