title: Halloween (franchise)

text: The "Halloween" series, when compared to the other top-grossing American horror series—"A Nightmare on Elm Street", "Child's Play", "Friday the 13th", the Hannibal Lecter series, "Psycho", "Saw", "Scream", and "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre"—and adjusting for 2018 inflation is the highest-grossing horror series in the United States at approximately $761.3 million. Next in line is "Friday the 13th" at $755.6 million, followed by the "Nightmare on Elm Street" series with $730.3 million. The Hannibal Lecter film series closely follows in fourth with $727.6 million. The "Saw" series with $580.9 million, "Scream" with $586.9 million, "Psycho" with $554.4 million, "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" with $391 million, and the "Child's Play" film series rounding out the list with $249.6 million.


title: Halloween (franchise)

text: "Halloween: 25 Years of Terror" is a DVD released on July 25, 2006, featuring a documentary on the "Halloween" films, narrated by P. J. Soles and featuring interviews from many of the cast members as well as filmmakers of the "Halloween" films and a lot of footage from the series as well. It has panel discussions with members from the casts and crews of most of the "Halloween" films, plus other celebrities and filmmakers such as Rob Zombie and Clive Barker as well as film critics. All of the panel discussions took place at a 25th anniversary convention in Pasadena, California (one of the filming locations of the original "Halloween") in October 2003. It also has extended versions of interviews featured in the documentary and much more. In 2010, The Biography Channel produced a television special titled "Halloween: The Inside Story", which premiered on October 28, 2010.


title: Halloween (franchise)

text: When the original "Halloween" was released in 1978, a novelization of the film followed just a year later. Written by Curtis Richards, the book follows the events of the film, but expands on the festival of Samhain and Michael's time at Smith's Grove Sanitarium. "Halloween II", "Halloween III: Season of the Witch", and "Halloween 4" each received novelizations as well. Jack Martin would write "Halloween II", which was released alongside its film counterpart. Martin included an additional victim of Michael's in this novel. "Halloween IV", released in October 1988 and written by Nicholas Grabowsky, also followed the events of the film in which it was adapted from. A novelization of the 2018 film by John Passarella was released on October 23, 2018.


title: Halloween (franchise)

text: Over a four-month period, Berkley Books published three young adult novels written by Kelly O'Rourke. The novels are original stories created by O'Rourke, with no direct continuity with the films. The first, released on October 1, 1997, titled "The Scream Factory", follows a group of friends who set up a haunted house attraction in the basement of Haddonfield City Hall, only to be stalked and killed by Michael Myers while they are there. "The Old Myers Place" is the second novel, released December 1, 1997, and focuses on Mary White, who moves into the Myers house with her family. Michael returns home and begins stalking and attacking Mary and her friends. O'Rourke's final novel, "The Mad House", was released on February 1, 1998. "The Mad House" features a young girl, Christine Ray, who joins a documentary film crew that travels to haunted locations, and they are headed to Smith's Grove Sanitarium, where they are confronted by Michael.


title: Halloween (franchise)

text: The first "Halloween" comic was published by Brian Pulido's Chaos! Comics. Simply titled "Halloween", it was intended to be a one-issue special, but eventually two sequels spawned: "Halloween II: The Blackest Eyes" and "Halloween III: The Devil's Eyes". All of the stories were written by Phil Nutman, with Daniel Farrands—writer for "Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers"—assisting on the first issue, and David Brewer and Justiniano worked on the illustrations. Tommy Doyle is the main protagonist in each of the issues, focusing on his attempts to kill Michael Myers. The first issue includes back story on Michael's childhood, while the third picks up after the events of the film "Halloween H20". These comics were based on Daniel Farrand's concept for "Halloween: Resurrection". He had been approached by the producers to pitch a follow-up to "Halloween H20". His idea was to have Tommy Doyle incarcerated at Smith's Grove for Michael Myers' crimes, only to escape and reunite with Lindsay Wallace. Together, they study the journals of Dr. Loomis and find out more about Michael's childhood. The movie would have explored Michael's time at Smith's Grove and his relationship with Dr. Loomis, before returning to Tommy and Lindsay, who are attacked by the adult Michael Myers. Upon defeating him and removing his mask, they discover Laurie Strode, who has taken over her brother's mantle. Farrand's logic was that, since Jamie Lee Curtis was contracted to cameo in "Halloween: Resurrection", they should make that cameo as significant and surprising as possible. Although the studio did not follow up on his pitch, Farrands was able to tell his story in comic book form.


title: Halloween (franchise)

text: "One Good Scare" written by Stefan Hutchinson, and illustrated by Peter Fielding, was released in 2003. The main character in this comic is Lindsey Wallace, the young girl who first saw Michael Myers alongside Tommy Doyle in the original 1978 film. Hutchinson wanted to bring the character back to his roots, and away from the "lumbering Jason-clone" the film sequels had made him. "One Good Scare" came about because Hutchinson wanted to produce a comic book to celebrate the series' twenty-fifth anniversary, to be sold as a collectible at a "Halloween" convention in South Pasadena. Due to the positive reception to "One Good Scare", Hutchinson hoped to use the comic as a "demo" for getting a distribution deal, but was unable to do so, due to rights issues.


title: Halloween (franchise)

text: While waiting to acquire the rights to publish more "Halloween" comics, Stefan Hutchinson worked on the documentary "Halloween: 25 Years of Terror" with Malek Akkad. Together, they developed ideas for possible "Halloween" stories that would be "connected into a larger tale, so the idea was that it would use the serial aspect of comic books to create different storylines than would be possible in the films." On July 25, 2006, as an insert inside the DVD release of "Halloween: 25 Years of Terror", Hutchinson released "Halloween: Autopsis". Written by Hutchinson, and artwork by Marcus Smith and Nick Dismas, the story is about a photographer assigned to take pictures of Michael Myers. As the photographer, Carter, follows Dr. Loomis he begins to take on Loomis's obsession himself, until finally meeting Michael Myers in person, which results in his death.


title: Halloween (franchise)

text: Rob Zombie's reboot of the film series ensured that any "Halloween" comics would not be contradicted by upcoming films, allowing Hutchinson creative freedom. Malek Akkad was approached by Devil's Due Publishing with the possibility of producing a line of "Halloween" comics, and he and Hutchinson worked to make them a reality. Hutchinson was convinced by the strong support of "One Good Scare" that the comic books would have an audience. In 2008, Stefan Hutchinson released the first issue of his new comic book, "Halloween: Nightdance". This is a four-issue miniseries, and it does not contain any characters—other than Michael—from the films. The four issues are titled, "A Shape in the Void", "The Silent Clown", "A Rainbow in One Color", and "When the Stars Came Crashing Down". The first issue, "A Shape in the Void", takes place on October 31, 2000, so that it falls between "Halloween H20" and "Halloween: Resurrection". Issue one follows Michael as he stalks Lisa, an eighteen-year-old girl with insecurities and "a chronic fear of darkness". Hutchinson explains that "Nightdance" was an attempt to escape the dense continuity of the film series and recreate the tone of the 1978 film. Michael becomes inexplicably fixated on Lisa, just as he did with Laurie in the original "Halloween", before the sequels established that a sibling bond was actually his motivation for stalking her. The aim was to once again establish Michael Myers as a "credible and dangerous force".


title: Halloween (franchise)

text: August 2008 saw the release of Devil's Due's "Halloween: 30 Years of Terror" to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of "Halloween". This comic book one-shot is a collection of short stories inspired by John Carpenter's original. "Trick or Treat" features the MacKenzies, unseen characters from the first film who Tommy and Lindsey run to for help. "P.O.V." shows a murder from the point of view of both Michael and his victim, "Visiting Hours" sees Laurie Strode reflecting on how her life could have been had her brother never found her in 1978, while "Tommy and the Boogeyman" reveals that Tommy Doyle grew up to write comic books featuring Michael Myers. In the final story, "Repetition Compulsion", Dr. Loomis tries to predict where Michael will strike next on Halloween 1989. Writer Hutchinson explains that "H30" came about because, unlike previous decades, there was no "Halloween" film coming out in 2008 to acknowledge the occasion.


title: Halloween (franchise)

text: Devil's Due released the three-issue miniseries "Halloween: The First Death of Laurie Strode" in late 2008. Written by Hutchinson with artwork from Jeff Zornow, the story bridges the gap between "Halloween II" and "Halloween H20" by focusing on Laurie Strode in the aftermath of the 1978 murders. Hutchinson explains that Laurie is "trying to get better and trying to repair, but where do you even start after going through such horror? How do you even try to resume normality when you don't know what that is anymore?" Although Michael appears in the series, it is not clear whether he is real or if the traumatised Laurie is seeing things. Hutchinson is not a fan of the revelation that Laurie and Michael are siblings and took steps to address that problem in the story. He wanted to avoid the "bloodline plot of the middle sequels", which he felt demystified the character of the Shape, and approach the story so that "it becomes almost incidental that she's his sister". Hutchinson believed that Laurie Strode's evolution into Keri Tate was fertile ground for a storyline; he says, "it's not the faking of the death that's interesting at all, but it's the fall that leads to that happening. The faked death is just simple mechanics and can be covered in a sentence, but the state of mind and events leading to that are full of rich character and dramatic potential."


title: Halloween (franchise)

text: All of Stefan Hutchinson's "Halloween" comic books take place in the "Halloween H20" timeline, which retconned "Halloween 4"–"6" from continuity. Hutchinson comments that, while the retcon was unpopular with "a lot of fans" for ignoring previous movies, he preferred the "simplicity of this storyline, over the needlessly convoluted mythology that the last three films had created". However, he admits that one of the downsides of the "H20" timeline is that fans do not know exactly what happened to Dr. Sam Loomis after "Halloween II". To remedy this, Hutchinson pitched "Halloween: Sam" as a way of paying tribute to the character. Written by Hutchinson and featuring illustrations from "Autopsis" Marcus Smith, "Sam" is a prose short story available exclusively for download at the website HalloweenComics.com. It explores the life of Dr. Loomis, including his backstory and relationship with Elizabeth Worthington, a journalist he met during World War II. In 1995, Michael Myers visits the ailing Dr. Loomis in a hospital and murders Elizabeth in front of him. Loomis attempts to stop him, but dies of a coronary failure.


title: Halloween (franchise)

text: In 1983, Wizard Video, who had also released a video game version of "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre", released a "Halloween" game for the Atari 2600. In the game, the player is a babysitter who has to protect her children from Michael Myers, who has managed to get inside the house. Although the game is called "Halloween", and features the film's theatrical poster as its cover art as well as the movie's main music theme, the game itself never refers to any characters, including the killer, by their names in the film.


title: Halloween (franchise)

text: "Halloween" has also seen profitability through various merchandise like toys, dolls, statues, model kits, bobbleheads, snow globes, movie posters, masks, T-shirts, hats, and more. Michael Myers has made appearances in the form of dolls and toys from McFarlane Toys, Mezco Toyz, Sideshow Collectibles and NECA. Even Dr. Loomis has been immortalized in plastic alongside Michael Myers in a two-figure set produced by NECA.


title: Halloween (franchise)

text: The Michael Myers mask has been reproduced over the years by Don Post, the mask company responsible for the creation of the masks from several of the "Halloween" films (the Silver Shamrock novelty factory seen in "Halloween III" was actually shot on location in one of Don Post's factories). While Don Post reproductions of the Michael Myers mask are still commonly found in costume stores every Halloween, the license to produce Michael Myers masks has since been given to Cinema Secrets, the company commissioned with the creation of the Michael Myers mask for "Halloween: Resurrection". , Universal Pictures has granted license to Trick or Treat Studios to produce two versions of the Michael Myers mask from "Halloween II", one "clean" version and one with the famous "blood tears".


title: Halloween (franchise)

text: Many versions of the original "Halloween" as well as several of its sequels have been released on DVD and Blu-ray by Anchor Bay Entertainment, Universal Pictures and Dimension Films. In December 2007, there were reports that the Producer's Cut of "Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers" might get a DVD release in the future.


title: Halloween (franchise)

text: Following the first Blu-ray release of the original "Halloween", all other films in the series were subsequently released to Blu-ray, as well.


title: Halloween (franchise)

text: Home video distributors Anchor Bay Entertainment and Scream Factory released "Halloween: The Complete Collection" to Blu-ray on September 23, 2014. This box set brings together all ten "Halloween" films released to date. Two versions of "The Complete Collection" were released: a standard 10-disc set featuring the first eight original films of the series and Rob Zombie's 2007 and 2009 remakes, and a "Limited Edition" 15-disc set, containing the ten films on ten discs, and five extra discs featuring the television versions of "Halloween" and "Halloween II", the never-before released "Halloween 6: The Producer's Cut", a bonus disc to Rob Zombie's "Halloween", and a bonus disc containing all-new special features from all ten films. The box set won the 2015 Saturn Award for Best DVD/BD Collection Release.


title: Dyslexia

text: Dyslexia, also known until the 1960s as word blindness, is a disorder characterized by reading below the expected level for one's age. Different people are affected to different degrees. Problems may include difficulties in spelling words, reading quickly, writing words, "sounding out" words in the head, pronouncing words when reading aloud and understanding what one reads. Often these difficulties are first noticed at school. The difficulties are involuntary, and people with this disorder have a normal desire to learn. People with dyslexia have higher rates of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), developmental language disorders, and difficulties with numbers.


title: Dyslexia

text: Dyslexia is believed to be caused by the interaction of genetic and environmental factors. Some cases run in families. Dyslexia that develops due to a traumatic brain injury, stroke, or dementia is sometimes called "acquired dyslexia" or alexia. The underlying mechanisms of dyslexia result from differences within the brain's language processing. Dyslexia is diagnosed through a series of tests of memory, vision, spelling, and reading skills. Dyslexia is separate from reading difficulties caused by hearing or vision problems or by insufficient teaching or opportunity to learn.


title: Dyslexia

text: Treatment involves adjusting teaching methods to meet the person's needs. While not curing the underlying problem, it may decrease the degree or impact of symptoms. Treatments targeting vision are not effective. Dyslexia is the most common learning disability and occurs in all areas of the world. It affects 3–7% of the population; however, up to 20% of the general population may have some degree of symptoms. While dyslexia is more often diagnosed in boys, this is partly explained by a self-fulfilling referral bias among teachers and professionals. It has even been suggested that the condition affects men and women equally. Some believe that dyslexia is best considered as a different way of learning, with both benefits and downsides.


title: Dyslexia

text: Dyslexia is divided into developmental and acquired forms. Acquired dyslexia occurs subsequent to neurological insult, such as traumatic brain injury or stroke. People with acquired dyslexia exhibit some of the signs or symptoms of the developmental disorder, but require different assessment strategies and treatment approaches. "Pure alexia", also known as "agnosic alexia" or "pure word blindness", is one form of alexia which makes up "the peripheral dyslexia" group.


title: Dyslexia

text: In early childhood, symptoms that correlate with a later diagnosis of dyslexia include delayed onset of speech and a lack of phonological awareness. A common myth closely associates dyslexia with mirror writing and reading letters or words backwards. These behaviors are seen in many children as they learn to read and write, and are not considered to be defining characteristics of dyslexia.


title: Dyslexia

text: School-age children with dyslexia may exhibit signs of difficulty in identifying or generating rhyming words, or counting the number of syllables in words—both of which depend on phonological awareness. They may also show difficulty in segmenting words into individual sounds (such as sounding out the three sounds of "k", "a", and "t" in "cat") or may struggle to blend sounds, indicating reduced phonemic awareness.


title: Dyslexia

text: Difficulties with word retrieval or naming things is also associated with dyslexia. People with dyslexia are commonly poor spellers, a feature sometimes called "dysorthographia" or "dysgraphia", which depends on the skill of orthographic coding.


title: Dyslexia

text: Problems persist into adolescence and adulthood and may include difficulties with summarizing stories, memorization, reading aloud, or learning foreign languages. Adults with dyslexia can often read with good comprehension, though they tend to read more slowly than others without a learning difficulty and perform worse in spelling tests or when reading nonsense words—a measure of phonological awareness.


title: Dyslexia

text: Dyslexia often co-occurs with other learning disorders, but the reasons for this comorbidity have not been clearly identified. These associated disabilities include:


title: Dyslexia

text: Researchers have been trying to find the neurobiological basis of dyslexia since the condition was first identified in 1881. For example, some have tried to associate the common problem among people with dyslexia of not being able to see letters clearly to abnormal development of their visual nerve cells.


title: Dyslexia

text: Neuroimaging techniques, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET), have shown a correlation between both functional and structural differences in the brains of children with reading difficulties. Some people with dyslexia show less electrical activation in parts of the left hemisphere of the brain involved with reading, such as the inferior frontal gyrus, inferior parietal lobule, and the middle and ventral temporal cortex. Over the past decade, brain activation studies using PET to study language have produced a breakthrough in the understanding of the neural basis of language. Neural bases for the visual lexicon and for auditory verbal short-term memory components have been proposed, with some implication that the observed neural manifestation of developmental dyslexia is task-specific (i.e., functional rather than structural). fMRIs of people with dyslexia indicate an interactive role of the cerebellum and cerebral cortex as well as other brain structures in reading.


title: Dyslexia

text: The cerebellar theory of dyslexia proposes that impairment of cerebellum-controlled muscle movement affects the formation of words by the tongue and facial muscles, resulting in the fluency problems that some people with dyslexia experience. The cerebellum is also involved in the automatization of some tasks, such as reading. The fact that some children with dyslexia have motor task and balance impairments could be consistent with a cerebellar role in their reading difficulties. However, the cerebellar theory has not been supported by controlled research studies.


title: Dyslexia

text: Research into potential genetic causes of dyslexia has its roots in post-autopsy examination of the brains of people with dyslexia. Observed anatomical differences in the language centers of such brains include microscopic cortical malformations known as ectopias, and more rarely, vascular micro-malformations, and microgyrus—a smaller than usual size for the gyrus. The previously cited studies and others suggest that abnormal cortical development, presumed to occur before or during the sixth month of fetal brain development, may have caused the abnormalities. Abnormal cell formations in people with dyslexia have also been reported in non-language cerebral and subcortical brain structures. Several genes have been associated with dyslexia, including DCDC2 and KIAA0319 on chromosome 6, and DYX1C1 on chromosome 15.


title: Dyslexia

text: The contribution of gene–environment interaction to reading disability has been intensely studied using twin studies, which estimate the proportion of variance associated with a person's environment and the proportion associated with their genes. Both environmental and genetic factors appear to contribute to reading development. Studies examining the influence of environmental factors such as parental education and teaching quality have determined that genetics have greater influence in supportive, rather than less optimal, environments. However, more optimal conditions may just allow those genetic risk factors to account for more of the variance in outcome because the environmental risk factors have been minimized.


title: Dyslexia

text: As environment plays a large role in learning and memory, it is likely that epigenetic modifications play an important role in reading ability. Measures of gene expression, histone modifications, and methylation in the human periphery are used to study epigenetic processes; however, all of these have limitations in the extrapolation of results for application to the human brain.


title: Dyslexia

text: The orthographic complexity of a language directly affects how difficult it is to learn to read it. English and French have comparatively "deep" phonemic orthographies within the Latin alphabet writing system, with complex structures employing spelling patterns on several levels: letter-sound correspondence, syllables, and morphemes. Languages such as Spanish, Italian and Finnish primarily employ letter-sound correspondence—so-called "shallow" orthographies—which makes them easier to learn for people with dyslexia. Logographic writing systems, such as Chinese characters, have extensive symbol use; and these also pose problems for dyslexic learners.


title: Dyslexia

text: For most people who are right-hand dominant, the left hemisphere of their brain is more specialized for language processing. With regard to the mechanism of dyslexia, fMRI studies suggest that this specialization is less pronounced or absent in people with dyslexia. In other studies, dyslexia is correlated with anatomical differences in the corpus callosum, the bundle of nerve fibers that connects the left and right hemispheres.


title: Dyslexia

text: Data via diffusion tensor MRI indicate changes in connectivity or in gray matter density in areas related to reading and language. Finally, the left inferior frontal gyrus has shown differences in phonological processing in people with dyslexia. Neurophysiological and imaging procedures are being used to ascertain phenotypic characteristics in people with dyslexia, thus identifying the effects of dyslexia-related genes.


title: Dyslexia

text: The dual-route theory of reading aloud was first described in the early 1970s. This theory suggests that two separate mental mechanisms, or cognitive routes, are involved in reading aloud. One mechanism is the lexical route, which is the process whereby skilled readers can recognize known words by sight alone, through a "dictionary" lookup procedure. The other mechanism is the nonlexical or sublexical route, which is the process whereby the reader can "sound out" a written word. This is done by identifying the word's constituent parts (letters, phonemes, graphemes) and applying knowledge of how these parts are associated with each other, for example, how a string of neighboring letters sound together. The dual-route system could explain the different rates of dyslexia occurrence between different languages (e.g., the consistency of phonological rules in the Spanish language could account for the fact that Spanish-speaking children show a higher level of performance in non-word reading, when compared to English-speakers).


title: Dyslexia

text: Dyslexia is a heterogeneous, dimensional learning disorder that impairs accurate and fluent word reading and spelling. Typical—but not universal—features include difficulties with phonological awareness; inefficient and often inaccurate processing of sounds in oral language ("phonological processing"); and verbal working memory deficits.


title: Dyslexia

text: Dyslexia is a neurodevelopmental disorder, subcategorized in diagnostic guides as a "learning disorder with impairment in reading" (ICD-11 prefixes "developmental" to "learning disorder"; DSM-5 uses "specific"). Dyslexia is not a problem with intelligence. Emotional problems often arise secondary to learning difficulties. The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke describes dyslexia as "difficulty with phonological processing (the manipulation of sounds), spelling, and/or rapid visual-verbal responding".


title: Dyslexia

text: The British Dyslexia Association defines dyslexia as "a learning difficulty that primarily affects the skills involved in accurate and fluent word reading and spelling" and is characterized by "difficulties in phonological awareness, verbal memory and verbal processing speed". "Phonological awareness" enables one to identify, discriminate, remember (working memory), and mentally manipulate the sound structures of language—phonemes, onsite-rime segments, syllables, and words.


title: Dyslexia

text: Apply a multidisciplinary team approach involving the child's parent(s) and teacher(s), school psychologist, pediatrician, and, as appropriate, speech and language pathologist (speech therapist), and occupational therapist.


title: Dyslexia

text: Gain familiarity with typical ages children reach various general developmental milestones, and domain-specific milestones, such as phonological awareness (recognizing rhyming words; identifying the initial sounds in words).


title: Dyslexia

text: Do not rely on tests exclusively. Careful observation of the child in the school and home environments, and sensitive, comprehensive parental interviews are just as important as tests.


title: Dyslexia

text: Look at the empirically supported response to intervention (RTI) approach, which "... involves monitoring the progress of a group of children through a programme of intervention rather than undertaking a static assessment of their current skills. Children with the most need are those who fail to respond to effective teaching, and they are readily identified using this approach."


title: Dyslexia

text: There is a wide range of tests that are used in clinical and educational settings to evaluate the possibility of dyslexia. If initial testing suggests that a person might have dyslexia, such tests are often followed up with a full diagnostic assessment to determine the extent and nature of the disorder. Some tests can be administered by a teacher or computer; others require specialized training and are given by psychologists. Some test results indicate how to carry out teaching strategies. Because a variety of different cognitive, behavioral, emotional, and environmental factors all could contribute to difficultly learning to read, a comprehensive evaluation should consider these different possibilities. These tests and observations can include:


title: Dyslexia

text: Screening procedures seek to identify children who show signs of possible dyslexia. In the preschool years, a family history of dyslexia, particularly in biological parents and siblings, predicts an eventual dyslexia diagnosis better than any test. In primary school (ages 5–7), the ideal screening procedure consists of training primary school teachers to carefully observe and record their pupils' progress through the phonics curriculum, and thereby identify children progressing slowly. When teachers identify such students they can supplement their observations with screening tests such as the "Phonics screening check" used by United Kingdom schools during Year one.


title: Dyslexia

text: In the medical setting, child and adolescent psychiatrist M. S. Thambirajah emphasizes that "[g]iven the high prevalence of developmental disorders in school-aged children, all children seen in clinics should be systematically screened for developmental disorders irrespective of the presenting problem/s." Thambirajah recommends screening for developmental disorders, including dyslexia, by conducting a brief developmental history, a preliminary psychosocial developmental examination, and obtaining a school report regarding academic and social functioning.


title: Dyslexia

text: Through the use of compensation strategies, therapy and educational support, individuals with dyslexia can learn to read and write. There are techniques and technical aids that help to manage or conceal symptoms of the disorder. Reducing stress and anxiety can sometimes improve written comprehension. For dyslexia intervention with alphabet-writing systems, the fundamental aim is to increase a child's awareness of correspondences between graphemes (letters) and phonemes (sounds), and to relate these to reading and spelling by teaching how sounds blend into words. Reinforced collateral training focused on reading and spelling may yield longer-lasting gains than oral phonological training alone. Early intervention can be successful in reducing reading failure.


title: Dyslexia

text: Research does not suggest that specially-tailored fonts (such as Dyslexie and OpenDyslexic) help with reading. Children with dyslexia read text set in a regular font such as Times New Roman and Arial just as quickly, and they show a preference for regular fonts over specially-tailored fonts. Some research has pointed to increased letter-spacing being beneficial.


title: Dyslexia

text: There is currently no evidence showing that music education significantly improves the reading skills of adolescents with dyslexia.


title: Dyslexia

text: Dyslexic children require special instruction for word analysis and spelling from an early age. The prognosis, generally speaking, is positive for individuals who are identified in childhood and receive support from friends and family. The New York educational system (NYED) indicates "a daily uninterrupted 90-minute block of instruction in reading" and "instruction in phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary development, reading fluency" so as to improve the individual's reading ability.


title: Dyslexia

text: The prevalence of dyslexia is unknown, but it has been estimated to be as low as 5% and as high as 17% of the population. Dyslexia is diagnosed more often in males.


title: Dyslexia

text: There are different definitions of dyslexia used throughout the world. Further, differences in writing systems may affect development of written language ability due to the interplay between auditory and written representations of phonemes. Dyslexia is not limited to difficulty in converting letters to sounds, and Chinese people with dyslexia may have difficulty converting Chinese characters into their meanings. The Chinese vocabulary uses logographic, monographic, non-alphabet writing where one character can represent an individual phoneme.


title: Dyslexia

text: The phonological-processing hypothesis attempts to explain why dyslexia occurs in a wide variety of languages. Furthermore, the relationship between phonological capacity and reading appears to be influenced by orthography.


title: Dyslexia

text: Dyslexia was clinically described by Oswald Berkhan in 1881, but the term "dyslexia" was coined in 1883 by Rudolf Berlin, an ophthalmologist in Stuttgart. He used the term to refer to the case of a young boy who had severe difficulty learning to read and write, despite showing typical intelligence and physical abilities in all other respects. In 1896, W. Pringle Morgan, a British physician from Seaford, East Sussex, published a description of a reading-specific learning disorder in a report to the "British Medical Journal" titled "Congenital Word Blindness". The distinction between phonological versus surface types of dyslexia is only descriptive, and without any etiological assumption as to the underlying brain mechanisms. However, studies have alluded to potential differences due to variation in performance. Over time, we have changed from the intelligence-based model to the age-based model, in terms of those with Dyslexia.


title: Dyslexia

text: As is the case with any disorder, society often makes an assessment based on incomplete information. Before the 1980s, dyslexia was thought to be a consequence of education, rather than a neurological disability. As a result, society often misjudges those with the disorder. There is also sometimes a workplace stigma and negative attitude towards those with dyslexia. If the instructors of a person with dyslexia lack the necessary training to support a child with the condition, there is often a negative effect on the student's learning participation.


title: Dyslexia

text: Since at least the 1960s in the UK, the children diagnosed with developmental dyslexia have consistently been from privileged families. Although half of prisoners in the UK have significant reading difficulties, very few have ever been evaluated for dyslexia. Access to some special educational resources and funding is contingent upon having a diagnosis of dyslexia. As a result, when Staffordshire and Warwickshire proposed in 2018 to teach reading to all children with reading difficulties, using techniques proven to be successful for most children with a diagnosis of dyslexia, without first requiring the families to obtain an official diagnosis, dyslexia advocates and parents of children with dyslexia were fearful that they were losing a privileged status.


title: Dyslexia

text: The stigma surrounding dyslexia is just beginning to be understood. As awareness increases, it is informative to observe the long list of notable people who struggled with dyslexia but ended up with successful careers, among them Whoopi Goldberg, who said:


title: Dyslexia

text: Most dyslexia research relates to alphabetic writing systems, and especially to European languages. However, substantial research is also available regarding people with dyslexia who speak Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, or other languages. The outward expression of individuals with reading disability, and regular poor readers, is the same in some respects.


title: The Challenge (TV series)

text: The Challenge (originally known as Road Rules: All Stars, followed by Real World/Road Rules Challenge) is a reality competition show on MTV that is spun off from two of the network's reality shows, "The Real World" and "Road Rules". Originally featuring alumni from these two shows, casting for "The Challenge" has slowly expanded to include contestants who debuted on "The Challenge" itself, alumni from other MTV franchises including "Are You the One?", "Ex on the Beach" (Brazil, UK and US), "Geordie Shore" and from other non-MTV shows. The contestants compete against one another in various extreme challenges to avoid elimination. The winners of the final challenge win the competition and typically share a large cash prize. "The Challenge" is currently hosted by T. J. Lavin.


title: The Challenge (TV series)

text: The series premiered on June 1, 1998. The show was originally titled "", and had notable "Real World" alumni participated in a "Road Rules" style road-trip. It was renamed "Real World/Road Rules Challenge" for the 2nd season, then later abridged to simply "The Challenge" by the show's . Since the fourth season, each season has supplied the show with a unique subtitle, such as "." Each season consists of a format and theme from which the subtitle is derived.


title: The Challenge (TV series)

text: "The Challenge" casts are season specific as the cast varies from season to season. The casts are made up of contestants originating from one of "The Challenge's" related TV programs and, in a few seasons, previously unknown contestants. The cast usually contains both "veterans" (or vets) and "rookies". Veterans are thought of as players that have won at least one "Challenge" season or have appeared on several seasons of the show; Rookies refer to newer players. Many recent alumni come from various reality shows such as "Big Brother", "Survivor", "The Amazing Race", "Ex on the Beach", and "Geordie Shore".


title: The Challenge (TV series)

text: A season's typical multitude of cast members are usually divided up into separate teams or pairs according to a certain criteria, which varies from season to season. The criteria that teams have been arranged by over the show's history have ranged from gender, the contestants' original show, heroic/villainous status and ex-romantic partners of contestants. Each of the opposing teams compete in numerous missions in order to win prizes and advance in the overall game. Following each mission, a team or a cast member is voted into an elimination round to take on the least successful team from the previous mission, or the winning team gets to choose a team for elimination to face off against another team determined by different circumstances. In elimination rounds, they must compete against one another to determine which one is eliminated from the season. Each season has its own, very distinct elimination round, distinguished from those of other seasons in title, design, and general atmosphere. Determining which two teams or two cast members are sent into the episode's elimination round frequently leads to drama and dirty gameplay; this is due to the show's contestants being in charge of who is thrown into elimination rounds. Like that of "The Real World", sporadically throughout the course of each episode, various contestants are seen privately expressing themselves through reality TV confessionals about the events taking place on the show.


title: The Challenge (TV series)

text: Some seasons, however, have used entirely different formats from the typical: "" is one "Challenge" in particular that adopted many features atypical to "Real World/Road Rules Challenge", instead taking concepts like that of another reality television game show "Survivor"; as another example, the first season ("") ironically only included contestants from "The Real World" and consisted of a much smaller cast before the show was completely restructured in its second season. Except for season one, a monetary prize has always been the award for winning the final mission.


title: The Challenge (TV series)

text: The series initially used no hosts but instead a former cast member who had been kicked off his or her season, providing assignments as "Mr." or "Ms. Big" (David "Puck" Rainey, , and served this role). After one season without anyone in this role, the series began using hosts: Eric Nies and co-hosted a season, and Jonny Moseley and Dave Mirra hosted various seasons before T. J. Lavin became the show's regular host by the .


title: The Challenge (TV series)

text: Over time there was a playful rivalry with the cast of the "Road Rules" occasionally trying to prank "The Real World" cast that was currently in production. During the filming of "" and "", the two casts met while the "Real World" cast was vacationing in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Producers set up a face-off where both teams would compete for a cash prize. The challenge brought in high ratings and this set ideas in motion to produce yet another spin-off series. After another face-off called "AquaGames", hosted by Kit Hoover and Mark Long, between "" and "" in 1998, the "Challenge" series was born in 1998 with "", and featured cast members from five seasons of "The Real World".


title: The Challenge (TV series)

text: After "All Stars", producers decided to include former cast members of "Road Rules" in the series as well. In the next season, two six-member teams were sent around the world in a competition to see which show could best the other in head-to-head competition. The series followed the format for three years and brought in hugely successful ratings.


title: The Challenge (TV series)

text: Following the hugely successful boom of reality television in the new millennium, from shows like Survivor, producers decided to add new elements to the series. 2002's "Battle of the Seasons" was the first season to depart from the previous six-member structure and brought in a large group of former cast members to compete in one location. The show added in eliminations that added an additional layer of scheming and manipulation. Earlier season incorporated voting off by majority, but eventually that changed to sudden-death elimination competitions between cast members up for elimination. With this season MTV also added a fantasy challenge game to their website. Players "draft" cast members, a la fantasy baseball and cast members are given points for performing certain tasks, such as cursing or "hooking up."


title: The Challenge (TV series)

text: After switching to the "vote off" format, the series would alternate between "Battle" seasons, including two seasons of "Battle of the Sexes" and themed "Challenges" which included the "Gauntlet" and "Inferno" seasons. Both the "Gauntlet" and "Inferno" seasons contained "showdown" matches between members of the two opposing teams. The cast member who lost the showdown would be sent home. The "Gauntlet" seasons featured an intra-cast dynamic as teams were forced to vote off cast members within their own groups into the showdown, while the "Inferno" seasons featured an inter-cast dynamic as teams were forced to vote off cast members from the other group into the showdown.


title: The Challenge (TV series)

text: Contestants are various reality television cast members from different television shows. Originally the cast consisted of "The Real World" and "Road Rules" alumni, and cast who debuted directly on "The Challenge", but eventually MTV expanded it to other alumni from other reality shows.


title: The Challenge (TV series)

text: "" (originally known as "The Challenge: Champs vs. Pros") is a special recurring mini-series of "The Challenge". In each multi-week event, alumni from "The Challenge" compete against celebrities to win money for charity.


title: The Challenge (TV series)

text: In 2020, "" alumnus Mark Long started asking his social media followers if they'd be interested in seeing former cast members of "The Challenge" coming together for a new version of the series. The movement was titled "We Want OGs". After his idea went viral, he announced a partnership with Bunim/Murray Productions to further develop his project and began gauging interest from potential former cast members. On February 24, 2021, the show was officially announced as "".


title: The Challenge (TV series)

text: In February 2022, a new series of international seasons series was announced to air later in the year. The series will comprise four new editions of "The Challenge" – three new international versions for Australia, Argentina, the UK as well a new American edition set to air on CBS with CBS reality show alumni called "". All editions of the series will air locally on a Paramount affiliated network and be available globally to stream on Paramount+. This will follow with a fifth season in which winners will compete again on another season titled " The Challenge: Global Championship" which will air on Paramount+. "Global Championship" is a working title, and when the series was first announced they were using the name "The Challenge: War of the Worlds".


title: The Challenge (TV series)

text: In March 2010, prior to the airing of the , MTV aired a special spring break spin-off of "The Challenge" in Acapulco, Mexico. Challenge alum coached teams of college-aged friends in various challenges of old and new, while "" alumnus Evan Starkman and "" alumna Paula Meronek served as broadcasters, with T. J. Lavin as the host. Camila Nakagawa, a contestant of the winning team, went on to appear on future challenges, with her debut Challenge being "". To date, Camila is the only player to appear on the challenges.


title: The Challenge (TV series)

text: "The Challenge: CT's Getting Married" is a two-part special revolving around the wedding of "Challenge" star Chris "CT" Tamburello and Lilianet Solares. MTV released the trailer and premiere date on November 20, 2018. The two-week special premiered on December 11, 2018, and concluded on December 18, 2018.


title: The Challenge (TV series)

text: "The Challenge: Untold History" is a six-part docuseries about "The Challenge". It will feature over 30 former competitors and several celebrity fans, discussing the show and telling behind the scene stories. It premiered on Wednesday, September 21, 2022 on MTV. A sneak preview was shown during the "Unscripted" portion of the 2022 MTV Movie & TV Awards.


title: Mass shootings in the United States

text: Mass shootings are incidents involving multiple victims of firearm-related violence. Definitions vary, with no single, broadly accepted definition. One definition is an act of public firearm violence—excluding gang killings, domestic violence, or terrorist acts sponsored by an organization—in which a shooter kills at least four victims. Using this definition, one study found that nearly one-third of the world's public mass shootings between 1966 and 2012 (90 of 292 incidents) occurred in the United States. Using a similar definition, "The Washington Post" records 163 mass shootings in the United States between 1967 and June 2019. "Mother Jones" records 133 mass shootings between 1982 and July 2022. "The Associated Press" records 59 mass shootings between 2006 and August 2022. "The New York Times" records 90 mass shootings from 1966 to 2012.


title: Mass shootings in the United States

text: The United States has had more mass shootings than any other country. Shooters generally either die by suicide afterward, or are restrained or killed by law enforcement officers. Mass shootings accounted for under 0.2% of firearm deaths in the U.S. between 2000 and 2016.


title: Mass shootings in the United States

text: There is no fixed definition of a mass shooting in the United States, and different researchers define "mass shootings" in different ways. Among the various definitions are those that are:


title: Mass shootings in the United States

text: The appropriateness of a broad versus narrow definition of "mass shooting" has been the subject of debate. Some commentators argue in favor of a narrow definition of mass shootings that excludes the victims of street crime. Mark Follman of "Mother Jones", which compiles an open-source database of mass shootings, contends that "While all the victims are important, conflating those many other crimes with indiscriminate slaughter in public venues obscures our understanding of this complicated and growing problem." Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox argues against the use of the broad definition of "mass shooting" in the popular press, stating that it misleads readers. Others, by contrast, argue that defining "mass shooting" solely as a shooting in a public place in which the perpetrator fires at random is too narrow. For example, Mark Hay argues that although gang, party, and domestic violence "probably warrant different solutions" than random mass public shootings, a narrow definition fails "to capture and convey the full scope of large-scale gun violence in the United States" and its effect on marginalized communities.


title: Mass shootings in the United States

text: Some studies indicate that the rate at which public mass shootings occur has tripled since 2011. Between 1982 and 2011, a mass shooting occurred roughly once every 200 days. However, between 2011 and 2014, that rate has accelerated greatly with at least one mass shooting occurring every 64 days in the United States.


title: Mass shootings in the United States

text: Under the definition used by the Gun Violence Archive, by the end of 2019, there were 417 mass shootings; by the end of 2020, there had been 611; and by the end of 2021, 693. By mid-May 2021, there were 10 mass shootings per week on average; by mid-May 2022, there was a total of 198 mass shootings in the first 19 weeks of the year, which represents 11 mass shootings a week. The FBI designated 61 "active shooter" incidents (defined as "one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area"). There were ten mass shootings in 2019, two in 2020, and six in 2021. Under the substantially narrower 2022 National Institute of Justice/The Violence Project dataset definition, there were 167 mass shootings (4 or more killed with firearms in public, not connected to "underlying criminal activity or commonplace circumstance") in the U.S. from 1966 to 2019, and 30.8% of the shootings occurred at the workplace.


title: Mass shootings in the United States

text: In 2014, the Federal Bureau of Investigation conducted a review of 160 active shooter incidents in the U.S. from 2000 to 2013 (averaging approximately 11 cases annually) in 40 states and the District of Columbia. The study found that 45.6% took place in a business or commercial setting, 16.9% occurred in schools, 7.5% in institutions of higher education, 9.4% in open spaces, 6.9% in (non-military) government properties, 3.1% in military sites, 4.4% in homes, 3.8% in places of worship, and 2.5% in healthcare settings. FBI data shows that active shooter incidents increased from 2000 to 2019.


title: Mass shootings in the United States

text: A comprehensive report by "USA Today" tracked all mass killings from 2006 through 2017 in which the perpetrator willfully killed four or more people. For mass killings by firearm for instance, it found 271 incidents with a total of 1,358 victims.


title: Mass shootings in the United States

text: Under the Everytown for Gun Safety definition ("any incident in which four or more people are shot and killed, excluding the shooter") there were an average of 19 mass shootings in the U.S. each year from 2009 to 2020, with 947 wounded by gunfire and 1,363 fatally shot. The report found that: "In nearly all mass shootings over this period, the shooter was an adult man who acted alone. Thirty-two percent of mass shooters, or 92 shooters, ended with the perpetrator dying by suicide, and another 24 shooters were killed by responding law enforcement. The remaining 145 mass shooters were taken into custody by law enforcement, while the outcomes and identities of 23 remain unknown."


title: Mass shootings in the United States

text: In October 2018, "PLOS One" published a study analyzing 100 mass shootings from the "Mother Jones" database that occurred from January 1982 to May 2018 that used non-homogeneous Poisson regression models on the biannual and annual incidence of mass shootings in the United States to evaluate whether mass shootings became more common in the United States over the preceding three decades that found that mass shootings had steadily increased (with the biannual incidence model having a better goodness of fit value based upon Akaike information criterion than the annual incidence model). However, some researchers dispute whether the frequency of mass shootings are increasing due to differences in research methods and differences in the criteria used to define events as mass shootings.


title: Mass shootings in the United States

text: According to "The New York Times", there is no common profile of people who carry out mass shootings in the United States, except that they are mostly men. By race, according to a study, the proportion of mass shooters in the United States who are white is about equal to the overall proportion of white people in the general population of the US. According to the same study, Asians are overrepresented in mass shootings, having perpetrated 6.06% of attacks despite being 5.7% of the population. The proportion of male mass shooters is considerably larger than the proportion of males in the general population. According to the Associated Press, white men comprise nearly 50 percent of all mass shooters in the US. According to the National Institute of Justice/The Violence project study, the demographics of shooters were 97.7% male, with an average age of 34.1 years, 52.3% white, 20.9% black, 8.1% latino, 6.4% asian, 4.2% middle eastern, and 1.8% native American.


title: Mass shootings in the United States

text: According to the Center for Inquiry, mass shootings of family members (the most common) are usually carried out by white, middle-aged males. Felony-related mass shootings (connected with a previous crime) tend to be committed by young Black or Hispanic males with extensive criminal records, typically against people of the same ethnic group. Public mass shootings of persons unrelated to the shooter, and for a reason not connected with a previous crime (the rarest but most publicized) are committed by men whose racial distribution closely matches that of the nation as a whole. Other than gender, the demographic profiles of public mass shooters are too varied to draw firm conclusions. In its 2014 active shooter incidents review, the FBI found that the perpetrator was female in only 6 of the 160 incidents (4%) and that in only 2 incidents (1%) was there more than one perpetrator. Analogously, in December 2013, the "Journal of Forensic Sciences" published a sociodemographic network characteristics and antecedent behaviors survey of 119 lone-actor terrorists in the United States and Europe that found that 96.6 percent were male.


title: Mass shootings in the United States

text: Higher accessibility and ownership of guns has been cited as a reason for the U.S.'s high rate of mass shootings. The US has the highest per-capita gun ownership in the world with 120.5 firearms per 100 people; the second highest is Yemen with 52.8 firearms per 100 people.


title: Mass shootings in the United States

text: A study published in "PLOS One" in 2015 examined mass shootings in the U.S. from 2005 to 2013 (and school shootings in the U.S. from 1998 to 2013). The study authors found that the "state prevalence of firearm ownership is significantly associated with the state incidence of mass killings with firearms, school shootings, and mass shootings."


title: Mass shootings in the United States

text: Conversely, the October 2018 "PLOS One" study used a Bayesian zero-inflated Poisson regression model to assess the impact of state-level gun ownership rates in predicting state-level mass shooting rates (with state-level SMI rates, state-level poverty rates, and state-level population sizes as covariates) that found that state-level gun ownership rates were not statistically significantly associated with the number of mass shootings in each state. The Bayesian zero-inflated Poisson regression model had a better goodness of fit value based upon deviance information criterion than a Bayesian Poisson regression model (which were 102.5 to 145.7 respectively). The researchers then tested the possibility that the relationship between gun ownership and the mass shooting rate was being confounded by gun law permissiveness using the Bayesian zero-inflated Poisson regression model and found that gun law permissiveness was only nominally correlated with gun ownership and that gun ownership was not statistically associated with the mass shooting rate with or without gun law permissiveness being adjusted in the model.


title: Mass shootings in the United States

text: A 2019 study published in "The BMJ" conducted a cross-sectional time series study of U.S. states from 1998 to 2015; the study found that "States with more permissive gun laws and greater gun ownership had higher rates of mass shootings, and a growing divide appears to be emerging between restrictive and permissive states." The study specifically found that "A 10% increase in state gun ownership was associated with a significant 35.1% (12.7% to 62.7%, P=0.001) higher rate of mass shootings. Partially adjusted regression analyses produced similar results, as did analyses restricted to domestic and non-domestic mass shootings."


title: Mass shootings in the United States

text: A 2020 study published in "Law and Human Behavior" examined the relationship of state guns laws and the incidence and lethality of mass shootings in the U.S. from 1976 to 2018.The study found that "laws requiring permits to purchase a gun are associated with a lower incidence of mass public shootings, and bans on large capacity magazines are associated with fewer fatalities and nonfatal injuries when such events do occur." The study specifically found that large-capacity magazine bans were associated with approximately 38% fewer fatalities and 77% fewer nonfatal injuries when a mass shooting occurred.


title: Mass shootings in the United States

text: The American Psychiatric Association has endorsed assault weapons bans, high-capacity magazine bans, and universal background checks as a way to curb gun violence in the U.S.


title: Mass shootings in the United States

text: A panel of mental health and law enforcement experts has estimated that roughly one-third of acts of mass violence—defined as crimes in which four or more people were killed—since the 1990s were committed by people with a "serious mental illness" (SMI). However, the study emphasized that people with an SMI are responsible for less than 4% of all the violent acts committed in the United States. The American Psychiatric Association (APA) states that gun violence is a public health crisis and has repeatedly noted that the overwhelming majority of people with mental illness are not violent and "are far more likely to be victims of violent crime than perpetrators of violence." The APA has endorsed red flag laws to remove firearm access from people at high risk of committing acts of violence.


title: Mass shootings in the United States

text: In February 2021, "Psychological Medicine" published a survey reviewing 14,785 publicly reported murders in English language news worldwide between 1900 and 2019 compiled in a database by psychiatrists at the New York State Psychiatric Institute and the Columbia University Irving Medical Center which found that of the 1,315 personal-cause mass murders (i.e. driven by personal motivations and not occurring within the context of war, state-sponsored or group-sponsored terrorism, gang activity, or organized crime) only 11 percent of mass murderers and only 8 percent of mass shooters had an SMI (e.g. schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder), that mass shootings have become more common than other forms of mass murder since 1970 (with 73 percent occurring in the United States alone), and that mass shooters in the United States were more likely to have legal histories, to engage in recreational drug use or alcohol abuse, and to display non-psychotic psychiatric or neurologic symptoms.


title: Mass shootings in the United States

text: In 2018, the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit released a survey of 63 active shooter cases between 2000 and 2013 that found that while 62 percent of active shooters showed symptoms of mental health disorders, those symptoms may have been "transient manifestations of behaviors and moods that would not be sufficient to warrant a formal diagnosis of mental illness", and that only one-fourth of active shooters surveyed had a formal diagnosis of any mental health disorder (and a psychotic disorder in only 3 cases). The survey concludes that given the high lifetime prevalence of the symptoms of mental illness among the U.S. population, "formally diagnosed mental illness is not a very specific predictor of violence of any type, let alone targeted violence."


title: Mass shootings in the United States

text: In May 2022, "Psychology, Public Policy, and Law" published a survey of 172 mass shooters coded on 166 life history variables conducted by Jillian Peterson, sociologist James Densley (Peterson's co-founder of The Violence Project's database), and criminologists Kyle Knapp, Stasia Higgins, and Amanda Jensen that found that symptoms of psychosis played no role in 69 percent of mass shootings. In the October 2018 "PLOS One" study, the Bayesian zero-inflated Poisson regression model that included state-level SMI rates as a covariate to predict state-level mass shooting rates found that state-level SMI rates did not predict state-level mass shooting rates. In 2004, the U.S. Secret Service and the U.S. Department of Education issued a report analyzing 41 school shootings in the United States that found that 78 percent of the shooters surveyed had histories of suicidal ideation or attempted suicide. In its 2014 active shooter incidents review, the FBI found that 96 of the 160 incidents (60%) ended before police arrived, and in 64 incidents (40%) the shooter committed suicide.


title: Mass shootings in the United States

text: In December 2021, the "Journal of Threat Assessment and Management" published a study comparing 171 public mass shooters and 63 active shooters in the United States from 1966 to 2019 (using cases compiled in The Violence Project's database) to the general population, homicide offenders, and people who die by suicide. In comparison to the general population, mass shooters were more likely to have a history of mental health issues, to have lifetime thought disorders, and greater lifetime suicidal ideation, while in comparison to general homicide offenders, mass shooters four times more frequently premeditated their homicides, eight times more frequently killed strangers, and were more likely to experience suicidal ideation and commit suicide directly or by cop. In comparison to people who committed suicide, mass shooters were actually more likely to have histories of suicidal ideation and were slightly more likely to premeditate the act. However, like the APA, the researchers emphasized that having a formal mental health disorder diagnosis is more predictive of being a victim of violence rather than a perpetrator. In the December 2013 "Journal of Forensic Sciences" lone-actor terrorists survey, lone-actor attacks were rarely sudden or impulsive and the researchers have subsequently noted that a sizable subset of their subjects took preparations to maximize their chances of death by cop or suicide.


title: Mass shootings in the United States

text: Based upon the similarities in premeditation and lifetime suicidal ideation, James Densley has argued, "Many of these mass shootings are angry suicides." Jillian Peterson et al., in a cross-sectional study published in "JAMA Network Open" examining 170 perpetrators of mass public shootings from 1996 to 2019, found that 44.3% of mass shooters had leaked their plans prior to committing the act, and that "Leakage was associated with receiving counseling and suicidality, which suggests it may be best characterized as a cry for help from perpetrators prior to their act." Peterson wrote: "These findings suggest that leakage is a critical moment for mental health intervention to prevent gun violence."


title: Mass shootings in the United States

text: Psychiatrist Paul S. Appelbaum argued that the data from the New York State Psychiatric Institute and Columbia University Irving Medical Center database of mass shootings show that "difficulty coping with life events seem more useful foci for prevention [of mass shootings] and policy than an emphasis on serious mental illness," while psychiatrist Ronald W. Pies has suggested that psychopathology should be understood as a three-gradation continuum of mental, behavioral and emotional disturbance with most mass shooters falling into a middle category of "persistent emotional disturbance."


title: Mass shootings in the United States

text: In 2015, psychiatrists James L. Knoll and George D. Annas noted that considering that mass shootings committed by perpetrators with SMIs amount to less than 1 percent of all gun-related homicides (and that most gun deaths in the United States are suicides rather than homicides), the tendency of most media attention following mass shootings on mental health leads to sociocultural factors being comparatively overlooked. Instead, Knoll and Annas cite research by social psychologists Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell on narcissism and social rejection in the personal histories of mass shooters, as well as cognitive scientist Steven Pinker's suggestion in "The Better Angels of Our Nature" (2011) that further reductions in human violence may be dependent upon reducing human narcissism.


title: Mass shootings in the United States

text: In the December 2021 "Journal of Threat Assessment and Management" study, mass shooters were more likely to be unemployed and be unmarried in comparison to the general population, while in comparison to general homicide offenders, mass shooters were more likely to not be in an intimate relationship. In the December 2013 "Journal of Forensic Sciences" lone-actor terrorists survey, a wide range of activities and experiences preceded lone actors attacks, many but not all lone-actors were socially isolated, lone-actors regularly engaged in a detectable and observable range of activities with a wider pressure group, social movement, or terrorist organization, and a subset of 106 subjects for whom relationship data was available found that 68.9 percent had never married or were divorced or separated from their spouse and only 27.7 percent were reported to have children. British criminologist Peter Squires argued that mass shooters in Europe and the U.S. "tend to be loners with not much social support who strike out at their communities, schools and families."


title: Mass shootings in the United States

text: Psychologist Jillian Peterson and James Densley, co-founded The Violence Project, a National Institute of Justice-funded project in which researchers studied approximately 150 mass shooters and coded 50 life history variables for each. Their data suggest that almost all mass shooting perpetrators had four qualities in common: they had (1) commonly experienced early childhood trauma and exposure to violence; (2) "reached an identifiable crisis point in the weeks or months leading up to the shooting," often linked to a specific grievance; (3) researched previous mass shootings, with many being radicalized through the internet; and (4) obtained the means (firearms) to carry out the plan, with perpetrators obtaining weapons from family members in 80% of school shootings, workplace shooters tending to use legally owned handguns, and other public shooters being more likely to acquire firearms illegally. The Violence Project's comprehensive mass shooting database also showed that mass shootings tend to occur in clusters, that mass shooters share a sense of entitlement and seek scapegoats when they fail to achieve goals in life, and that hate-motivated and fame-seeking mass shootings have increased since 2015. A 2021 article in the journal "Injury Epidemiology" found that from 2014 to 2019, 59.1% of mass shootings in the United States were related to domestic violence (DV), and the shooter either killed a family member or had a DV history in 68.2% of mass shootings.


title: Mass shootings in the United States

text: Mass shooting contagion (the "copycat phenomenon") has been studied. A study published in "PLOS One" in 2015 examined mass shootings in the U.S. from 2005 to 2013 (and school shootings in the U.S. from 1998 to 2013). The study authors found that "significant evidence that mass killings involving firearms are incentivized by similar events in the immediate past," concluding that: "On average, this temporary increase in probability lasts 13 days, and each incident incites at least 0.30 new incidents (p = 0.0015). We also find significant evidence of contagion in school shootings, for which an incident is contagious for an average of 13 days and incites an average of at least 0.22 new incidents (p = 0.0001)."


title: Mass shootings in the United States

text: In the October 2018 "PLOS One" study, the Bayesian zero-inflated Poisson regression model that included state-level poverty rates and state-level population sizes as covariates to predict state-level mass shooting rates found that state-level poverty rates and state-level population sizes did not predict state-level mass shooting rates. However, the researchers also used a Poisson regression model to test if the frequency of online media coverage density and online search interest levels correlated with shorter intervals between any two consecutive incidents. Due to the distributions of online media coverage density being highly skewed, the researchers first performed a logarithmic transformation on the media coverage variable and adjusted for numbers of fatalities and injuries (which the researchers also did for online search interest). The researchers then applied a pairwise correlation analysis on online media coverage, online search interest levels, and mass shootings and found that both online indices significantly inversely correlated with the time interval between consecutive incidents (i.e. that greater online media posts and online searches correlated with shorter time intervals between incidents and vice versa). The researchers concluded that their findings suggest that online media might correlate with an increasing incidence rate of mass shootings. Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker has also noted that much of the news media in the United States has an editorial policy of "if it bleeds, it leads".


title: Mass shootings in the United States

text: Other posited factors contributing to the prevalence of mass shootings include perpetrators' desire to seek revenge for perceived school or workplace bullying, the widespread chronic gap between people's expectations for themselves and their actual achievement, perpetrators' desire for fame and notoriety, toxic masculinity (mass shootings are perpetrated almost exclusively by men and boys), and a failure of government background checks due to incomplete databases and/or staff shortages. Feminist activist and psychotherapist Harriet Fraad and Marxian economist Richard D. Wolff contend that "American hyper-capitalism" fosters loneliness and social alienation among American men who become mass shooters.


title: Mass shootings in the United States

text: Several types of guns have been used in mass shootings in the United States, including semi-automatic handguns, semi-automatic rifles, revolvers, and shotguns. Of the 172 events from 1966 to 2019 classified as mass public shootings (four or more victims killed) in the U.S. by the 2022 National Institute of Justice/The Violence Project dataset, perpetrators used handguns in 77.2% of cases and semi-automatic rifles in 25.1% of cases. An earlier 2016 study by James Alan Fox and Emma E. Fridel similarly concluded that "rather than assault weapons, semiautomatic handguns are the weapons of choice for most mass shooters." High-capacity magazines were used in more than half of mass shootings over the four decades up to 2018. From 1966 to 2019, approximately 77% of mass shooters in the U.S. legally obtained the firearm used in the attacks. Although semi-automatic rifles are used in only 1% of overall shootings in the U.S., they are used in 25% of mass shootings, and (as of 2018) in six of the ten deadliest mass shooting events.


title: Mass shootings in the United States

text: A "British Journal of Political Science" study first published in 2017 (and in print in 2019) found that increase in proximity to mass public shootings in the U.S. was associated with statistically significant and "substantively meaningful" increases in support for stricter gun control laws. The study also found that repeated events, magnitude, and recency of mass shootings play a role with "proximity to repeated events, more horrific events and more recent events" increasing "the salience of gun violence, and thus ... support for gun control." However, the study found that the "most powerful effects" in support or opposition to gun control "are driven by variables related to local culture, with pronounced but expected differences emerging between respondents in rural, conservative, and gun-heavy areas and those residing in urban, liberal areas with few firearm stores." A separate 2019 replication study, extending the earlier panel analysis, found no evidence that mass shootings caused a "significant or substantively meaningful main effect" on attitudes toward gun control. However, the study did find evidence that mass shootings "have polarizing effects conditional on partisanship": "That is, Democrats who live near a mass shooting even tend to become more supportive of gun control restrictions, while Republican attitudes shift in the opposite direction." The study authors concluded, "To the extent that mass shootings may affect public opinion, the result is polarizing rather than consensus building."


title: Mass shootings in the United States

text: A 2020 study published in the "American Political Science Review" using data on school shootings from 2006 to 2018 concluded the incidents had "little to no effect on electoral outcomes in the United States," whereas a 2021 study in the same journal covering a broader time period (1980–2016) found that the vote share of the Democratic Party increased by an average of almost 5 percentage points in counties that had experienced a "rampage-style" school shooting. Both studies found no increase in voter turnout.


title: Mass shootings in the United States

text: A 2021 study published in "PNAS" concluded that "mass shootings have a strong impact on the emotions of individuals, but the impact is politicized, limited to individuals living within the town or city where the incident occurs, and fades within a week of the incident." The study authors suggested that this phenomenon could help explain why mass shootings in the U.S. have not led to meaningful policy reform efforts.


title: Mass shootings in the United States

text: A review article first published online in 2015 and then printed in January 2017 in the journal "Trauma, Violence, & Abuse", concluded that "mass shootings are associated with a variety of adverse psychological outcomes in survivors and members of affected communities" and that while "the psychological effects of mass shootings on indirectly exposed populations" is less well-understood, "there is evidence that such events lead to at least short-term increases in fears and declines in perceived safety." Identified risk factors for adverse psychological outcomes have included, among others, demographics, greater proximity to the attack, acquaintance with victims, and less access to psychosocial resources.


title: Mass shootings in the United States

text: The following mass shootings are the deadliest to have occurred in modern U.S. history. Only incidents with ten or more fatalities, excluding those of the perpetrators, are included. This list starts in 1949, the year in which Howard Unruh committed his shooting, which was the first in modern U.S. history to incur ten or more fatalities.


title: Karthi

text: Karthik Sivakumar (born 25 May 1977), better known by his stage name Karthi, is an Indian actor who works predominantly in Tamil cinema. He has won three Filmfare Awards South, an Edison Award, a SIIMA Award and a Tamil Nadu State Film Award.


title: Karthi

text: The younger brother of actor Suriya and the youngest son of actor Sivakumar, Karthi initially joined Mani Ratnam as an assistant director. He was offered acting roles and made his acting debut in "Paruthiveeran" in 2007, which garnered critical acclaim and several accolades including the Filmfare Award for Best Actor. His next project was that of the lead role in "Aayirathil Oruvan" (2010), an action-adventure film directed by Selvaraghavan. He achieved consecutive commercial successes with his subsequent releases – "Paiyaa" (2010), "Naan Mahaan Alla" (2010) and "Siruthai" (2011). After appearing in a series of box office flops, he starred in successful films such as "Madras" (2014), "Thozha" (2016), "Theeran Adhigaaram Ondru" (2017), "Kadaikutty Singam" (2018), "Kaithi" (2019), "Thambi" (2019). In 2022 he had three criticall and commercial success, "Viruman" (2022), "" (2022), and "Sardar" (2022), which promoted his career.


title: Karthi

text: Apart from his film career, Karthi has also been involved in social welfare activities, encouraging fans to do likewise through the "Makkal Nala Mandram", a social welfare club that he inaugurated. In 2011, he became a cause ambassador to promote awareness of lysosomal storage diseases. As of 2015, he is the treasurer of the Nadigar Sangam.


title: Karthi

text: Karthi was born Karthik Sivakumar on 25 May 1977 in Madras (now Chennai), Tamil Nadu, India. He completed his elementary and secondary school education at Padma Seshadri Bala Bhavan and St. Bede's Anglo Indian Higher Secondary School, Chennai. He gained a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Crescent Engineering College, Chennai. After graduation, he worked as an Engineering consultant in Chennai and considered higher studies abroad. "I was earning about 5000 per month and found the work monotonous. That was when I thought, I should do something more", he recalled in an interview. Karthi got a scholarship for his higher studies in the United States, and enrolled at Binghamton University, New York, where he earned his Master of Science in industrial engineering. While pursuing his master's degree, he also took elective courses on filmmaking.


title: Karthi

text: During his stay in New York, Karthi worked as a part-time graphic designer. He then decided to pursue a career in filmmaking; he attended two courses in basic filmmaking at State University of New York. He stated: "I always knew I wanted to be in films, but I did not know exactly what I wanted to do. I loved movies and watched a lot of them. But my father insisted that I get a good education before I joined the film industry".


title: Karthi

text: When Karthi returned to Chennai, he met director Mani Ratnam and got a chance to work as an assistant director in "Aayutha Ezhuthu", because he wanted to become a film director and preferred directing to acting, though he did appear as an extra in "Aayutha Ezhuthu". He continued to receive acting offers and his father convinced him to take up acting, telling him " ... one can always direct films, but one will not get a chance to act once you grow older". He accepted his first acting assignment with Priyamani as female lead in April 2005. When director Ameer approached him to play the titular character in the film "Paruthiveeran", he accepted the offer because the film was " ... so compelling". The filming started in July 2005 and experienced financial difficulties, and was almost abandoned by mid–2006. It was released in January 2007, to critical acclaim and became commercially successful.


title: Karthi

text: Critics unanimously praised Karthi's portrayal of a careless village ruffian. Behindwoods said: "He has done away with every trace of sophistication in his body language and even handles the sickle with consummate ease. He looks every inch a hot blooded youngster from some rural part of Tamil Nadu [and] appears seasoned in the romantic scenes ... Uninformed people might not believe that this is the young man's big screen debut. Look out for this guy ... ". "Sify" said: "It's hard to believe that it is Karthi's debut film as he is just spectacular. His expressions, anger, laughter and anguish are all so realistic that you can feel the fire in him." Rediff called his performance "excellent", and " ... one of the top performances of 2007". Karthi received several accolades for his performance, including the Filmfare Award for Best Actor in Tamil.


title: Karthi

text: In October 2006, Karthi signed his second project under Selvaraghavan's direction, "Idhu Maalai Nerathu Mayakkam", which was supposed to be a romance film, featuring Sandhya as the female lead. Karthi's character was a " ... sophisticated upmarket stylish guy ... ". Selvaraghavan abandoned that project and in July 2007, he announced the production of an action-adventure film titled "Aayirathil Oruvan", with Karthi in the lead role. Filming began later that year and was expected to be completed by February 2008. The producers planned to release it in mid-2008, but production was delayed and filming continued until early 2009. He had agreed to play the lead character in Linguswamy's next film "Paiyaa", in September 2007. Because of the slow progress of "Aayirathil Oruvan", "Paiyaa" was postponed several times. He later said that he became anxious because he received several film offers, but could not work on them because he needed to maintain the continuity of his looks. During the filming of "Aayirathil Oruvan", producer R.Ravindran complained that Karthi was trying to change his look and move on to "Paiyaa" before finishing his commitments.


title: Karthi

text: "Aayirathil Oruvan" was released in early 2010. Karthi's portrayal of a chief coolie was often compared to that in his debut film. "Sify" called Karthi's performance " ... a scream.", and said, "Right from his introduction scene till the end, he is lovable and provides humour.", and that he had " ... made a sensational comeback ... ".


title: Karthi

text: In April 2010, Linguswamy's "Paiyaa" released. A romantic road-trip film, featuring an album by Yuvan Shankar Raja, it was very successful. For the first time, he enacted a character that lives in an urban area. He said that he accepted the film because he desperately wanted to play a cool dude on screen. Karthi's performances in "Aayirathil Oruvan" and "Paiyaa" earned him further nominations at the 58th Filmfare Awards South in the Best Actor category. Both films were dubbed into Telugu as "Yuganiki Okkadu" and "Aawara", respectively, and were successful.


title: Karthi

text: Karthi's third film in 2010 was Suseenthiran's action thriller "Naan Mahaan Alla", in which he played a middle class youth from Chennai whose life is disrupted when his father is targeted by a gang of killers. It received good reviews, was very popular, and Karthi's performances was praised by critics. Sreedhar Pillai wrote for Sify: "[Karthi] nails the character to perfection"  ...  He is one good reason to see the film." Bhama Devi Ravi of "Times of India" wrote: "  ...  what a pleasure to see Karthi deliver his best performance to date  ...  ". "Rediff" wrote that "Karthi has simply had a ball ... " and "It's been a long time since you saw an actor who can be as convincing in sadness and rage, as in happiness." "Naan Mahaan Alla" was dubbed into Telugu and released as "Naa Peru Shiva" in 2011; it was very successful and earned Karthi some Telugu film offers.


title: Karthi

text: Karthi's next film was the action–masala "Siruthai" (2011), a remake of the 2006 Telugu film "Vikramarkudu". He played two roles; a thief and a police officer. Karthi's performances received favourable reviews. Malathi Rangarajan of "The Hindu" wrote: "Karthi looks and performs better with every film. "Siruthai" exemplifies the observation". Pavithra Srinivasan of "Rediff" wrote: "But the film belongs to Rocket Raja (Karthi), the sort of adorable ruffian Tamil cinema has been missing for a while. He picks pockets, slices off handbags, charms women and even bashes (!) them up without a single jolt to his conscience." Despite gaining mixed critical response, the film achieved financial success, becoming one of the highest-grossing Tamil films of 2011. In 2011, "Siruthai" became Karthi's biggest commercial success, cementing his position in the Tamil film industry. "Sify" said that Karthi had become " ... one of the hottest stars in Kollywood". He made a special appearance in a song in K. V. Anand's "Ko" (2011), alongside other prominent actors from Tamil cinema.


title: Karthi

text: In May 2011, Karthi began working in the political comedy film "Saguni", directed by Shankar Dayal and featuring him amongst an ensemble cast of supporting actors. He played Kamalakannan in the film, a villager who comes to the city to save his palatial house in Karaikudi from being destroyed for a politician's personal gain and unknowingly transforms to become a kingmaker in Tamil Nadu politics. The film opened to mixed reviews from critics, and became a box office failure. Karthi dubbed for himself for the Telugu version of "Saguni" (2012) and his since dubbed for the Telugu dubbed versions of all of his films. He later appeared in the 2013 Pongal release "Alex Pandian", opposite Anushka Shetty, which also opened to negative critical response upon release.


title: Karthi

text: Karthi's next release was Rajesh M's "All in All Azhagu Raja", which featured him opposite Kajal Aggarwal and Santhanam. The film was released on Diwali 2013, and received mostly negative reviews from critics, with Behindwoods saying: "Though the laughs are spread across a few moments, when "All in All Azhagu Raja" is pitted against Rajesh's other wholesome "laughathons" such as "Oru Kal Oru Kannadi" and "Boss Engira Bhaskaran", it falls way short" and Sify saying "The trouble with "All in All Azhagu Raja" is that it lacks basic story line and took the audiences for granted. The film has no real script to speak of, at best a skeletal plot." His next film was Venkat Prabhu's "Biriyani", which was released in December 2013, opening to positive reviews and became a box office success. He also sang the song "Mississippi" under Yuvan Shankar Raja's direction. In 2014, Karthi appeared in Pa. Ranjith's "Madras", a critical and commercial success. His next release was the 2015 action drama "Komban". His first release in 2016 was the Telugu-Tamil bilingual film "Oopiri" / "Thozha". The film received positive reviews. Karthi's performance was also praised, with Baradwaj Rangan of "The Hindu" stating (in his review of the Tamil version "Thozha"), "At a time every leading man (including Karthi) seems to be participating in a game-show titled "Who Wants To Be The Next Rajinikanth?", here's a simple 'buddy movie' (in the Hollywoodian sense), with no punch dialogues, no action sequences, with just one duet (with Tamannaah, who plays Vikram's secretary; her romance with Seenu is strangely unresolved). We see, all the time, character actors striving to become larger-than-life heroes. For a change, here's a hero scaling himself down to play a life-sized character." Later that year, Karthi appeared in director Gokul's "Kaashmora". Though the film received mixed reviews, his performance was praised.


title: Karthi

text: Karthi's "Kaatru Veliyidai", was directed and produced by Mani Ratnam. The film met with mixed reviews and became a failure. Karthi's "Theeran Adhigaaram Ondru" was directed by H. Vinoth and produced by Dream Warrior Pictures. It received critical acclaim and Karthi received a "Filmfare Award South" for the "Best Actor – Critics" for his performance. The film became a huge success at the box office. Right after "Theeran" Karthi acted in "Kadaikutty Singam" portrayed the role of a farmer directed by Pandiraj which has been produced by this brother Suriya which has gained the highest footfalls in the year 2018 in Tamil Nadu. His next film was "Dev", produced by Prince Pictures, directed by debutante director Rajath Ravishankar, music composed by Harris Jayaraj and R.Velraj handles the camera. The film received negative reviews from critics and eventually became a commercial failure.


title: Karthi

text: His Deepawali release in the same year "Kaithi" was a blockbuster hit and it collected more than one billion in box office. "Kaithi" became the highest grosser in his career. He was next seen in "Sulthan", directed by Bakkiyaraj Kannan. The movie also stars Rashmika Mandanna in a lead role. The film met with positive review and became box-office success.


title: Karthi

text: Next he was seen in rural based film, "Viruman" directed by M. Muthaiah, marking his second collaboration with the director. Viruman turned out to became commercial successful. After Viruman, Karthi was seen in Magnum Opus "" directed by Mani Ratnam. Karthi will be playing as Vallavaraiyan Vandiyadevan in that film and this is the first Pan-Indian film for the actor. The actor is next seen in a dual role as father and son in "Sardar" release on Diwali 2022.


title: Karthi

text: Karthi is the second son of actor Sivakumar and his wife Lakshmi. He has two siblings; an elder brother, Suriya, who was already an established actor at the time of Karthi's film debut, and a younger sister, Brindha, who is a singer in Tamil cinema. Tamil film actress Jyothika is Karthi's sister-in-law. On 3 July 2011, Karthi married Ranjani Chinnasamy, who graduated with a master's degree in English literature from Stella Maris College, Chennai. They were engaged on 29 April 2011 at Ranjani's native village, Goundampalayam in Erode district, and the wedding was held in a traditional Kongu culture at the CODISSIA Trade Fair Complex in Coimbatore. The wedding was arranged by the elders of the family. They have two children, a daughter and a son.


title: Karthi

text: Karthi has been involved in several charities and social service activities. On his 31st birthday, he inaugurated the "Makkal Nala Mandram", in order to encourage his fans to become involved in welfare activities. During the event, Karthi donated blood, donated bicycles to handicapped people, sewing machines to women and schoolbags to children. He presented a cheque of 50,000 to YRG Care Centre, which helps AIDS affected children. In 2011, Karthi became a cause ambassador for promoting awareness of lysosomal storage disease.<ref name="LSD/Tiger"></ref> He had also adopted a white tiger cub at Vandalur Zoo and contributed 72,000 to protect and preserve the animal. On his birthdays, Karthi visits orphanages and donates funds to them. He told Indiaglitz; "When I see people in need, I make sure I go and help. If I am going on birthdays to reach out to kids in orphanages, it is for my own satisfaction. I feel happier to be with them and it's nice to make them smile on that particular day."


title: Karthi

text: In September 2010, Karthi signed a contract with Bharti Airtel to become its brand ambassador in South India and appear in its "Indraikku enna plan" advertising campaign. He has also appeared in advertisements for Bru Instant Coffee along with Kajal Aggarwal, who had earlier acted opposite him in "Naan Mahaan Alla" and "All in All Azhagu Raja".


title: Karthi

text: In 2015, Karthi joined fellow actors Vishal, Nassar, Karunas and Ponvannan to campaign against the concurrent office bearers of the Nadigar Sangam, led by R. Sarathkumar and Radha Ravi. He was successful in the election, becoming the association's treasurer. After starring in "Kaatru Veliyidai", he expressed his interest in learning to fly.


title: Benin

text: Benin ( , ; , ), officially the Republic of Benin (), and formerly Dahomey, is a country in West Africa. It is bordered by Togo to the west, Nigeria to the east, Burkina Faso to the north-west, and Niger to the north-east. The majority of its population lives on the southern coastline of the Bight of Benin, part of the Gulf of Guinea in the northernmost tropical portion of the Atlantic Ocean. The capital is Porto-Novo, and the seat of government is in Cotonou, the most populous city and economic capital. Benin covers an area of and its population in was estimated to be approximately /1e6 round 2 million. It is a tropical nation, dependent on agriculture, and is an exporter of palm oil and cotton. Some employment and income arise from subsistence farming.


title: Benin

text: The official language of Benin is French, with indigenous languages such as Fon, Bariba, Yoruba and Dendi also spoken. The largest religious group in Benin is Sunni Islam (27.7%), followed by Roman Catholicism (25.5%), Vodun (11.6%), and Protestantism. Benin is a member of the United Nations, the African Union, the Economic Community of West African States, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, the South Atlantic Peace and Cooperation Zone, Francophonie, the Community of Sahel–Saharan States, the African Petroleum Producers Association and the Niger Basin Authority.


title: Benin

text: From the 17th to the 19th century, political entities in the area included the Kingdom of Dahomey, the city-state of Porto-Novo, and other states to the north. This region was referred to as the Slave Coast from the early 17th century due to the high number of people who were sold and trafficked during the Atlantic slave trade to the New World. France took over the territory in 1894, incorporating it into French West Africa as French Dahomey. In 1960, Dahomey gained full independence from France. As a sovereign state, Benin has had democratic governments, military coups, and military governments. A self-described Marxist–Leninist state called the People's Republic of Benin existed between 1975 and 1990. In 1991, it was replaced by the multi-party Republic of Benin.


title: Benin

text: During French colonial rule and after independence on 1 August 1960, the country was named Dahomey, after the Kingdom of Dahomey. On 30 November 1975, the country was renamed Benin following a Marxist-Leninist military coup. The Bight of Benin borders the country, and the bight takes its name from the Kingdom of Benin, located in present-day Nigeria.


title: Benin

text: Prior to 1600, present-day Benin comprised a variety of areas with different political systems and ethnicities. These included city-states along the coast (primarily of the Aja ethnic group, and also including Yoruba and Gbe peoples) and tribal regions inland (composed of Bariba, Mahi, Gedevi, and Kabye peoples). The Oyo Empire, located primarily to the east of Benin, was a military force in the region, conducting raids and exacting tribute from the coastal kingdoms and tribal regions. The situation changed in the 17th and 18th centuries as the Kingdom of Dahomey, consisting mostly of Fon people, was founded on the Abomey plateau and began taking over areas along the coast. By 1727, King Agaja of the Kingdom of Dahomey had conquered the coastal cities of Allada and Whydah. Dahomey had become a tributary of the Oyo Empire, and rivaled but did not directly attack the Oyo-allied city-state of Porto-Novo. The rise of Dahomey, its rivalry with Porto-Novo, and tribal politics in the northern region persisted into the colonial and post-colonial periods.


title: Benin

text: In the Dahomey, some younger people were apprenticed to older soldiers and taught the kingdom's military customs until they were old enough to join the army. Dahomey instituted an elite female soldier corps variously called Ahosi (the king's wives), Mino ("our mothers" in Fongbe), or the "Dahomean Amazons". This emphasis on military preparation and achievement earned Dahomey the nickname of "Black Sparta" from European observers and 19th-century explorers such as Sir Richard Burton.


title: Benin

text: The kings of Dahomey sold their war captives into transatlantic slavery or killed them ritually in a ceremony known as the Annual Customs. By about 1750, the King of Dahomey was earning an estimated £250,000 per year by selling African captives to European slave-traders. The area was named the "Slave Coast" because of a flourishing slave trade. Court protocols which demanded that a portion of war captives from the kingdom's battles be decapitated, decreased the number of enslaved people exported from the area. The number went from 102,000 people per decade in the 1780s to 24,000 per decade by the 1860s. The decline was partly due to the Slave Trade Act 1807 banning the trans-Atlantic slave trade by Britain in 1808, followed by other countries. This decline continued until 1885 when the last slave ship departed the modern Benin Republic for Brazil, which had yet to abolish slavery. The capital Porto-Novo ("New Port" in Portuguese) was originally developed as a port for the slave trade.


title: Benin

text: Among the goods the Portuguese sought were carved items of ivory made by Benin's artisans in the form of carved saltcellars, spoons, and hunting horns - pieces of African art produced for sale abroad as exotic objects.


title: Benin

text: By the middle of the 19th century, Dahomey had "begun to weaken and lose its status as the regional power". The French took over the area in 1892. In 1899, the French included the land called French Dahomey within the larger French West Africa colonial region.


title: Benin

text: France sought to benefit from Dahomey and the region "appeared to lack the necessary agricultural or mineral resources for large-scale capitalist development". As a result, France treated Dahomey as a sort of preserve in case future discoveries revealed resources worth developing.