title: Richard Serra

text: "Shift" (1970–72), Serra's second endeavor in the landscape, was built in a field owned by the collector Roger Davidson in King City, Ontario. The sculpture is composed of six rectilinear concrete sections placed along the sloping landscape"." In 2013 "Shift" was designated a Heritage Site under the Ontario Heritage Act. "Shift," like "Pulitzer Piece," was based on the elevational fall of the land over a given distance. The top edges of the plates function as a horizon being placed into specific elevational intervals as you walk the entire field.Serra's subsequent site-specific works in landscape continued to explore the topography of the land and how the sculpture relates to this topography by way of movement, meditation, and perception of the viewer. Among the most notable of the landscape works are "Porten i Slugten" (1983–86) in Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; "Afangar (Stations, Stops on the Road, To Stop and Look: Forward and Back, To Take It All In)" (1990) in Videy Island, Iceland; "Schunnemunk Fork" (1991) in Storm King Art Center, New York; "Snake Eyes and Box Cars" (1993) in Sonoma County, California; "Te Tuhirangi Contou"r (2000-2) in Kaipara, New Zealand; and "East-West/West-East" (2014) in Qatar.


title: Richard Serra

text: The sculpture "Porten i Slugten" (1983–86) was commissioned for the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark. After walking the museum grounds, Serra chose a ravine that runs towards the Kattegat Sea as the site for his sculpture. The ravine was the only area in the grounds that had not been landscaped. Two plates were set at an angle to each other at the end of a sloping stretch of path which fronts the ravine. The plates function in their location like a gate which opens as the viewer walks down the path towards the sea. Seen from the center of a bridge, which crosses the ravine and leads to the museum, the two plates form a single plane as if the gate had closed. As you walk down from the museum to the ocean below, the plates appear to have a continuous swinging motion.In 1988 Serra was invited by the National Gallery of Iceland to build a work. Serra chose Videy Island as the site for "Afangar (Stations, Stops on the Road, To Stop and Look: Forward and Back, To Take It All In)" (1990). The sculpture consists of nine pairs of basalt columns (a material indigenous to Iceland) and placed along the periphery of Vesturey, the northwest part of the island. All nine locations share the same elevations in that the stones of each pair are situated at an elevation of 9 and 10 meters, respectively. Each set of stones is level at the top. All stones at the higher elevation measure 3 meters; all stones at the lower elevation measure 4 meters. Because of the variance of topography, the stones in a set are sometimes closer together, sometimes further apart. The rise and fall of Videy Island and the surrounding landscape is seen against the fixed measure of the standing stones. The stones are visible along the horizon of the island and orient the viewer against the rise and fall of the surrounding landscape.


title: Richard Serra

text: "Te Tuhirangi Contour" (2000-2) is located on vast open pasture on Gibbs Farm in Kaipara, New Zealand. The sculpture stands 20 feet high and spans 844 feet as one continuous contour that follows the rolling hills, expansion, and contraction of the landscape. The sculpture's elevation is perpendicular to the fall of the land.


title: Richard Serra

text: "East-West/West-East" (2014), located on an east–west axis in the Brouq Nature Reserve in Qatar, was commissioned by Sheika al-Mayassa al-Thani of Qatar. It consists of four steel plates either 54 3/4 or 48 1/2 feet high. The plates are placed at irregular intervals in a valley that runs between two gypsum plateaus. The plates are level to each other and the elevation of the adjacent plateaus. The work spans less than a kilometer and all plates are visible from either end.


title: Richard Serra

text: In the landscape, the sculptural elements draw the viewer's attention to the topology of the land as its walked. Serra's site-specific Urban sculptures focus the viewer's attention on the sculpture itself. Their locations often more accessible to the public than the landscape works, invite the viewer to walk inside, pass through and move around them. Because of the confines of Urban architecture, sculptures such as "Sight Point" (1972–75) at the Stedelijk Museum, The Netherlands; "Termina"l (1977) in Bochum, Germany; "T.W.U". (1980) at the Deichterhallen, Hamburg, Germany; "Fulcrum" (1986–87), installed in Broadgate, London; "Exchange" (1996) outside the City of Luxembourg; or "7" (2011) on a pier in Doha, Qatar, reflect the verticality of their surrounding architecture. Outdoor sculptures like "St. John's Rotary Arc" (1980) temporarily installed outside the Holland Tunnel entrance in New York City; "Tilted Arc" (1981) installed and later removed from New York City's Federal Plaza; "Clara-Clara" (1983), temporarily installed at Tuileries, Place de la Concorde, Paris; "Berlin Junction" (1987) installed outside the Berlin Philharmonic; are all curved forms or arcs that open and close depending on the direction the viewer takes walking around them.


title: Richard Serra

text: "Sight Point" (1972–75) was Serra's first vertical Urban work and a continuation of the balance and counterbalance principles of his earlier work "Prop". "Sight Point" stands outside the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, consisting of three vertical steel plates 10 feet wide and 40 feet high that lean in at an angle and forming a triangular space on the ground with three openings that can be walked through. Once inside the viewer can look up and see the sky framed by the triangular shape made by the leaning plates.


title: Richard Serra

text: Another vertical sculpture, "Terminal" (1977), was conceived for "Documenta VI" in 1977. It was permanently installed on a traffic island between the street car tracks in front of a train station in Bochum, Germany. Serra chose the site because of its proximity to a high traffic area. "Exchange" (1996), sited in a vehicular round-about on top of a highway tunnel, made of seven trapezoidal plates. The sculpture stands 60 feet high and can be seen by drivers as they enter and leave the City of Luxembourg.


title: Richard Serra

text: In 1980 Serra installed two sculptures, with support of the Public Art Fund, in New York City. "T.W.U." (1980) and "St. John's Rotary Arc" (1980) were each placed in areas where traffic and people converged. "T.W.U," a vertical sculpture consisting of three vertical plates, each 36 feet high, was installed at a subway entrance near West Broadway between Leonard and Franklin Streets. The sculpture is now permanently installed outside the Deichterhallen, Hamburg, Germany. "St. John's Rotary Arc", one of Serra's earliest curved sculptures, was 12 feet high and spanned 180 feet. From 1980 to 1988 the site-specific sculpture was installed on the rotary at the entrance and exit to the Holland Tunnel.


title: Richard Serra

text: The following year in 1981, a second site-specific curved sculpture "Tilted Arc" (1981) was installed in New York City's Federal Plaza. Commissioned by the U.S. General Services Administration's Art-in-Architecture Program following a rigorous selection process, the sculpture's arc spanned 120 feet and 12 feet high. The sculpture was a curve that tilted and leaned away from its base. It was anchored into the plaza at both ends so that the center of the sculpture was raised. Serra's intention for the sculpture was to draw pedestrians' attention to the sculpture as they crossed the plaza. "Tilted Arc" was met with resistance by workers in the Federal building. An eight-year campaign to remove the sculpture ensued and "Tilted Arc" was ultimately removed on March 15, 1989. In Serra's defense to preserve the sculpture he stated "To remove the work is to destroy the work," advocating an art-for art's sake mantra of site-specific artworks. The case of "Tilted Arc" continues to highlight the tension surrounding the nature of public art and its intended audience.


title: Richard Serra

text: Serra has had numerous exhibitions in gallery and museum settings. His site-specific gallery installations are sometimes used to test ideas. Serra's first US solo exhibition was at the Leo Castelli Warehouse, New York in 1969. There he exhibited ten lead Prop Pieces, a Scatter Piece: "Cutting Device: Base Plate Measure" (1969), and a Splash Piece: "Splashing with Four Molds (To Eva Hesse)" (1969).


title: Richard Serra

text: Following his process-based works of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Serra began to solely use rolled or forged steel in his sculpture. "Berlin Block (for Charlie Chaplin)" (1977) was Serra's first forged sculpture. Made for the plaza outside the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the sculpture weighs 70 tons. Other forged sculptures include "Elevation for Mies (1985-88)" at Museum Haus Esters, Krefeld, Germany; "Philibert et Marguerite" (1985), in the Musee de Brou, Bourg-en-Bresse, France; "Weight and Measure" (1992), a temporary site-specific installation at the Tate Gallery, London; "Santa Fe Depot" (2004), in the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; and "Equal" (2015) in the Museum of Modern Art, New York.


title: Richard Serra

text: Serra's most known series of sculpture using rolled steel plates are the "Torqued Ellipses". In 1991 Serra visited Borromini's Church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane in Rome and mistook the ovals of the dome and the floor to be offset from one another. He thought to make a sculpture in this torqued form. Serra constructed models of this perceived form in his studio by cutting two ellipse-shaped pieces of wood and nailing a dowel between them. He then turned the ellipses so they were at a right angle to one another and wrapped a sheet of lead around the form. After making a template from the models Serra worked with an engineer to fabricate the sculptures. In total there are seven Torqued Ellipses and four Double Torqued Ellipses (an ellipse inside of an ellipse) dated between 1996 and 2004. Each sculpture has a different degree or torque and measures up to 13 feet high. The sculptures all have an opening so that they can be walked through and around. Three Torqued Ellipses are on permanent view at Dia Beacon, New York.


title: Richard Serra

text: In 2005 "The Matter of Time", a commissioned installation, opened at the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain. Consisting of eight sculptures spanning a decade from 1994 to 2005, "The Matter of Time" highlights the evolution of Serra's sculptural forms. Serra chose to include five sculptures derived from the initial torqued ellipse: one single, one double ellipse, and three torqued spirals. The Torqued Spirals followed after the Double Torqued Ellipses when Serra decided to connect a double ellipses into one wound form that can be entered and walked through. The remaining sculptures in "The Matter of Time" are one closed ("Blind Spot Reversed)" and one open ("Between the Torus and the Sphere") torus and spherical sculpture; and "Snake": made of three parts, each comprising two identical conical sections inverted relative to each other and spanning 104 feet overall. The sculptures are organized by Serra with intention. The direction which the viewer moves through the space creates a sensation of varying scale and proportion, and an awareness to the passing of time.


title: Richard Serra

text: In 2008 Serra participated in "Monumenta", an annual exhibition held in Paris's Grand Palais featuring a single artist. For "Monumenta" Serra installed a single sculpture, "Promenade" (2008), consisting of five plates, each 55 feet tall and 13 feet wide, placed 100 feet apart from one another across the cavernous interior of the Grand Palais. Overall, the sculpture spanned 656 feet The plates were not placed in a line but stood side to side off the Grand Palais's center axis. They tilted either left or right, leaned either toward or away from another, and the viewer as they strolled around them.


title: Richard Serra

text: The sculpture "Equal" (2015), in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, consists of eight forged blocks. Each block measures 5 by 5 by 6 feet and weighs 40 tons. The blocks are stacked in pairs and positioned on their longer or shorter sides so that each stack measures 11 feet tall. When walking amongst the four stacks the viewer becomes aware of their own sense of weight, balance, and gravity in relation to the sculptures.


title: Richard Serra

text: Serra created several works similar to "Equal", consisting of large masses of forged steel, often weighing the maximum amount possible for creation in an industrial forge. Another example of these works is "Four Rounds: Equal Weight, Unequal Measure" (2017), permanently installed at Glenstone in an outdoor gallery structure designed by Serra.


title: Richard Serra

text: Drawing is integral to Serra's practice. Serra makes drawings on large sheets of canvas or handmade paper. They include horizontal or vertical compositions; constructions of overlapping sheets; or line drawings. His drawings are primarily done in paintstick, lithographic crayon, or charcoal and are always black. Serra experiments with different techniques and tools to manipulate and apply the medium. He often pushes the conventions of drawing towards a tactile, phenomenological experience of movement, time and space. The artist has said that his drawing practice is involved with "repetition, knowing there's no possibility of repeating, knowing that it's going to yield something different each time."


title: Richard Serra

text: Following his break into space with sculptures like "Strike: To Roberta and Rudy" (1969–71), Serra became interested in redefining architectural space with drawing as well. In 1974 Serra started to make his Installation Drawings—large-scale site-specific sheets of canvas completely covered in paintstick and stapled to the wall. The Installation Drawings cover the wall, or walls, of a given space. "Shafrazi" and "Zadikians" were two of Serra's first Installation Drawings. Both were exhibited at Leo Castelli Gallery, New York in 1974 and measured approximately 10 feet high and 18 feet wide overall. Serra continued to make Installation Drawing throughout his career. Other notable drawing series include: Diptychs (1989) Dead Weight (1991–92); "Weight and Measure" (1993–94)"; Videy Afangar" (1989–91); "Rounds" (1996–97); "out-of-rounds" (1999-2000); "Line Drawings" (2000-02"); Solids" (2008) "Greenpoint Rounds" (2009); "Elevational Weights" (2010); "Rifts" (2011–18); "Transparencies" (2011–13); "Horizontal Reversals" (2014) "Rambles" (2015–16); "Composites" (2016)"; Horizontals and Verticals" (2016–17); "Orchard Street" (2018).


title: Richard Serra

text: National and international survey exhibitions of Serra's drawings include "Richard Serra: Tekeningen/Drawings 1971-1977" at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam in 1978; "Richard Serra: Tekeningen/Drawings" at the Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastrict in 1990; "Richard Serra Drawings: A Retrospective" at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Menil Collection, Houston from 2011 to 2012; and "Richard Serra: Drawings 2015-2017: Rambles, Composites, Rotterdam Verticals, Rotterdam Horizontals, Rifts" at the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen. Rotterdam, The Netherlands in 2017.


title: Richard Serra

text: Serra began making prints in 1972. Working closely with Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles, Serra developed unconventional printing techniques. He has made over 200 printed works and like his sculpture and drawing, his prints reflect an interest in process, scale, and experimentation with material.


title: Richard Serra

text: His early lithographs starting in 1972 include the prints "Circuit;" "Balance; Eight by Eight; or 183rd & Webster Avenue," each titled after a sculpture created around the same time. In 1981 Serra produced his first lithograph series comprising seven editions, titled: "Sketch #1" through "Sketch #7." That same year Serra begin to make larger-scale prints such as "Malcolm X; Goslar," or "The Moral Majority Sucks."


title: Richard Serra

text: After pushing lithography to its limit, Serra began to work with silkscreen to produce a unique surface in his prints. He did so by first applying a layer of ink onto the paper. He then would apply a layer of paint stick through the second screen creating a saturated and textured surface.


title: Richard Serra

text: Serra continued to work this his silkscreen technique, sometimes combining it with etching and aquatint. Print series include: "Videy Afanger" (1991); "Hreppholer" (1991); "WM" (1996); "Rounds" (1999); "Venice Notebook" (2001); "Between the Torus and the Sphere" (2006); "Paths and Edges" (2007); "Level" (2008); "Junction" (2010); "Reversal" (2015); "Elevational Weight" (2016); "Equa"l (2018); and (2019).


title: Richard Serra

text: From 1968 to 1979 Serra made a collection of films and videos. Although he began working with sculpture and film at the same time, Serra recognized the different material capacities of each and did not extend sculptural problems into his films and videos. Serra collaborated with several artists including Joan Jonas, Nancy Holt, and Robert Fiore, on his films and videos. His first films, "Hand Catching Lead" (1968), "Hands Scraping" (1968) "and Hand Tied" (1968) involve a series of actions: a hand tries to catch falling lead; pairs of hands move lead shavings; and bound hands untie themselves.


title: Richard Serra

text: A later film "Railroad Turnbridge" (1976) frames the surrounding landscape of the Willamette River in Portland, Oregon, as the bridge turns. "Steelmill/Stahwerk" (1979), made in collaboration with the art historian Clara Weyergraf is divided in two parts. The first part is made up of interviews of German steel-factory workers about their work. The second part captures the forging of Serra's sculpture "Berlin Block (for Charlie Chaplin)."


title: Richard Serra

text: Survey exhibitions and screenings of his films were held at the Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland in 2017; Anthology Film Archives, New York, October 17–23, 2019; and Harvard Film Archive, January 27-February 9, 2020. In 2019 Serra donated his entire film and video works to The Museum of Modern Art in New York.


title: Richard Serra

text: Serra's first solo exhibition was in 1966 at Galleria Salita in Rome, Italy. His first solo exhibition in the US was at the Leo Castelli Warehouse, New York in 1969. His first solo museum exhibition was held at the Pasadena Art Museum in California in 1970.


title: Richard Serra

text: The first retrospective of his work was held at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1986. A second retrospective was held at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2007.


title: Richard Serra

text: The first survey exhibition of his drawings was held at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam in 1977 and traveled to the Kunsthalle Tübingen in 1978. A second retrospective of drawings was presented at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and The Menil Collection, Houston from 2011 to 2012. An overview of the artist's work in film and video was on view at the Kunstmuseum Basel, in 2017.


title: Richard Serra

text: Serra has had solo exhibitions at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, 1978; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 1980; Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1983–1984; Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld, 1985; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1986 and 2007; Louisiana Museum, Humlebæk, 1986; Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Münster, 1987; Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, 1987; Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 1988; Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, 1990; Kunsthaus Zürich, 1990; CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain, Bordeaux, 1990; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 1992; Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, 1992; Dia Center for the Arts, New York, 1997; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1998–1999; Centro de Arte Hélio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro, 1997–1998; Trajan's Market, Rome, 1999–2000; Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, St. Louis, 2003; and Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, Naples, 2004; and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, in 2017.


title: Richard Serra

text: Serra's work is included in many museums and public collections around the world.  Selected museum collections include The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Art Institute of Chicago; Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastrict, The Netherlands; Centre Cultural Fundació La Caixa, Barcelona; Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; Dia Art Foundation, New York; Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and New York; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland.


title: Richard Serra

text: Selected public collections include City of Bochum, Germany; City of Chicago, Public Art Collection; City of Goslar, Germany; City of Hamburg, Germany; City of St. Louis, Missouri; City of Tokyo, Japan; City of Berlin, Germany; City of Paris, France; Collection City of Reykjavic, Iceland.


title: Richard Serra

text: Serra has been the recipient of many notable prizes and awards, including Fulbright Grant (1965–66); Guggenheim Fellowship (1970); République Française, Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1985 and 1991); Japan Arts Association, Tokyo Praemium Imperiale  (1994); a Leone d’Oro for lifetime achievement, Venice Biennale, Italy (2001); American Academy of Arts and Letters (2001); Orden pour le Mérite für Wissenschaften und Künste, Federal Republic of Germany (2002); Orden de las Artes y las Letras de España, Spain (2008); The National Arts Award: Lifetime Achievement Award (bestowed by Americans for the Arts 2014); Hermitage Museum Foundation's Award for Lifetime Contributions to the World of Art (2014); Chevalier de l’Ordre national de la Légion d’honneur, Republic of France (2015); Landesmuseum Wiesbaden Alexej-von-Jawlensky-Preis (2017); and a J. Paul Getty Medal (2018).


title: Richard Serra

text: Richard Serra moved to New York City in 1966. He bought a house in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia in 1970 and spent summers working there. Serra married art historian Clara Weyergraf in 1981. Since early 2010s Serra and Weyergraf-Serra spend their time between New York City and the North Fork, Long Island.


title: Madame Nhu

text: Trần Lệ Xuân (22 August 1924 – 24 April 2011), more popularly known in English as Madame Nhu, was the "de facto" First Lady of South Vietnam from 1955 to 1963. She was the wife of Ngô Đình Nhu, who was the brother and chief advisor to President Ngô Đình Diệm. As Diệm was a lifelong bachelor and because she and her family lived in Independence Palace together with him, she was considered to be the first lady.


title: Madame Nhu

text: Known for her harsh and incendiary comments that denounced anti-government protests by some Buddhist sects and the strong U.S. influence and presence in the country, she went to live in exile in France after her husband and her brother-in-law, Diệm, were assassinated in 1963.


title: Madame Nhu

text: Trần Lệ Xuân, whose given name means "Spring's Beauty," was born into a wealthy aristocratic family in Hanoi, French Indochina, then part of the French colonial empire. Her paternal grandfather was close to the French colonial administration, while her father, Trần Văn Chương, studied law in France and practiced in Bac Lieu in the Mekong Delta before marrying into the ruling imperial dynasty. Her father also served as the first foreign secretary for Indochina under Japanese occupation. Her mother, Thân Thị Nam Trân, was a granddaughter of Emperor Đồng Khánh and a cousin of Emperor Bảo Đại. The Trầns were under observation by the French police who doubted their loyalty to France, with M. Chương dismissed as a "little runt" controlled by his wife, while Madame Chương, described as "beautiful and very intriguing...the one who directs her husband," was known for "her dogged ambition as for her —sleeping around with people of influence from any and all nationalities." Madame Chuong was accused by the French secret police (French Sûreté) of sleeping with Japanese diplomats so her husband was hired by them.


title: Madame Nhu

text: Lệ Xuân's education at the Lycée Albert Sarraut, a prestigious French school in Hanoi, was entirely in French, and she remembered as a schoolgirl learning about French history but nothing about Vietnamese history, and of singing songs about the forests and mountains of France, observing later the purpose of her education was to eradicate any sense of a Vietnamese identity, and to make her into a proper young Frenchwoman. The purpose of French educational policies in Vietnam was always in reference to France's self-proclaimed ("civilizing mission") to make all Vietnamese into "Frenchmen with yellow skin," and thus French teachers tried to stamp out any sense of a Vietnamese identity in their students. The message French teachers taught their students was that to be French was to be "civilized" and to be Vietnamese was to be "uncivilized." She then dropped out of Lycée Albert Sarraut. She spoke French at home and could not write in Vietnamese; as an adult, she drafted her speeches in French and had them translated into Vietnamese. She gained a reputation in her youth as a tomboy who loved ballet and piano, once dancing solo at Hanoi's National Theatre. She had an elder sister named Trần Lệ Chi (who married the Frenchman Etienne Oggeri and changed her name to Lechi Oggeri) and a younger brother, Trần Văn Khiêm. Like many other Vietnamese, Lệ Xuân was to find that no matter how hard she tried to be French, that the French were only prepared to accept whites as French.


title: Madame Nhu

text: When she became an adult, her mother introduced her to a series of eligible young men, but she insisted on Nhu. He was fourteen years her senior and referred to her as "little niece" in accordance with Vietnamese custom. In accordance with Vietnamese tradition, they were married three years after being betrothed in 1940. In May 1943, aged 18, she married Nhu, and converted from Mahayana Buddhism to Roman Catholicism, her husband's religion. Madame Nhu later admitted she married Nhu as a way of getting away from her family, saying "I never had a sweeping love. I read about such things in books, but I do not believe that they really existed. Or perhaps only for a very few people". After an uprising by the Viet Minh in August 1945, her brother-in-law, Ngô Đình Khôi, the eldest of the Ngô brothers, was buried alive, and Nhu and another brother, Ngô Đình Cẩn, were forced to flee.


title: Madame Nhu

text: She, her mother-in-law and her eldest daughter, at the time a baby, were captured. Thinking her piano was a radio for communicating with French colonialists, the Viet Minh blew it up and then exiled her to a remote village for four months, where she lived on two bowls of rice a day. The French dismissed Nhu from his post at the National Library due to his brother (Diệm)'s nationalist activities, and he moved to Đà Lạt and lived comfortably, editing a newspaper, where his wife bore three more children. The French war in Vietnam made little impression on Madame Nhu from her home in Đà Lạt, and she often called the war ("a bizarre little war") as the fighting never affected her personally. Nhu was during these years building a secret political party called the Cần Lao (Personalist Labour Party) based on the Catholic philosophy of personalism (people were persons, not individuals) while Madame Nhu later saying "I was alone most of the time. My husband would simply disappear without a word". To improve her husband's career, Madame Nhu befriended her cousin, the Emperor Bảo Đại during this time.


title: Madame Nhu

text: Madame Nhu's brother-in-law, Ngô Đình Diệm, had been appointed Prime Minister of the State of Vietnam by her mother's distant cousin, Emperor Bảo Đại, after the French had been defeated at the Battle of Điện Biên Phủ. At the start of 1955, French Indochina was dissolved, leaving Diệm in temporary control of the south. After the French defeat at the Battle of Điện Biên Phủ, the French wanted to hang on to a zone of influence in the south by keeping the Emperor Bảo Đại as Head of State, while the Americans wanted to push the French out by having Diệm create a republic. Diệm in the words of an American diplomat had developed "a blind hatred of the French" and the Americans believed that South Vietnam needed an anti-Communist leader who was not tainted with any associations with the French, which led them to back Diệm. Madame Nhu had lobbied Bảo Đại to appoint her brother-in-law Prime Minister and believed that it was her influence that led to the appointment. She was deeply shocked to learn the real reason why Bảo Đại had appointed Diệm Prime Minister was out of the expectation that he would fail, thereby curtailing his career. The State of Vietnam was in a serious political and economic crisis by 1954 that almost nobody expected Diệm to navigate effectively. Nhu never forgave the Emperor and the French for this plot to ruin Diệm.


title: Madame Nhu

text: In order to ensure American support for Diệm, Madame Nhu befriended Americans working at the embassy in Saigon known to be CIA agents. For their part, the French backed General Nguyễn Văn Hinh as Prime Minister, and he in turn had won the support of the Bình Xuyên crime syndicate that dominated the economic life of Saigon. Giving Madame Nhu an additional reason to intrigue against Hinh was his repeated boasting that when he deposed Diệm he would make Madame Nhu into another of his concubines. At a party, Madame Nhu confronted Hinh to tell him: "You are never going to overthrow this government because you don't have the guts. And if you do overthrow the government, you will never have me because I will claw your throat out first!"


title: Madame Nhu

text: To win support for Diệm, Madame Nhu hit upon the idea of enlisting support from the million or so refugees from North Vietnam, many of them Catholics who fled to the south after the Geneva accords had partitioned Vietnam, organizing them for a massive pro-Diệm demonstration on 21 September 1954. The rally in Saigon led to a confrontation on the streets between Madame Nhu and Bình Xuyên gunmen, with Madame Nhu daring the thugs to kill her right then and there, which caused them to demur, and the rally went on. Emboldened by this triumph, Diệm saw a chance to put his puritanical Roman Catholic values into practice and to strike a blow at the Bình Xuyên at the same time by shutting down the brothels, gambling houses and opium dens of Saigon owned by the Bình Xuyên while having pornographic magazines burned on the streets (the Bình Xuyên were the largest producers and sellers of pornography in Vietnam).


title: Madame Nhu

text: A referendum was scheduled for 23 October 1955, to determine the future direction of the south. It was contested by Bảo Đại, the Emperor, advocating the restoration of the monarchy, while Diệm ran on a republican platform. The elections were held, with Nhu and the family's Cần Lao Party, which supplied Diệm's electoral base, organising and supervising the elections. Campaigning for Emperor Bảo Đại was prohibited, and the result was rigged, with Bảo Đại's supporters attacked by Nhu's paid thugs. Diệm claimed 98.2% of the vote, including 605,025 votes in Saigon, where only 450,000 voters were registered. Diệm's tally exceeded the registration numbers in other districts. As a result, Diệm eliminated the Emperor Bảo Đại and became the first president of South Vietnam. Madame Nhu made no secret of her dislike for the Emperor Bảo Đại, calling him "that French puppet".


title: Madame Nhu

text: After the election, the couple moved into the Presidential Palace. Madame Nhu was influential on government policy and, since her brother-in-law, Ngô Đình Diệm, was unmarried, she was regarded as the First Lady of South Vietnam. She attempted to syncretize Roman Catholicism with a cult around herself as a modern reincarnation of Vietnam's fabled Trưng Sisters, who raised a revolt against China and temporarily defeated the Hán Dynasty Chinese troops in AD 40. President Diệm never married and is not known to have had a relationship with any women, through his bodyguard noted he was fond of keeping "good looking men around him". Diệm, who was known for his poor social skills, decided to have his sister-in-law serve as the unofficial First Lady of South Vietnam. Madame Nhu frequently talked to the Vietnamese, French and other foreign press quite candidly. Madame Nhu's marriage was unhappy as she wrote in her diary of an all consuming "rising desire" in her body, complained her husband had little interest in sex with her, and wrote with disgust of his affections for a younger woman whom she called that "creature" who was very "vulgar" and "dirty". Madame Nhu devoted her time to politics, championing a new Family Code she presented to parliament in October 1957 and passed in June 1958 to replace the old French code that banned concubinage and polygamy; allowed women to open bank accounts and own property; and required that daughters be given greater inheritance rights.


title: Madame Nhu

text: In 1962, she had a statue erected in Saigon to the memory of the Trưng Sisters, with the facial features modelled on herself, and also established the Women's Solidarity Movement, a female paramilitary organization. The statue cost US$20,000, a substantial sum at the time, given that South Vietnam was a developing country, but she was undeterred by criticism about largesse. She pressured the wives of ARVN officers and public servants into joining her "movement". A flamboyant woman, Madame Nhu took to flashing around her handgun in public, and the Women's Solidarity Movement was intended to allow Vietnamese women to participate in the fight against the Viet Cong, just as the Trưng sisters had fought against the Chinese, but most of the women who joined the movement were upper-class women who believed that their husbands would benefit by being given government jobs.


title: Madame Nhu

text: Her father became the ambassador to the United States while her mother was South Vietnam's observer at the United Nations. Two of her uncles were cabinet ministers.


title: Madame Nhu

text: Her parents resigned from their posts in 1963, in protest over the treatment of Buddhists under the regime of President Diệm and disowned their daughter.


title: Madame Nhu

text: Howard Jones says "Madame Nhu was chauffeured in a black Mercedes and wore a small diamond crucifix", and "wore form-fitting apparel so tight that one French correspondent suggestively described her as 'molded into her ... dress like a dagger in its sheath.' On formal occasions, she wore red satin pantaloons with three vertical pleats, which was the mark of the highest-ranking women of the imperial court in ancient Annam." When Diệm once criticized her collarless apparel, she snapped: "It's not your neck that sticks out, it's mine. So, shut up."


title: Madame Nhu

text: During her brother-in-law's presidency, Madame Nhu pushed for the passing of "morality laws" outlawing abortion, adultery, divorce, contraceptives, dance halls, beauty pageants, boxing matches, and animal fighting, and closed down the brothels and opium dens. She was widely mocked by the public who regarded her as a hypocrite, with older Vietnamese believing her "décolleté" gowns to be sexually suggestive. In Vietnam's Confucian culture, overt displays of sexuality are considered inappropriate. Her family received further scorn as her sister Trần Lệ Chi, who was married to Nguyển Hữu Châu, had a French lover named Etienne Oggeri, and critics alleged that Madame Nhu introduced the "morality laws" so that her sister's husband could not get a divorce. Since he was extremely wealthy, the Ngô family would have lost highly valuable assets. In addition, her brother, Khiêm, used his government connections to bilk rich entrepreneurs. Diệm had stated before becoming president, "The history of China bears witness to the grave crises brought on by the empresses and their relatives." The Diệm regime tended to favor giving high positions to Roman Catholics, which alienated the Buddhist majority over time.


title: Madame Nhu

text: Madame Nhu exerted influence with her fiery attitude, often abusing Diệm and Nhu, who bowed to her angry tirades. Madame Nhu was frequently mocked by the media for her ostentatious flaunting of power, and was sometimes called the "Dragon Lady", as well as "Lucretia Borgia" and "The Queen Bee". She once stated "Power is wonderful. Total power is totally wonderful." In Vietnam, Madame Nhu was called the Tiger Lady as dragons are considered lucky and benevolent (mythical) animals in Vietnamese culture that are the wise and kindly friends of humanity, whereas the tiger is considered a symbol of ferocity, and many Vietnamese found the term "Dragon Lady" mystifying and insulting. She once told a group of American congressmen, "I'm not exactly afraid of death. I love power and in the next life I have a chance to be even more powerful than I am." U.S. Defense Secretary McNamara noted that "I saw Madame Nhu as bright, forceful, and beautiful, but also diabolical and scheming—a true sorceress."


title: Madame Nhu

text: She had a message to Diệm's opponents: "We will track down, neutralize and extirpate all these scabby sheep." French journalist François Sully wrote that Madame Nhu was "conceited, and obsessed with a drive for power that far surpasses that of even her husband ... It is no exaggeration to say that Madame Nhu is the most detested personality in South Vietnam." Sully was promptly expelled from Vietnam by the Ngô family.


title: Madame Nhu

text: Madame Nhu claimed that she and her husband were responsible for Diệm's triumph over the Bình Xuyên in the Battle for Saigon in 1954. She claimed it was the family's destiny to save South Vietnam. Following the collapse of the coup, her influence in the family began to rise.


title: Madame Nhu

text: As her husband's influence grew, as did her own vicariously, so did American distaste for them. Wesley Fishel, the anti-Communist academic from Michigan State University who had led an advisory group that helped to train Vietnamese public servants and who had lobbied American politicians in the 1950s to support Diệm's bid for power, resigned along with his staff. Fishel called Madame Nhu "Brilliant, vivacious, bitchy and brutal in her Borgia-like fashion", claiming that she and her husband were evil influences corrupting the regime.


title: Madame Nhu

text: She often exerted her influence through bouts of shouting. Sometimes when she disagreed with a proposal or decision that had been made inside the palace by some ministers or other senior public servants, she would verbally abuse them and intimidate them into adopting her preferred stance.


title: Madame Nhu

text: On 27 February 1962, two dissident Republic of Vietnam Air Force pilots, Nguyễn Văn Cử and Phạm Phú Quốc, bombed the Independence Palace, the official residence of the Ngô family, with the aim of assassinating them. One bomb landed in a room where Diệm was reading, but failed to detonate. The family escaped to the cellar unhurt, except for Madame Nhu, who sustained an arm fracture while running for cover.


title: Madame Nhu

text: Diệm reacted to the bombing by cracking down on political dissidents and further tightening control of the press. Madame Nhu added, "[y]ou open a window to let in light and air, not bullets. We want freedom, but we don't want to be exploited by it." In a radio interview in late 1962, she mockingly remarked that American journalists were "intoxicated with communism".


title: Madame Nhu

text: The following year she instructed her Women's Solidarity Movement to oppose American attempts "to make lackeys of Vietnamese and to seduce Vietnamese women into decadent paths." As relations became strained, she publicly accused the Americans of having supported the 1960 coup.


title: Madame Nhu

text: On 8 May 1963, a series of celebrations were held by Buddhist priests all over South Vietnam to honor Buddhist holiday of Vesak, as 8 May was the 2,527th anniversary of the Buddha's birthday. The Catholic Diệm disapproved of Vesak, and ordered the police to put down the celebrations under a law which forbade religious symbols from being paraded in the streets. A series of clashes occurred all over South Vietnam as the police sought to end the marches. When she heard that Diệm was to sign a statement offering compensation to the families of Buddhist protesters shot dead by the police of his brother Ngô Đình Cẩn, Nhu was reported to have thrown a bowl of soup at him. On 8 June 1963, Madame Nhu released a statement through the Women's Solidarity Movement accusing the Buddhists of neutralism, effectively accusing them of being communist collaborators. It then implored "bonzes of good faith" to stop helping the communists, otherwise Vietnamese Buddhism would be seen as a "small anti-nationalist branch of a dubious international association, exploited and controlled by communism and oriented to the sowing of the disorder of neutralism". She made another attack on the United States, calling on Diệm to "keep vigilance on all others, particularly those inclined to take Viet Nam for [a] satellite of [a] foreign power or organization." Madame Nhu publicly mocked Thích Quảng Đức, who performed a self-immolation on 11 June 1963 in a crowded Saigon street to protest against the shooting of Buddhists by Diệm's regime. She labelled it a "barbecue" and stated, "Let them burn and we shall clap our hands." She further offered to provide more fuel and matches for the Buddhists, noting the "barbecuing" was not "self-sufficient" because "imported gasoline" was used. The monk's suicide followed Ngô Đình Nhu's repression of the Buddhist-inspired protests and was responsible for the regime's continuing instability. According to historian Howard Jones, these comments "all but put the finishing touch on the Diệm regime".


title: Madame Nhu

text: Her own father went on radio to condemn her comments. A Confucian, Chương said that the regime had alienated "the strongest moral forces", implying that they had lost the Mandate of Heaven. She responded by calling him a "coward". Her mother said that "There is an old proverb in my country which means 'one should not make oneself or one's family naked before the world'... I was sick... Now, nobody can stop her ... She never listened to our advice." After these comments, the U.S. ambassador, Frederick Nolting, told Diệm that if he did not denounce his sister-in-law's comment in public, the U.S. would have to stop supporting him, but the president refused to do so, and assailed the monks. In an interview with David Halberstam, Madame Nhu said that it was "embarrassing to see people [Buddhist leaders] so uncultured claiming to be leaders". The U.S. embassy told Diệm that these comments violated an agreement between the Buddhists and his regime to avoid verbal exchanges, but Diệm refused to keep his family's end of the bargain, saying that his sister-in-law was obliged to expose "extremists" to keep the public informed. In July, the U.S. government rejected a request from her to travel to the United States for a public speaking tour, fearing a public relations disaster. On 3 August, she called the Buddhists "seditious elements who use the most odious Communist tactics to subvert the country."


title: Madame Nhu

text: This occurred after special forces loyal to the Ngôs raided the Xá Lợi Pagoda in Saigon in August. The pagoda was vandalized, monks beaten, and the cremated remains of Thích Quảng Đức, which included a heart which had not disintegrated, were confiscated. Simultaneous raids were carried out across the country, with the Từ Đàm Pagoda in Huế being looted, the statue of Gautama Buddha demolished, and the body of a deceased monk stolen. When the populace came to the defense of the monks, the resulting clashes saw 30 civilians killed and 200 wounded. Notably, President Diệm sent his sister-in-law a letter asking her not to talk in public about the clashes as her "barbecue" remarks had been a public relations disaster for his regime, both at home and abroad. Through her paramilitary organization, Madame Nhu claimed that the Buddhists were "controlled by communism" and that they were manipulated by the Americans, calling on Diệm to "expel all foreign agitators whether they wear monks' robes or not". A few days after the raids, Madame Nhu described the deadly attacks on the Buddhists as "the happiest day in my life since we crushed the Bình Xuyên in 1955", and assailed them as "communists".


title: Madame Nhu

text: The United States, in a position of some leverage owing to the considerable U.S. aid flowing into South Vietnam, in August 1963 wished to give President Diệm a chance to rid himself of both his brother and Madame Nhu. In a cable drafted by Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, Roger Hilsman, to Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, Lodge was instructed to advise Diệm of a call for "the removal of the Nhus from the scene." U.S. President Kennedy supported the message in the cable upon its approval by most of his advisors.


title: Madame Nhu

text: Her comments further stoked open infighting with her parents, who would eventually disown her and seek refuge in the United States. Her father, Trần Văn Chương, the ambassador to the United States, resigned in protest, along with all but one of the staffers at the embassy. Chương charged Diệm with having "copied the tactics of totalitarian regimes". His wife, who was South Vietnam's observer at the United Nations, resigned and spoke of mass executions and a reign of terror under Diệm and Nhu. She predicted that if Diệm, Nhu, and Madame Nhu did not leave Vietnam, then they would inevitably be killed. Madame Nhu claimed Buddhist leader Thích Trí Quang "spoke for many intellectuals who had repeatedly ridiculed her."


title: Madame Nhu

text: Following the pagoda raids, Trí Quang was given asylum at the U.S. Embassy after Ngô Đình Nhu's plans to assassinate him were uncovered. Madame Nhu gave a media interview in which she called on government troops to invade the American embassy and capture Thích Trí Quang and some other monks who were staying there, saying that the government must arrest "all key Buddhists". In a media interview, her husband responded to his parents-in-law by vowing to kill his father-in-law, claiming his wife would participate. He said "I will have his head cut off. I will hang him in the center of a square and let him dangle there. My wife will make the knot on the rope because she is proud of being a Vietnamese and she is a good patriot."


title: Madame Nhu

text: When acting U.S. ambassador William Trueheart warned that development aid might be withheld if the repression orchestrated by the Ngôs continued, Madame Nhu denounced it as blackmail. Nhu and Diệm, fearing a cut in aid, sent Madame Nhu to the United States on a speaking tour. She departed South Vietnam on 9 September 1963 in an expedition that brought widespread international scorn to her family's regime. She had predicted "a triumphant lecture tour". She left on 17 September for the Inter-Parliamentary Union meeting in Yugoslavia, followed by a trip to Italy and possibly to the United States, where she had an invitation to speak before the Overseas Press Club of New York.


title: Madame Nhu

text: Madame Nhu's comments were such that President John F. Kennedy became personally concerned. He asked his advisers to find means of having Diệm gag her. McGeorge Bundy thought her comments were so damaging that it would only be acceptable for Ngô Đình Diệm to remain in power if she were out of the picture. The National Security Council deemed her a threat to U.S. security, and told the then United States Ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. to seek her permanent removal from South Vietnam.


title: Madame Nhu

text: There was also speculation that she could turn up at the United Nations in New York and embarrass South Vietnam and the U.S. Bundy said in a meeting that "this was the first time the world had been faced with collective madness in a ruling family since the days of the czars" and her comments provoked much debate on how to get Diệm to silence her.


title: Madame Nhu

text: In Madame Nhu's first destination, Belgrade, she said in an interview that "President Kennedy is a politician, and when he hears a loud opinion speaking in a certain way, he tries to appease it somehow", referring to the opposition to her family's rule. She continued: "if that opinion is misinformed, the solution is not to bow to it, but the solution should be to inform."


title: Madame Nhu

text: The issue resulted in an awkward confrontation when U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Maxwell Taylor, traveled to Vietnam for a fact-finding mission known as the McNamara–Taylor mission about the progress of the war. One of the purposes of the mission was to achieve, in the words of President Kennedy, "a visible reduction in influence of Nhus, who are symbol to disaffected of all that they dislike in GVN [Government of (South) Vietnam]. This we think would require Nhus' departure from Saigon and preferably Vietnam at least for extended vacation."


title: Madame Nhu

text: On 29 September 1963 meeting with Diệm, McNamara bemoaned "the ill-advised and unfortunate declarations of Madame Nhu", who had described U.S. military advisors as "acting like little soldiers of fortune". McNamara said that such comments would damage bilateral military cooperation and deter American officers from helping the South Vietnamese forces. Lodge denounced the comments and said, "These men should be thanked, not insulted." However, one of his aides lost his composure and asked if "there were not something the government could do to shut her up." Diệm was stunned by the comments and retorted that "one cannot deny a lady the right to defend herself when she has been unjustly attacked", saying his sister-in-law was entitled to freedom of speech. But McNamara reinforced the point, noting to Diệm that "This is not satisfactory. The problems were real and serious. They had to be solved before the war could be won."


title: Madame Nhu

text: Madame Nhu arrived in the United States on 7 October, and her arrival was greeted by the United Nations' launching of an inquiry into the repression of Buddhists in South Vietnam. Kennedy had resisted the temptation to deny her an entry visa and his administration soon came under a flurry of verbal attacks.


title: Madame Nhu

text: Despite U.S. Vice President Lyndon Johnson's advice for her to stop damaging relations with inflammatory remarks, Madame Nhu refused to back down, describing herself as a scapegoat for American shortcomings and failures. She went on to accuse the administration of betraying her family, saying "I refuse to play the role of an accomplice in an awful murder ... According to a few immature American junior officials—too imbued by a real but obsolete imperialist spirit, the Vietnamese regime is not puppet enough and must be liquidated." She accused the Americans of undermining South Vietnam through "briberies, threats and other means" to destroy her family because they "do not like" it. She further mocked Kennedy's entourage, asking why "all the people around President Kennedy are pink?"


title: Madame Nhu

text: She denounced American liberals as "worse than communists" and Buddhists as "hooligans in robes". Her father did not share the same beliefs and followed her around the country rebutting her comments, denouncing the "injustice and oppression" and stating that his daughter had "become unwittingly the greatest asset to the communists." She predicted that Buddhism would become extinct in Vietnam. The Oram Group, the Madison Avenue PR firm that had been hired to promote Diệm's image in the U.S. for $3,000 per month ended its relationship with Diệm during Madame Nhu's visit under the grounds she had so badly damaged the image of the Diệm government in America that there was nothing that could be done to improve his image and a continued association was going to cost the Oram Group other clients. American journalists had discovered Madame Nhu was "unfortunately too beautiful to ignore" as a Kennedy administration staffer complained, and that it was easy to provoke her into saying something outrageous, causing a media circus to develop around her as she traveled across America.


title: Madame Nhu

text: In the wake of the tumultuous events, Madame Nhu appeared on NBC-TV's "Meet the Press" on 13 October 1963, defending her actions and those of the South Vietnamese government. "I don't know why you Americans dislike us ... Is it because the world is under a spell called liberalism? Your own public, here in America, is not as anti-Communistic as ours is in Vietnam. Americans talk about my husband and I leaving our native land permanently. Why should we do this? Where would we go? To say that 70 percent of my country's population is Buddhistic is absolutely true. My father, who was our ambassador to the United States until two months ago, has been against me since my childhood."


title: Madame Nhu

text: Upon the assassination of the Diệm brothers, President Kennedy's feelings were expressed to close friend Paul "Red" Fay, Acting Secretary of the Navy. The circumstances which allowed the flow towards the elimination from South Vietnam of the Diệm regime, Kennedy held, were due to the active personality of Madame Nhu. The Secretary recalls the President's feelings and in an oral history interview gave volunteered paraphrase of the words addressed to him,


title: Madame Nhu

text: On 2 November 1963, Diệm and Nhu were assassinated in a coup d'état led by General Dương Văn Minh (Armed Forces Council) with the understanding that the United States would not intervene. At the time of the assassinations, Madame Nhu was in Beverly Hills, California, traveling with her 18-year-old daughter, Ngô Đình Lệ Thủy. Her other children were in Vietnam at the family retreat in Đà Lạt and she feared that they would meet the same fate as their father. The children were not harmed by the generals and were flown out of the country into exile in Rome, where they were placed in the custody of their uncle, Archbishop Thục. Madame Nhu later flew to Rome to join them.


title: Madame Nhu

text: In response to the killings of Diệm and Nhu, she immediately accused the United States, saying "Whoever has the Americans as allies does not need enemies", and that "No coup can erupt without American incitement and backing". She went on to predict a bleak future for Vietnam and said that, by being involved in the coup, the troubles of the United States in Vietnam were just beginning. She called the deaths an "indelible stigma" against the U.S. and said "My family has been treacherously killed with either official or unofficial blessing of the American government, I can predict to you now that the story is only at its beginning." She invoked biblical analogies, saying "Judas has sold the Christ for thirty pieces of silver. The Ngô brothers have been sold for a few dollars." When asked if she wanted asylum in the United States, she said, "I cannot stay in a country whose government stabbed me in the back. I believe all the devils in hell are against us."


title: Madame Nhu

text: In the aftermath of the coup, the statues of the Trưng Sisters that Madame Nhu had erected with her own facial features were demolished by jubilant anti-Diệm rioters. The "Times of Vietnam" office was also burned down, and the newspaper was never published again.


title: Madame Nhu

text: The military government of Vietnam under General Dương Văn Minh confiscated all of the property in Saigon that belonged to Madame Nhu and her family, and she was not allowed to return to South Vietnam. She went to Rome briefly before moving to France and, later, Italy, with her children. Her daughter, Lệ Thủy, died in 1967, at age 22, in a car accident in Longjumeau, France. Her younger daughter, Ngô Đình Lệ Quyên, who grew up to be an Italian-Vietnamese human rights lawyer, also died of a car accident in 2012.


title: Madame Nhu

text: In November 1982 Madame Nhu accorded a first significant interview on the historic events in Vietnam to Judith Vecchione in Rome. Vecchione was a producer for "". The interview, one of at least two hundred and fifty-nine for the series, lasts a recorded fifty-two minutes but Madame Nhu's subjectivity was far from the hard facts demanded of the producers' intended content and barely two minutes of her observations found use. The interview remains valid though as personal documentation of Madame Nhu's life and character. The series subsequently aired on PBS in 1983.


title: Madame Nhu

text: On 2 November 1986, Madame Nhu charged the United States with hounding her family during the arrest of her younger brother, Trần Văn Khiêm, who was charged in the strangling deaths of their parents in their Washington, D.C. home after being cut out of their will.


title: Madame Nhu

text: In 1993, she sued her parents' insurance company to prevent it from awarding their death benefit because she contested the validity of their wills. Her parents allegedly changed their wills, disinheriting their son Khiem and Madame Nhu and making their sister Le Chi the sole beneficiary.


title: Madame Nhu

text: In the 1990s, she was reportedly living on the French Riviera and charging the press for interviews. In 2002, she gave an interview to journalist Truong Phu Thu of "Dân Chúa Mỹ Châu", a Vietnamese Catholic community publication. It was published in October 2004. The article stated that she was living in Paris and working on her memoirs.


title: Madame Nhu

text: In her last years, she lived with her eldest son, Ngô Đình Trác, and youngest daughter, Ngô Đình Lệ Quyên, in Rome, and was reportedly working on a book of memoirs to be published posthumously.


title: Madame Nhu

text: In early April 2011, she was taken to a hospital in Rome where she died three weeks later, on Easter Sunday, 24 April 2011. News of her death was announced by her sister Lechi Oggeri, while family friend Truong Phu Thu was interviewed by BBC News afterwards.


title: Madame Nhu

text: In the early 1960s, Madame Nhu popularized a tight-fitting version of the traditional "áo dài" (long dress) that was considered controversial in its day, due to its tight fit and low-cut neckline. According to Boi Tran Huynh, a scholar of Vietnamese visual arts, "To foreigners, this collar made sense, given the tropical conditions, but conservatives saw it as too suggestive for Vietnamese women."


title: Unity of opposites

text: The unity of opposites is the central category of dialectics, said to be related to the notion of non-duality in a deep sense. It defines a situation in which the existence or identity of a thing (or situation) depends on the co-existence of at least two conditions which are opposite to each other, yet dependent on each other and presupposing each other, within a field of tension.


title: Unity of opposites

text: The unity of opposites was first suggested to the western view by Heraclitus (c. 535 – c. 475 BC), a pre-Socratic Greek thinker. Philosophers had for some time been contemplating the notion of opposites. Anaximander posited that every element had an opposite, or was connected to an opposite (water is cold, fire is hot). Thus, the material world was said to be composed of an infinite, boundless "apeiron" from which arose the elements (earth, air, fire, water) and pairs of opposites (hot/cold, wet/dry). There was, according to Anaximander, a continual war of opposites


title: Unity of opposites

text: Anaximenes of Miletus, a student and successor of Anaximander, replaced this infinite, boundless arche with air, a known element with neutral properties. According to Anaximenes, there was not so much a war of opposites, as a continuum of change.


title: Unity of opposites

text: Heraclitus, however, did not accept the Milesian monism and replaced their underlying material arche with a single, divine law of the universe, which he called Logos. The universe of Heraclitus is in constant change, while remaining the same. That is to say, when an object moves from point A to point B, a change is created, while the underlying law remains the same. Thus, a unity of opposites is present in the universe simultaneously containing difference and sameness. An aphorism of Heraclitus illustrates the idea as follows:


title: Unity of opposites

text: This is an example of a compresent unity of opposites. For, at the same time, this slanted road has the opposite qualities of ascent and descent. According to Heraclitus, everything is in constant flux, and every changing object contains at least one pair of opposites (though not necessarily simultaneously) and every pair of opposites is contained in at least one object.


title: Unity of opposites

text: Cold things grow hot, hot things grow cold, a moist thing withers, a parched thing is wetted. (DK B126)


title: Unity of opposites

text: Dialecticians claim that unity or identity of opposites can exist in reality or in thought. If the opposites were completely balanced, the result would be stasis, but often it is implied that one of the pairs of opposites is larger, stronger or more powerful than the other, such that over time, one of the opposed conditions prevails over the other. Yet rather than 'stasis' the identity of opposites, there being unity within their duality, is taken to be the instance of their very manifestation, the unity between them being the essential principle of making any particular opposite in question extant as either opposing force. For example 'upward' cannot exist unless there is a 'downward', they are opposites but they co-substantiate one another, their unity is that either one exists because the opposite is necessary for the existence of the other, one manifests immediately with the other. Hot would not be hot without cold, due to there being no contrast by which to define it as 'hot' relative to any other condition, it would not and could not have identity whatsoever if not for its very opposite that makes the necessary prerequisite existence for the opposing condition to be. This is the oneness, unity, principle to the very existence of any opposite. Either one's identity is the contra-posing principle itself, necessitating the other. The criteria for what is opposite is therefore something "a priori".


title: Unity of opposites

text: In his criticism of Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel tried to systematise dialectical understandings and thus wrote:


title: Unity of opposites

text: In his philosophy, Hegel ventured to describe quite a few cases of "unity of opposites", including the concepts of Finite and Infinite, Force and Matter, Identity and Difference, Positive and Negative, Form and Content, Chance and Necessity, Cause and effect, Freedom and Necessity, Subjectivity and Objectivity, Means and Ends, Subject and Object, and Abstract and Concrete. It is also considered to be integral to Marxist philosophy of nature and is discussed in Friedrich Engels' "Dialectics of Nature".


title: Unity of opposites

text: "Coincidentia oppositorum" is a Latin phrase meaning coincidence of opposites. It is a neoplatonic term attributed to 15th century German polymath Nicholas of Cusa in his essay, "De Docta Ignorantia" (1440). Mircea Eliade, a 20th-century historian of religion, used the term extensively in his essays about myth and ritual, describing the "coincidentia oppositorum" as "the mythical pattern". Psychiatrist Carl Jung, the philosopher and Islamic Studies professor Henry Corbin as well as Jewish philosophers Gershom Scholem and Abraham Joshua Heschel also used the term.


title: Unity of opposites

text: In alchemy, "coincidentia oppositorum" is a synonym for "coniunctio". For example, Michael Maier stresses that the union of opposites is the aim of the alchemical work. Or, according to Paracelsus' pupil, Gerhard Dorn, the highest grade of the alchemical "coniunctio" consisted in the union of the total man with the "unus mundus" ("one world").


title: Unity of opposites

text: The term is also used in describing a revelation of the oneness of things previously believed to be different. Such insight into the unity of things is a kind of immanence, and is found in various non-dualist and dualist traditions. The idea occurs in the traditions of Tantric Hinduism and Buddhism, in German mysticism, Zoroastrianism, Taoism, Zen and Sufism, among others.


title: Type 12 Surface-to-Ship Missile

text: The Type 12 Surface-to-Ship Missile (12式地対艦誘導弾) is a truck-mounted anti-ship missile developed by Japan's Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in 2012. It is an upgrade of the Type 88 Surface-to-Ship Missile. The Type 12 features INS with mid-course GPS guidance and better precision due to enhanced Terrain Contour Matching and target discrimination capabilities. The weapon is networked, where initial and mid-course targeting can be provided by other platforms, and also boasts shorter reload times, reduced lifecycle costs, and a range of .


title: Type 12 Surface-to-Ship Missile

text: The missile shares the same Ka-band Active Electronic Scanned Array (AESA) radar seeker with Japanese BVRAAM missile, AAM-4B.


title: Type 12 Surface-to-Ship Missile

text: The ship-launched derivative of Type 12, designated as has been put into service and it is to start deploying from . The range has doubled to 400 kilometers and is also planning to re-apply for the improved version of the surface-to-ship system and the air-launched variant for the P-1 patrol aircraft.


title: Type 12 Surface-to-Ship Missile

text: The MoD approved the development of an improved version of the Type 12 SSM on December 18, 2020 by the Cabinet. According to Japanese newspapers, the range will be extended from 200 km to 900 km, with a future target of 1,500 km. It will have a stealthy shape to reduce RCS, as well as high mobility to prevent interception from the enemy. It can attack not only naval vessels but also ground targets. The MoD intends to launch the improved Type 12 SSM not only from the ground, but also from naval vessels and aircraft.


title: Lodoicea

text: Lodoicea, commonly known as the sea coconut, coco de mer, or double coconut, is a monotypic genus in the palm family. The sole species, Lodoicea maldivica, is endemic to the islands of Praslin and Curieuse in the Seychelles. It has the biggest seed in a plant. It formerly also was found on the small islets of St Pierre, Chauve-Souris, and Ile Ronde (Round Island), all located near Praslin, but had become extinct there for a time until recently reintroduced.


title: Lodoicea

text: The name of the genus "Lodoicea" is given by Philibert Commerson, it may be derived from "Lodoicus", a Latinised form of "Louis" (typically "Ludovicus"), in honour of King Louis XV of France. Other sources say that "Lodoicea" is from Laodice, the daughter of Priam and Hecuba.


title: Lodoicea

text: "Lodoicea" belongs to the Coryphoideae subfamily and tribe Borasseae. Borasseae is represented by four genera in Madagascar and one in Seychelles out of the seven worldwide. They are distributed on the coastlands surrounding the Indian ocean and the existing islands within. "Borassus", the genus closest to "Lodoicea", has about five species in the "old world," one species in Africa, one in India, South-East Asia and Malaysia, one in New Guinea and two species in Madagascar.


title: Lodoicea

text: The tree generally grows to 25–34 m tall. The tallest on record, measured on the ground after felling, was in total height. The leaves are fan-shaped, 7–10 m long and 4.5 m wide with a 4 m petiole in mature plants. However juveniles produce much longer petioles; up to or even . It is dioecious, with separate male and female plants. The male flowers are arranged in a catkin-like inflorescence up to 2 m (6.5 ft) long which continues to produce pollen over a ten-year period; one of the longest-living inflorescences known. The mature fruit is 40–50 cm in diameter and weighs 15–30 kg, and contains the largest seed in the plant kingdom. The fruit, which requires 6–7 years to mature and a further two years to germinate, is sometimes also referred to as the sea coconut, love nut, double coconut, coco fesse, or Seychelles nut.


title: Lodoicea

text: While the functional characteristics of "Lodoicea" are similar to other trees of monodominant forests in the humid tropics, its unique features include a huge seed, effective funnelling mechanism and diverse community of closely associated animals. These attributes suggest a long evolutionary history under relatively stable conditions. Of the six monospecific endemic palms in Seychelles, "Lodoicea" is the "only true case of island gigantism among Seychelles flowering plants, a unique feature of Seychelles vegetation". It holds nine botanical records:


title: Lodoicea

text: Of the six endemic palms it is the only dioecious species, with male and female flowers on different plants.


title: Lodoicea

text: "Lodoicea" is robust, solitary, up to 30 m tall with an erect, spineless, stem which is ringed with leaf scars (Calstrom, unpublished). The base of the trunk is of a bulbous form and this bulb fits into a natural bowl, or socket, about in diameter and in depth, narrowing towards the bottom. This bowl is pierced with hundreds of small oval holes about the size of a thimble with hollow tubes corresponding on the outside through which the roots penetrate the ground on all sides, never, however, becoming attached to the bowl; they are partially elastic, affording an almost imperceptible but very necessary "play" to the parent stem when struggling against the force of violent gales.


title: Lodoicea

text: The crown is a rather dense head of foliage with leaves that are stiff, palmate up to 10 m in diameter and petioles of two to four metres in length. The leaf is plicate at the base, cut one third or more into segments 4–10 cm broad with bifid end which are often drooping. A triangular cleft develops at the petiole base. The palm leaves form a huge funnel that intercepts particulate material, especially pollen, which is flushed to the base of the trunk when it rains. In this way, "Lodoicea" improves its nutrient supply and that of its dispersal-limited offspring.


title: Lodoicea

text: The clusters of staminate flowers are arranged spirally and are flanked by very tough leathery bracts. Each has a small bracteole, three sepals forming a cylindrical tube, and a three-lobed corolla. There are 17 to 22 stamens. The pistillate flowers are solitary and borne at the angles of the rachis and are partially sunken in it in the form of a cup. They are ovoid with three petals as well as three sepals. It has been suggested that they may be pollinated by animals such as the endemic lizards that inhabit the forest where they occur. Pollination by wind and rain are also thought to be important. Only when "Lodoicea" begins to produce flowers, which can vary from 11 years to 45 or more, is it possible to visually determine the sex of the plant. The nectar and pollen are also food for several endemic animals e.g. bright green geckos ("Phelsuma" sp.), white slugs ("Vaginula seychellensis") and insects.


title: Lodoicea

text: Inflorescences are interfoliar, lacking a covering spathe and shorter than the leaves. The staminate inflorescence is catkin-like, one to two metres long by about three inches (8 centimeters) in width and produces pollen over a period of 8 to ten years. These catkins are generally terminal and solitary, but sometimes two or three catkins may be present. The pistillate inflorescences are also one to two metres long unbranched and the flowers are borne on a zig-zagging rachilla.


title: Lodoicea

text: The fruit is bilobed, flattened, 40 to 50 cm long ovoid and pointed, and contains usually one but occasionally two to four seeds. The epicarp is smooth and the mesocarp is fibrous. The endosperm is thick, relatively hard, hollow and homogenous. The embryo sits in the sinus between the two lobes. During germination a tubular cotyledonary petiole develops that connects the young plant to the seed. The length of the tube is reported to reach about four metres. In the Vallée de Mai the tube may be up to 10 m long.


title: Lodoicea

text: "Lodoicea" was once believed to be a sea-bean or drift seed, a seed evolved to be dispersed by the sea. However, it is now known that the viable nut is too dense to float, and only rotted out nuts can be found on the sea surface, thus explaining why the trees are limited in range to just two islands.


title: Lodoicea

text: "Lodoicea" inhabit rainforests where there are deep, well-drained soils and open exposed slopes; although growth is reduced on such eroded soils.


title: Lodoicea

text: "Lodoicea" was formerly known as the Maldive coconut. Its scientific name, "Lodoicea maldivica", originated before the 18th century when the Seychelles were uninhabited. In centuries past the coconuts that fell from the trees and ended up in the sea would be carried away eastwards by the prevailing sea currents. The nuts can only float after the germination process, when they are hollow. In this way many drifted to the Maldives where they were gathered from the beaches and valued as an important trade and medicinal item.


title: Lodoicea

text: Until the true source of the nut was discovered in 1768 by Dufresne, it was believed by many to grow on a mythical tree at the bottom of the sea. European nobles in the sixteenth century would often have the shells of these nuts polished and decorated with valuable jewels as collectibles for their private galleries. The coco de mer tree is now a rare and protected species.


title: Lodoicea

text: The species is grown as an ornamental tree in many areas in the tropics (including, for example, botanical gardens in Sri Lanka and Thailand), and subsidiary populations have been established on Mahé and Silhouette Islands in the Seychelles to help conserve the species. The fruit is used in Siddha medicine, Ayurvedic medicine and also in traditional Chinese medicine. In food, it is typically found as flavor enhancers for soups in southern Chinese cuisine, such as that of Guangdong Province.


title: Lodoicea

text: The seeds of "Lodoicea" have been highly prized over the centuries; their rarity caused great interest and high prices in royal courts, and the tough outer seed coat has been used to make bowls such as for Sufi/Dervish beggar-alms "kashkul" bowls and other instruments.


title: Lodoicea

text: "Lodoicea maldivica" is officially classified as an endangered species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), with only approximately 8,000 wild mature trees left as of 2019. The history of exploitation continues today, and the collection of nuts has virtually stopped all natural regeneration of populations with the exception of the introduced population on Silhouette. This palm has been lost from the wild from three Seychelles islands within its former range. Habitat loss is one of the major threats to the survival of remaining populations, there have been numerous fires on the islands of Praslin and Curieuse, and only immature trees remain over large parts of these islands.


title: Lodoicea

text: The Seychelles is a World Heritage Site, and a third of the area is now protected. The main populations of "Lodoicea" are found within the Praslin and Curieuse National Parks, and the trade in nuts is controlled by the Coco-de-mer (Management) Decree of 1995. Firebreaks also exist at key sites in an effort to prevent devastating fires from sweeping through populations. Cultivated palms are grown on a number of other islands and are widely present in botanic gardens; although the collection of seeds in order to recruit these populations may be a further threat to the remaining natural stands. Conservation priorities are the continued protection of populations, enforcement of regulations and effective fire control.


title: Lodoicea

text: A single cultivated plant at the Botanical Garden of Kolkata, maintained by the Botanical Survey of India, was successfully artificially pollinated in 2015.


title: Club Libertad

text: Club Libertad is a professional football club based in Asunción, Paraguay that currently plays in the Paraguayan Primera División. The club plays its home games at Estadio Tigo La Huerta; which holds 10,100 people.


title: Club Libertad

text: Founded in 1905, Libertad is the third most successful Paraguayan football club, winning 22 national titles, only behind rivals Olimpia and Cerro Porteño.


title: Club Libertad

text: The club was founded on 30 July 1905 by a group of young men and students. Its first president was Juan Manuel Sosa, who chose the club's name.


title: Club Libertad

text: Since winning its first championship in 1910, Libertad has always been overshadowed by the two big clubs in Paraguay: Olimpia and Cerro Porteño, who together won most of the Paraguayan football national championships. Despite that, Libertad has confirmed its position as the third "big" team of Paraguay by winning 21 championships, ten more than Guaraní, which has eleven.


title: Club Libertad

text: In 1952, Libertad participated in the Copa Rio. The club played three matches. In the first match against Austria Wien, the opposition won 4–2. In the next match, against Corinthians, the Brazilians won 6–1. In its last game against German club 1. FC Saarbrücken, the Paraguayan club won 4–1, to finish the cup with one win and two defeats.


title: Club Libertad

text: The club's first participation in the Copa Libertadores was in 1968, where they finished last with one win, one draw and 4 losses in a group containing Peñarol, Nacional, and Guaraní. In the 1977 Copa Libertadores Libertad reached the semi-finals. They began their campaign by finishing first in their group. That gave them qualification to the semi-finals, where they had to play two legs against Boca Juniors and Deportivo Cali. The winner of the group advanced to the finals, which was Boca Juniors. Libertad finished last of the semi-finals group with one win, one draw and two losses.


title: Club Libertad

text: In 1998, the club was relegated for the first time in its history. In the Apertura tournament it finished last, and in the Clausura it finished second-to-last. A 4–3 defeat to rivals Guaraní on the last matchday, as well as their league position in 1997, secured the club's relegation. The club spent two years in the second tier before returning to the top tier in 2001 after winning the league title in 2000. The club went through lots of success after their return to the top tier, as noted by winning the league titles in 2002 and 2003.


title: Club Libertad

text: Libertad reached the semi-finals of Copa Libertadores for the second time in history in 2006, where Libertad topped its group and beat powerhouses Corinthians and River Plate on their way to being knocked out by winners Internacional. Despite the elimination, more success came for the club, because it became a three-time-champion by winning the 2007 Clausura, 2008 Apertura, and 2008 Clausura.


title: Club Libertad

text: In the 2013 Copa Sudamericana, the club made the semi-finals, beginning their campaign in the first stage by beating Montevideo Wanderers and Mineros in the second stage. Then they beat Sport Recife and Itagüí in the round of 16 and quarter-finals, before being eliminated by Lanús, who eventually won the competition. They also made the semi-finals again in 2017, losing to another Argentine club, Independiente, who also won the competition.


title: Club Libertad

text: Libertad has a rivalry with the other two "big clubs" of the country, Olimpia and Cerro Porteño, but mainly has one with Olimpia, and matches disputed between the two clubs are called "Clásico Blanco y Negro" (White and Black Classic). The first "clasico" was played in September 1906, with Olimpia winning 5-4. "Repollero" won the 2003 league title by beating Olimpia 6-5 on penalties. Overall, there have been 255 matches disputed between them, with Olimpia winning 112 and Libertad winning 74.


title: Club Libertad

text: The club also shares a rivalry with the fourth-biggest club in the country, Guaraní. The first match between the two clubs was played in 1921, which was won by Guarani to obtain the league title that year. The rivalry became greater in 1998, after Guaraní won 4-3 on the last matchday to cause Libertad's only relegation into the second division.


title: Club Libertad

text: The basketball team of Libertad belongs to the top teams of the national top basketball league and Libertad is after Olimpia the most successful club of Paraguay.


title: Meral Akşener

text: Meral Akşener (née Gürer, ; born 18 July 1956) is a Turkish politician, teacher, historian and academic. She served as Minister of the Interior and was a vice-speaker of the Grand National Assembly. She also founded and is leader of the Good Party (İYİ Party), and was its candidate in the 2018 Turkish presidential elections.


title: Meral Akşener

text: Akşener first entered parliament as a deputy of the True Path Party (DYP) in the 1995 and 1999 general election, and served as the interior minister in the coalition government established by Necmettin Erbakan between 1996 and 1997. Akşener entered the parliament as a deputy of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) in the 2007, 2011 and June 2015 general elections. After tensions between her and the MHP's leader Devlet Bahçeli, she was not nominated as an MP for the November 2015 general election. In 2016, she led a group of opposition within the party against Bahçeli. On 25 October 2017, she separated from the MHP and founded the Good Party, of which she is the leader.


title: Meral Akşener

text: Akşener is a key opposition figure in Turkish politics, and has been dubbed as an "iron lady" by international observers.


title: Meral Akşener

text: Meral Akşener was born on 18 July 1956, in the Gündoğdu neighbourhood of İzmit, Kocaeli. Her father Tahir Ömer and her mother Sıddıka are Balkan Turks from Macedonia and Thrace. Her parents were among hundreds of thousands who left Greece to resettle in Turkey in 1923.


title: Meral Akşener

text: She studied history at Istanbul University and completed her post-graduate studies at the Social Sciences Institute of Marmara University, earning a Ph.D. in history. She then worked as a lecturer at Yıldız Technical University, Kocaeli University and Marmara University before entering politics.


title: Meral Akşener

text: Meral's older brother was president of MHP's İzmit branch, which gave her connections to right-wing politicians. Akşener quit her post as a university department chair and entered politics with the 1994 municipal elections, running for the True Path Party (DYP) as the mayoral candidate for Kocaeli. Catching DYP' chairwoman and then prime minister Tansu Çiller's attention, Akşener became the chair of the women's branch of the DYP and entered parliament in the 1995 general election as a DYP deputy from Istanbul province. Akşener was a proponent of governing with the Motherland Party but, lacking a majority, Çiller instead formed a coalition government with Necmettin Erbakan's Islamist Refah Party.


title: Meral Akşener

text: From the outset, Akşener was opposed to the arrangement but Çiller kept her close by appointing her as one of the DYP’s general vice-presidents, as well as giving her responsibility for the party's General Governing Council and women’s and youth issues. Akşener replaced Mehmet Ağar as Minister of the Interior after his resignation due to his involvement in the Susurluk scandal, becoming the first female interior minister in Turkish history.


title: Meral Akşener

text: Akşener replaced many officials with ties to organised crime but even she was implicated when it emerged that she attended a wedding with Ağar and Abdullah Çatlı. Suspicious of her coalition partner, Akşener backed a rejected bill to replace Refah mayors that were governing against secular principles, which contributed to the escalation of the 1997 military memorandum. She was forced out of office following the collapse of the REFAH-DYP (Refahyol) government. By her own account, her tenure as interior minister saw security services conduct "the longest, broadest, and most comprehensive cross-border actions [against the PKK] in history."


title: Meral Akşener

text: In 1999 she was re-elected to parliament as a deputy for Kocaeli province, but sensing DYP's decline, she led a group of DYP members against Çiller by courting other right wing parties. On 4 July, 2001, Akşener left the DYP for the "innovative wing" of the Welfare Party, led by Abdullah Gül and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The innovative wing founded the Justice and Development Party (AKP) on 14 August. However she was dissatisfied with the continuation of the National Outlook (Turkish: Milli Görüş) ideology in the new party, and joined the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) in 3 November. She immediately became chief advisor for political affairs to the MHP chair Devlet Bahçeli. However like most of the long-established parties, the MHP was ejected from parliament when it wasn't able to clear the 10% threshold for entering parliament in the 2002 election, and Akşener lost her seat.


title: Meral Akşener

text: Although she was one of the founders of the Ak Parti, she would become the MHP's candidate for the Istanbul mayoralty in the 2004 mayoral elections. Akşener rejoined parliament in 2007, representing Istanbul province, and was elected vice-speaker of the parliament alongside Güldal Mumcu, another female politician, serving as Turkey's first female vice-speaker since 1968. She served in the Turkey-China Inter-Parliamentary Friendship Group of the parliament. She was re-elected in the 2011 and June 2015 general elections. However, she was not included on the MHP's lists for the November 2015 snap election.


title: Meral Akşener

text: When the MHP lost half of its MPs in the election and Bahçeli openly supported Erdoğan; Akşener demanded an extraordinary congress to oust him. On 8 September, 2016, she was expelled from the MHP and promised to start her own political party.


title: Meral Akşener

text: Under her leadership, the Good Party was founded on 25 October, 2017. In her first address to her followers, Akşener said she believed that Turkish democracy was "under threat" and that the Good Party wanted a free society and to fix the problems of the Turkish judiciary system.


title: Meral Akşener

text: Akşener further stated that the "media should not be under pressure. Democratic participation, a strong parliament and the national will are irreplaceable. We will democatise the law on political parties along contemporary democratic principles and the criteria of the Venice Commission." Aksener said that many who were joining her movement were young Turkish citizens who were "chafing under the restrictions" imposed by the government on public gatherings, freedom of expression and constraints on the media.


title: Meral Akşener

text: Initially, the Good Party only had five MPs, not enough to form a parliamentary group to participate in an election, but Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, leader of the Republican People's Party (CHP), transferred 15 MPs to her party to allow it to compete in the 2018 general election. On 1 May, the CHP, Good Party, Felicity Party, and Democrat Party formed the Nation Alliance as an electoral alliance to challenge the People's Alliance made up of the AKP and MHP. Akşener was the Good Party's presidential candidate in the election and received 7.3% of the vote, while her party captured 43 seats.


title: Meral Akşener

text: The Nation Alliance continued with the 2019 local elections. After negotiations between Akşener and Kılıçdaroğlu, the CHP and Good Party agreed to compete in separate provinces, and nominated Mansur Yavaş as a joint candidate for the Ankara mayoralty. The two campaigned together during the election. While the Good Party didn't win any mayoralties, Yavaş won Ankara, the CHP took the cities of Istanbul, Bolu, Antalya, Mersin, Bilecik, Artvin, Ardahan and Kırşehir from the AKP, and the Good Party was the third most popular party. Akşener condemned the decision to repeat the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality elections. During the election campaign , she toured every district of Istanbul and supported Ekrem İmamoğlu in his campaign.


title: Meral Akşener

text: Akşener has refused to run for president in the upcoming presidential elections, instead saying that she would run for prime minister once the opposition is able to return Turkey to a parliamentary system.


title: Meral Akşener

text: Meral Gürer married Tuncer Akşener, an engineer, in 1980. Their son, Fatih Akşener, was born in 1984. Meral Akşener has been described as a devout Muslim who prays regularly. She is known to her supporters as "Asena", after the mythical she-wolf.


title: Meral Akşener

text: During the 1990s, Akşener threatened journalists who spoke out against the government, saying: “Until now, we have succeeded in preventing any unwanted event happening. Still we will try. But after today, we know we will have difficulty in holding back our Tansu-Çiller-fanatical youths. We are warning you for the last time."


title: Meral Akşener

text: While Akşener carried out the military's demands in the lead-up to the 1997 military memorandum, one of her appointees was charged with wiretapping high ranking commanders of the Turkish Armed Forces, which created friction between her and the Turkish military. One general allegedly threatened to “impale her like a goose.”


title: Meral Akşener

text: Akşener' frequently uses nicknames for government-aligned politicians, some of which tend to stick.She dubbed Treasury and Finance Minister Berat Albayrak the "Damat" (royal son-in-law) after his marriage to Esra Erdoğan.


title: Maggie and the Ferocious Beast

text: Maggie and the Ferocious Beast is a Canadian animated children's television series created by Michael and Betty Paraskevas. The program was based on the 1996 book "The Ferocious Beast with the Polka-Dot Hide" and its sequels, which were also written by the Paraskevas. The show began as a series of shorts aired on the Canadian channel Teletoon in 1998. In the U.S, the first full-length episode premiered on Nickelodeon's Nick Jr. block on June 5, 2000, and in Canada, the first full-length episode premiered on Teletoon on August 26, 2000. The series ran for three seasons, airing its final episode on June 9, 2002.


title: Maggie and the Ferocious Beast

text: A young girl named Maggie creates her own map of an imaginary world known as Nowhere Land that, in reality, takes the characters nowhere. She imagines that the characters Beast and Hamilton Hocks are her best friends.


title: Maggie and the Ferocious Beast

text: The theme song for the show is "Maggie and the Ferocious Beast in Nowhere Land," which is an original theme music was performed by Isabella Molley. "Maggie and the Ferocious Beast" is produced by Nelvana and produced with the participation of Teletoon, and directed by Jamie Whitney and Stuart Shankly. The show premiered in 2000 and aired its final episode in 2002. The show is distributed by Nelvana.


title: Maggie and the Ferocious Beast

text: In Canada, "Maggie and the Ferocious Beast" aired on Teletoon and Treehouse TV. In the U.S., it aired on Nickelodeon as part of its Nick Jr. block ahead of its Teletoon debut from June 5, 2000, to September 6, 2004. Repeats aired on Noggin, a channel co-founded by Nickelodeon. It also aired on the Nick Jr. channel when it replaced Noggin from September 28, 2009, until November 1, 2010, when the show was pulled from its lineup. Qubo picked up the show later on and aired repeats from May 28, 2018, until the channel ceased all operations on February 27, 2021. In the early 2000s, Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment released the show on video and DVD. Also, Phase 4 Films' Kaboom! Entertainment in Canada and Shout! Factory in the U.S. released the show as well, with Vivendi Visual Entertainment handling DVD distribution for the Shout! Factory releases.


title: Maggie and the Ferocious Beast

text: On March 18, 2021, it was announced a revival is now in the works. The computer-animated revival is titled "The Ferocious Beast Show" and will be produced by US-based Frederator Studios and Nelvana.


title: Hamburg cell

text: The Hamburg cell () or Hamburg terror cell () was, according to U.S. and German intelligence agencies, a group of radical Islamists based in Hamburg, Germany, that included students from different Arab countries who eventually came to be key operatives in the 9/11 attacks. Important members included Mohamed Atta, who led the four hijacking teams in 2001 and piloted American Airlines Flight 11; Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who conspired with the other three members but was unable to enter the United States; Marwan al-Shehhi, who piloted United Airlines Flight 175; and Ziad Jarrah, who piloted United Airlines Flight 93 and failed to hit a target in Washington, D.C. (claimed by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to have been the Capitol). Other members included Said Bahaji, Zakariya Essabar, Mounir el-Motassadeq, and Abdelghani Mzoudi.


title: Hamburg cell

text: On November 1, 1998, future-hijackers Mohamed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, and Ramzi bin al-Shibh moved into an apartment (two bedrooms, one living room, one kitchen) together on Marienstraße. Here they formed the secretive "Hamburg cell," which also included other minor participants in the 9/11 plot. They met together three or four times a week to discuss their anti-American and anti-Israeli views, and to decide how best to fight for their cause.


title: Hamburg cell

text: As late as 1999, the four core members of the group had intended to wage jihad in Chechnya, where Islamic jihadists were rebelling against Russia. The 9/11 Commission Report notes in Chapter 5 that "according to bin al-Shibh [who is now in U.S. custody], a chance meeting on a train in Germany caused the group to travel to Afghanistan instead. An individual named Khalid al Masri (or Khalid al-Masri) approached bin al-Shibh and Shehhi (because they were Arabs with beards, bin al-Shibh thinks) and struck up a conversation about jihad in Chechnya. When they later called Masri and expressed interest in going to Chechnya, he told them to contact Abu Musab in Duisburg, Germany. Abu Musab turned out to be Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a significant al-Qaeda operative who, even then, was well known to U.S. and German intelligence, though neither government apparently knew he was operating in Germany in late 1999."


title: Hamburg cell

text: Bin al-Shibh, Shehhi and Jarrah visited Slahi in Duisburg, where he convinced them that it would be best to train in Afghanistan first, because further experience would be useful, and anyway it was difficult at that time to get into Chechnya. Slahi instructed them to travel to Karachi, Pakistan, then to the Taliban office in Quetta, Pakistan, where they were to contact a man named Umar al Masri. Atta and Jarrah left Hamburg during the last week of November 1999. Shehhi left by himself around the same time; bin al-Shibh followed two weeks later.


title: Hamburg cell

text: "Umar al Masri" turned out to be a nonexistent person. The name was a code word that instructed members of the Taliban office to escort the men to Kandahar, Afghanistan, where they were convinced to join the al-Qaeda network and wage jihad against America. They met with Osama bin Laden himself and swore their loyalty to him. Mohamed Atta was chosen by Bin Laden as the leader of the group that would attack America; Atta would contact Bin Laden several more times before the attacks. The men then returned to Germany to enroll in flight training school, and later moved on to flight training schools in the United States at the recommendation of one of their instructors based in Germany.


title: Hamburg cell

text: The members of the Hamburg Cell were a boon to the 9/11 plot, which Khalid Shaikh Mohammed had proposed to Bin Laden in 1996. The Hamburg students were fluent in English, educated, accustomed to the Western lifestyle, radically Islamic, and capable of learning to pilot aircraft. "Bin Laden and Mohammed Atef wasted no time in assigning the Hamburg group to the most ambitious operation yet planned by al-Qaeda," the 9/11 Commission Report says.


title: Hamburg cell

text: Many al-Qaeda members lived in the Hamburg apartment at various times. In all, 29 men listed the apartment as their home address while Mohamed Atta's name was on the lease. Reportedly, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed visited the apartment repeatedly.


title: Hamburg cell

text: German intelligence monitored the apartment, but did not find any evidence against the residents. Both the United States' Central Intelligence Agency and German Intelligence have received criticism for failing to share information on these and other al-Qaida members.


title: Hamburg cell

text: The film "Hamburg Cell" is a docudrama on the planning and execution of the attacks. A co-production between Channel 4 in the UK and CBC in Canada, it was shown in the UK during September 2004, amid criticism that this was too close to the anniversary of the attack. Using computer-generated imagery, the film's producers were able to show the twin towers of the World Trade Center, before the attack, in the background. Ziad Jarrah is featured calling his girlfriend, Aysel Sengün, from a public telephone at the airport, repeating the words 'I love you' over and over.


title: Haley Kalil

text: Haley Baylee Kalil (née O'Brien; born August 6, 1992) is an American model. In 2018, Kalil was featured in the "Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue" as a contestant in the first ever "Sports Illustrated" Swim Search. As one of the two winners of the competition, alongside Camille Kostek, she officially appeared in the 2019 edition as a rookie.


title: Haley Kalil

text: Prior to her career as a model, Kalil competed in beauty pageants. As a teenager, she was crowned Miss Minnesota Teen USA 2010 and later competed in Miss Teen USA 2010. Afterwards, Kalil was crowned Miss Minnesota USA 2014, and placed in the top twenty in Miss USA 2014.