title: Jean Cocteau

text: In 1930 Cocteau made his first film "The Blood of a Poet", publicly shown in 1932. Though now generally accepted as a surrealist film, the surrealists themselves did not accept it as a truly surrealist work. Although this is one of Cocteau's best known works, his 1930s are notable rather for a number of stage plays, above all "La Voix humaine" and "Les Parents terribles", which was a popular success. His 1934 play "La Machine infernale" was Cocteau's stage version of the Oedipus legend and is considered to be his greatest work for the theater. During this period Cocteau also published two volumes of journalism, including "Mon Premier Voyage: Tour du Monde en 80 jours", a neo-Jules Verne around the world travel reportage he made for the newspaper Paris-Soir.


title: Jean Cocteau

text: Throughout his life, Cocteau tried to maintain a distance from political movements, confessing to a friend that "my politics are non-existent." According to Claude Arnaud, from the 1920s on, Cocteau's only deeply held political convictions were a marked pacifism and antiracism. He praised the French republic for serving as a haven for the persecuted, and applauded Picasso's anti-war painting "Guernica" as a cross that "Franco would always carry on his shoulder." In 1940, Cocteau signed a petition circulated by the Ligue internationale contre l'antisémitisme which protested the rise of racism and antisemitism in France, and declared himself "ashamed of his white skin" after witnessing the plight of colonized peoples during his travels.


title: Jean Cocteau

text: Although in 1938 Cocteau had compared Adolf Hitler to an evil demiurge who wished to perpetrate a Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre against Jews, his friend Arno Breker convinced him that Hitler was a pacifist and patron of the arts with France's best interests in mind. During the Nazi occupation of France, he was in a ""round-table"" of French and German intellectuals who met at the Georges V Hotel in Paris, including Cocteau, the writers Ernst Jünger, Paul Morand and Henry Millon de Montherlant, the publisher Gaston Gallimard and the Nazi legal scholar Carl Schmitt. In his diary, Cocteau accused France of disrespect towards Hitler and speculated on the Führer's sexuality. Cocteau effusively praised Breker's sculptures in an article entitled 'Salut à Breker' published in 1942. This piece caused him to be arraigned on charges of collaboration after the war, though he was cleared of any wrongdoing and had used his contacts to his failed attempt to save friends such as Max Jacob. Later, after growing closer with communists such as Louis Aragon, Cocteau would name Joseph Stalin as "the only great politician of the era."


title: Jean Cocteau

text: In 1940, "Le Bel Indifférent", Cocteau's play written for and starring Édith Piaf (who died the day before Cocteau), was enormously successful.


title: Jean Cocteau

text: Cocteau's later years are mostly associated with his films. Cocteau's films, most of which he both wrote and directed, were particularly important in introducing the avant-garde into French cinema and influenced to a certain degree the upcoming French New Wave genre.


title: Jean Cocteau

text: Following "The Blood of a Poet" (1930), his best known films include "Beauty and the Beast" (1946), "Les Parents terribles" (1948), and "Orpheus" (1949). His final film, "Le Testament d'Orphée" ("The Testament of Orpheus") (1960), featured appearances by Picasso and matador Luis Miguel Dominguín, along with Yul Brynner, who also helped finance the film.


title: Jean Cocteau

text: In 1945 Cocteau was one of several designers who created sets for the Théâtre de la Mode. He drew inspiration from filmmaker René Clair while making "Tribute to René Clair: I Married a Witch". The maquette is described in his "Journal 1942–1945," in his entry for 12 February 1945:


title: Jean Cocteau

text: In 1956 Cocteau decorated the "Chapelle Saint-Pierre" in Villefranche-sur-Mer with mural paintings. The following year he also decorated the marriage hall at the Hôtel de Ville in Menton.


title: Jean Cocteau

text: Jean Cocteau never hid his homosexuality. He was the author of the mildly homoerotic and semi-autobiographical "Le Livre blanc" (translated as "The White Paper" or "The White Book"), published anonymously in 1928. He never repudiated its authorship and a later edition of the novel features his foreword and drawings. The novel begins:


title: Jean Cocteau

text: Frequently his work, either literary ("Les enfants terribles"), graphic (erotic drawings, book illustration, paintings) or cinematographic ("The Blood of a Poet", "Orpheus", "Beauty and the Beast"), is pervaded with homosexual undertones, homoerotic imagery/symbolism or camp. In 1947 Paul Morihien published a clandestine edition of "Querelle de Brest" by Jean Genet, featuring 29 very explicit erotic drawings by Cocteau. In recent years several albums of Cocteau's homoerotica have been available to the general public.


title: Jean Cocteau

text: It is widely believed that Cocteau had affairs with Raymond Radiguet, Jean Desbordes, Marcel Khill, and Panama Al Brown.


title: Jean Cocteau

text: In the 1930s, Cocteau is rumoured to have had a very brief affair with Princess Natalie Paley, the daughter of a Romanov Grand Duke and herself a sometime actress, model, and former wife of couturier Lucien Lelong.


title: Jean Cocteau

text: Cocteau's longest-lasting relationships were with French actors Jean Marais and Édouard Dermit, whom Cocteau formally adopted. Cocteau cast Marais in "The Eternal Return" (1943), "Beauty and the Beast" (1946), "Ruy Blas" (1947), and "Orpheus" (1949).


title: Jean Cocteau

text: Cocteau died of a heart attack at his château in Milly-la-Forêt, Essonne, France, on 11 October 1963 at the age of 74. His friend, French singer Édith Piaf, died the day before but that was announced on the morning of Cocteau's day of death; it has been said, in a story which is almost certainly apocryphal, that his heart failed upon hearing of Piaf's death. Cocteau's health had already been in decline for several months, and he had previously had a severe heart attack on 22 April 1963. A more plausible suggestion for the reason behind this decline in health has been proposed by author Roger Peyrefitte, who notes that Cocteau had been devastated by a breach with his longtime friend, socialite and notable patron Francine Weisweiller, as a result of an affair she had been having with a minor writer. Weisweiller and Cocteau did not reconcile until shortly before Cocteau's death.


title: Jean Cocteau

text: According to his wishes Cocteau is buried beneath the floor of the Chapelle Saint-Blaise des Simples in Milly-la-Forêt. The epitaph on his gravestone set in the floor of the chapel reads: "I stay with you" ("Je reste avec vous").


title: Jean Cocteau

text: During his life, Cocteau was commander of the Legion of Honor, Member of the Mallarmé Academy, German Academy (Berlin), American Academy, Mark Twain (U.S.A) Academy, Honorary President of the Cannes Film Festival, Honorary President of the France-Hungary Association and President of the Jazz Academy and of the Academy of the Disc.


title: Home video game console

text: A home video game console is a video game console that is designed to be connected to a display device, such as a television, and an external power source as to play video games. Home consoles are generally less powerful and customizable than personal computers, designed to have advanced graphics abilities but limited memory and storage space to keep the units affordable. While initial consoles were dedicated units with only a few games fixed into the electronic circuits of the system, most consoles since support the use of swappable game media, either through game cartridges, optical discs, or through digital distribution to internal storage.


title: Home video game console

text: There have been numerous home video game consoles since the first commercial unit, the Magnavox Odyssey in 1972. Historically these consoles have been grouped into generations lasting each about six years based on common technical specifications. As of 2021, there have been nine console generations, with the current leading manufactures being Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo; past console manufacturers have included Atari, Fairchild, Intellivision Entertainment, Coleco, Sega, NEC, 3DO, and SNK.


title: Home video game console

text: A home video game console is a predesigned piece of electronic hardware that is meant to be placed at a fixed location at one's home, connected to a display like a television screen or computer monitor, and to an external power source, to play video games on using one or more video game controllers. This differs from a handheld game console which will have a built-in screen, controller buttons/features, and a power supply like a battery or battery pack.


title: Home video game console

text: Earlier home consoles were typically built from a selection of standard and highly customized integrated computer chips, packaged onto circuit boards and cases. Over time, home console design has converged to a degree with personal computers, using similar component and system design, including standardization with main computer chip architecture. Consoles remain as fixed systems, lacking the customization options that personal computer components have, and most consoles include customized components to maximize space and reduce power consumption to provide the best performance for game playing, while lowering costs with reduced storage and memory configurations.


title: Home video game console

text: Home video game consoles typically can play a multitude of games, offered either as game cartridges (or ROM cartridges), on optical media like CD-ROM or DVD, or obtained by digital distribution. Early consoles, also considered dedicated consoles, had games that were fixed in the electronic circuitry of the hardware. Some facets may be controlled by switching external controls on the console but the games could not be changed themselves.


title: Home video game console

text: Most home consoles require a separate game controller, and may support multiple controllers for multiplayer games. Some console games can only be played with special, unconventional game controllers, such as light guns for rail shooters and guitar controllers for music games. Some consoles also possess the ability to connect and interface with a particular handheld game system, which certain games can leverage to provide alternate control schemes, second screen gameplay elements, exclusive unlockable content or the ability to transfer certain game data.


title: Home video game console

text: The first commercial video game console was the Magnavox Odyssey, developed by Ralph H. Baer and first released commercially in 1972. It was shortly followed by the release of the home version of "Pong" by Atari Inc. in 1975 based on the arcade game. A number of clones of both systems rushed to fill the nascent home console market and the video game industry suffered a small recession in 1977 due to this.


title: Home video game console

text: The Fairchild Channel F, released in 1976, was the first console to use game cartridges, which was then used by the Atari VCS and several other consoles of the second generation and led to a second boom in the video game industry in the United States and around the globe. During this time, Atari Inc. had been sold to Warner Communications, and due to a change of leadership, several programmers left the company and founded Activision, becoming the first third-party developer. Activision's success led to a rush of new developers creating games without any publishing controls for these systems. The market became flooded with poor quality games, and combined with the rising popularity of the personal computer and the economic recession of the early 1980s, led to the video game crash of 1983 in the U.S. market. Nintendo, which had released its Famicom console in Japan that year, took several cautionary steps to limit game production to only licensed games, and was able to introduce the Famicom, rebranded as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in 1985 into the U.S. market. The NES helped to revive the console market and gave Nintendo dominance during the late 1980s.


title: Home video game console

text: Sega took advantage of the newfound U.S. growth to market its Sega Genesis against the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in the early 1990s in the so-called "console wars" and emphasized the notion of "bits" as a major selling point for consumers. The consumer adoption of optical discs with larger storage capacity in the mid-1995 led many console manufactures to move away from cartridges to CD-ROMs and later to DVDs and other formats, with Sony's PlayStation line introducing even more features that gave it an advantage in the market; the PlayStation 2, released in 2000, remains the best-selling console to date with over 155 million units sold. Microsoft, fearing that the PlayStation 2 was threatening the competitive edge of the personal computer, entered the console space with its Xbox line in 2001. Internet connectivity had become commonplace by the mid-2000s, and nearly all home consoles supported digital distribution and online service offerings by the 2010s.


title: Home video game console

text: With Sony and Microsoft's dominance in hardware capabilities, most other major manufacturers have since dropped out of the hardware business, but maintain a presence in the game development and licensing space. Nintendo remains the only competitor having taken a blue ocean strategy by offering more original console concepts such as motion sensing in the Wii and the hybrid design of the Nintendo Switch.


title: Home video game console

text: Within the home video game console market, the leading consoles have often been grouped into generations, consoles that were major competitors in the marketplace. There have been nine generations of consoles since the 1970s, with a new generation appearing about every five years in accordance with Moore's law.


title: Home video game console

text: There are more than 1000 home video game consoles known to exist, the vast majority of which were released during the first generation: only ' home video game consoles were released between the second and current generation, ' were canceled. This list is divided into console generations which are named based on the dominant console type of the era, though not all consoles of those eras are of the same type. Some eras are referred to based on how many bits a major console could process. The "128-bit era" (sixth generation) was the final era in which this practice was widespread.


title: Home video game console

text: This list only counts the first iteration of each console's hardware, because several systems have had slim, enhanced or other hardware revisions, but they aren't individually listed here. The list also includes unreleased systems. If a series of home video game consoles begins in a generation and lasts to another generation, it is listed in the generation the series began. This list does not claim to be complete.


title: Home video game console

text: This list does not include other types of video game consoles such as handheld game consoles, which are usually of lower computational power than home consoles due to their smaller size, microconsoles, which are usually low-cost Android-based devices that rely on downloading, retro style consoles, or dedicated consoles past the first generation, which have games built in and do not use any form of physical media. Consoles have been redesigned from time to time to improve their market appeal. Redesigned models are not listed on their own.


title: Home video game console

text: The list omits the more than 900 home video game consoles known to have been released in the first generation of video game consoles - those that were generally game consoles for a single dedicated game, such as home "Pong" consoles. Documented consoles of this generation can be found at list of first generation home video game consoles.


title: Kuwait City

text: Kuwait City () is the capital and largest city of Kuwait. Located at the heart of the country on the south shore of Kuwait Bay on the Persian Gulf, it is the political, cultural and economical centre of the emirate, containing Kuwait's Seif Palace, government offices, and the headquarters of most Kuwaiti corporations and banks. It is one of the hottest cities in summer on earth, with average summer high temperatures over 45 °C (113 °F) for three months of the year.


title: Kuwait City

text: As of 2018, the metropolitan area had roughly 3 million inhabitants (more than 70% of the country's population). The city itself has no administrative status. All six governorates of the country comprise parts of the urban agglomeration, which is subdived in numerous areas. In a more narrow sense, "Kuwait City" can also refer only to the town's historic core, which nowadays is part of the Capital Governorate and seamlessly merges with the adjacent urban areas.


title: Kuwait City

text: Kuwait City's trade and transportation needs are served by Kuwait International Airport, Mina Al-Shuwaik (Shuwaik Port) and Mina Al Ahmadi (Ahmadi Port).


title: Kuwait City

text: In 1613, the town of Kuwait was founded in modern-day Kuwait City as a fishing village inhabited by fishermen. In 1716, the Bani Utubs settled in Kuwait. At the time of the arrival of the Utubs, Kuwait was still inhabited by a few fishermen and primarily functioned as a fishing village. In the eighteenth century, Kuwait prospered and rapidly became the principal commercial center for the transit of goods between India, Muscat, Baghdad and Arabia. By the mid 1700s, Kuwait had already established itself as the major trading route from the Persian Gulf to Aleppo.


title: Kuwait City

text: During the Persian siege of Basra in 1775–1779, Iraqi merchants took refuge in Kuwait and were partly instrumental in the expansion of Kuwait's boat-building and trading activities. As a result, Kuwait's maritime commerce boomed. Between the years 1775 and 1779, the Indian trade routes with Baghdad, Aleppo, Smyrna and Constantinople were diverted to Kuwait. The East India Company was diverted to Kuwait in 1792. The East India Company secured the sea routes between Kuwait, India and the east coasts of Africa. After the Persian withdrawal from Basra in 1779, Kuwait continued to attract trade away from Basra.


title: Kuwait City

text: Kuwait was the center of boat building in the Persian Gulf region. During the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ship vessels made in Kuwait carried the bulk of trade between the ports of India, East Africa and the Red Sea. Kuwaiti ship vessels were renowned throughout the Indian Ocean. Regional geopolitical turbulence helped foster economic prosperity in Kuwait in the second half of the 18th century. Kuwait became prosperous due to Basra's instability in the late 18th century. In the late 18th century, Kuwait partly functioned as a haven for Basra's merchants fleeing Ottoman government persecution. According to Palgrave, Kuwaitis developed a reputation as the best sailors in the Persian Gulf.


title: Kuwait City

text: During the reign of Mubarak Al-Sabah, Kuwait was dubbed the "Marseilles of the Gulf" because its economic vitality attracted a large variety of people. In the first decades of the twentieth century, Kuwait had a well-established elite: wealthy trading families who were linked by marriage and shared economic interests.


title: Kuwait City

text: In 1937, Freya Stark wrote about the extent of poverty in Kuwait at the time:Poverty has settled in Kuwait more heavily since my last visit five years ago, both by sea, where the pearl trade continues to decline, and by land, where the blockade established by Saudi Arabia now harms the merchants.


title: Kuwait City

text: Some prominent merchant families left Kuwait in the early 1930s due to the prevalence of economic hardship. At the time of the discovery of oil in 1937, most of Kuwait's inhabitants were impoverished.


title: Kuwait City

text: From 1946 to 1982, Kuwait experienced a period of prosperity driven by oil and its liberal atmosphere. In popular discourse, the years between 1946 and 1982 are referred to as the "Golden Era". In 1950, a major public-work programme began to enable Kuwaitis to enjoy a modern standard of living. By 1952, the country became the largest oil exporter in the Persian Gulf region. In the following year, the country's annual oil income grew to $169 million. This massive growth attracted many foreign workers, especially from Palestine, Egypt and India and helped finance the development of a new master plan, which the state approved in 1952. In June 1961, Kuwait became independent with the end of the British protectorate and the sheikh Abdullah Al-Salim Al-Sabah became an Emir. Under the terms of the newly drafted constitution, Kuwait held its first parliamentary elections in 1963. Kuwait was the first Persian Gulf country to establish a constitution and parliament.


title: Kuwait City

text: In the 1960s and 1970s, Kuwait was the most developed country in the region. Kuwait was the pioneer in the Middle East in diversifying its earnings away from oil exports. The Kuwait Investment Authority is the world's first sovereign wealth fund. From the 1970s onward, Kuwait scored highest of all Arab countries on the Human Development Index. Kuwait University was established in 1966. Kuwait's theatre industry was well-known throughout the Arab world. In the 1960s and 1970s, Kuwait's press was described as one of the freest in the world. Kuwait was the pioneer in the literary renaissance in the Arab region. In 1958, "Al Arabi" magazine was first published, the magazine went on to become the most popular magazine in the Arab world. Many Arab writers moved to Kuwait for freedom of expression because Kuwait had greater freedom of expression than elsewhere in the Arab world. Kuwait was a haven for writers and journalists from all parts of the Middle East. The Iraqi poet Ahmed Matar left Iraq in the 1970s to take refuge in the more liberal environment of Kuwait.


title: Kuwait City

text: Kuwaiti society embraced liberal and Western attitudes throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Most Kuwaiti women did not wear the hijab in the 1960s and 1970s. At Kuwait University, mini-skirts were more common than the hijab.


title: Kuwait City

text: In the early 1980s, Kuwait experienced a major economic crisis after the Souk Al-Manakh stock market crash and decrease in oil price.


title: Kuwait City

text: During the Iran–Iraq War, Kuwait supported Iraq. Throughout the 1980s, there were several terror attacks in Kuwait, including the 1983 Kuwait bombings, hijacking of several Kuwait Airways planes and attempted assassination of Emir Jaber in 1985. Kuwait was a leading regional hub of science and technology in the 1960s and 1970s up until the early 1980s, the scientific research sector significantly suffered due to the terror attacks.


title: Kuwait City

text: The Kuwaiti government strongly advocated Islamism throughout the 1980s. At that time, the most serious threat to the continuity of Al Sabah came from home-grown secular democrats. The secular Kuwaiti opposition were protesting the 1976 suspension of the parliament. Al Sabah were attracted to Islamists preaching the virtues of a hierarchical order that included loyalty to the Kuwaiti monarchy. In 1981, the Kuwaiti government gerrymandered electoral districts in favor of the Islamists. Islamists were the government's main allies, hence Islamists were able to colonize state agencies, such as the government ministries. By the mid-1980s, Kuwait was described as an autocracy. In 1986, Emir Jaber suspended the parliament.


title: Kuwait City

text: After the Iran–Iraq War ended, Kuwait declined an Iraqi request to forgive its US$65 billion debt. An economic rivalry between the two countries ensued after Kuwait increased its oil production by 40 percent. Tensions between the two countries increased further in July 1990, after Iraq complained to OPEC claiming that Kuwait was stealing its oil from a field near the Iraq–Kuwait border by slant drilling of the Rumaila field.


title: Kuwait City

text: In August 1990, Iraqi forces invaded and annexed Kuwait. After a series of failed diplomatic negotiations, the United States led a coalition to remove the Iraqi forces from Kuwait, in what became known as the Gulf War. On 26 February 1991, the coalition succeeded in driving out the Iraqi forces. As they retreated, Iraqi forces carried out a scorched earth policy by setting oil wells on fire. During the Iraqi occupation, more than 1,000 Kuwaiti civilians were killed. In addition, more than 600 Kuwaitis went missing during Iraq's occupation, approximately 375 remains were found in mass graves in Iraq.


title: Kuwait City

text: In March 2003, Kuwait became the springboard for the US-led invasion of Iraq. Upon the death of the Emir Jaber, in January 2006, Saad Al-Sabah succeeded him but was removed nine days later by the Kuwaiti parliament due to his ailing health. Sabah Al-Sabah was sworn in as Emir.


title: Kuwait City

text: Kuwait City is located on Kuwait Bay, a natural deep-water harbor. 90% of Kuwait's population live within the Kuwait Bay coast. The country is generally low-lying, with the highest point being above sea level. It has nine islands, all of which, with the exception of Failaka Island, are uninhabited. With an area of , the Bubiyan is the largest island in Kuwait and is connected to the rest of the country by a bridge. The land area is considered arable and sparse vegetation is found along its coastline.


title: Kuwait City

text: Kuwait's Burgan field has a total capacity of approximately of proven oil reserves. During the 1991 Kuwaiti oil fires, more than 500 oil lakes were created covering a combined surface area of about . The resulting soil contamination due to oil and soot accumulation had made eastern and south-eastern parts of Kuwait uninhabitable. Sand and oil residue had reduced large parts of the Kuwaiti desert to semi-asphalt surfaces. The oil spills during the Gulf War also drastically affected Kuwait's marine resources.


title: Kuwait City

text: Kuwait City has a hot desert climate (Köppen: "BWh") with extremely hot, very prolonged summers and mild, short winters. It is one of the hottest cities in summer on Earth. Average summer high temperatures are above for three months of the year, and during heat waves; the daytime temperature regularly exceeds with nighttime lows often remaining above . In winter, nighttime temperatures frequently drop below . Considering its coastal position and relative distance to the equator in comparison with the hot desert climates in Africa and Saudi Arabia, the heat in the city is rather extreme - being surrounded in almost every direction by the hot desert.


title: Kuwait City

text: Sand storms occur at times during summer from the shamal wind. Sand storms can occur any time of year but occur mostly during summer, and less frequently during autumn.


title: Kuwait City

text: Kuwait has a petroleum-based economy, petroleum and fertilizers are the main export products. The Kuwaiti dinar is the highest-valued currency unit in the world. Petroleum accounts for 43% of GDP and 70% of export earnings. The Kuwait Stock Exchange is the second-largest stock exchange in the Arab world.


title: Kuwait City

text: Kuwait is known for its home-grown tradition of theatre. Kuwait is the only Arab country in the Persian Gulf region with a theatrical tradition. The Arabic theatrical movement in Kuwait constitutes a major part of the country's Arabic cultural life. Theatrical activities in Kuwait began in the 1920s when the first spoken dramas were released. Theatre activities are still popular today.


title: Kuwait City

text: Kuwaiti soap operas (المسلسلات الكويتية) are among the most-watched soap operas in the Arab world. Most Gulf soap operas are based in Kuwait. Although usually performed in the Kuwaiti dialect, some Kuwaiti soap operas were successful as far away as Tunisia.


title: Kuwait City

text: The city is home to the Al Kuwait SC, which has traditionally provided Kuwait's national basketball team with key players.


title: Adenosine

text: Adenosine (symbol A) is an organic compound that occurs widely in nature in the form of diverse derivatives. The molecule consists of an adenine attached to a ribose via a β-N-glycosidic bond. Adenosine is one of the four nucleoside building blocks of RNA (and its derivative deoxyadenosine is a building block of DNA), which are essential for all life. Its derivatives include the energy carriers adenosine mono-, di-, and triphosphate, also known as AMP/ADP/ATP. Cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP) is pervasive in signal transduction. Adenosine is used as an intravenous medication for some cardiac arrhythmias.


title: Adenosine

text: Adenosyl (abbreviated Ado or 5'-dAdo) is the chemical group formed by removal of the 5′-hydroxy (OH) group. It is found in adenosylcobalamin (an active form of vitamin B12) and as a radical in radical SAM enzymes.


title: Adenosine

text: In individuals with supraventricular tachycardia (SVT), adenosine is used to help identify and convert the rhythm.


title: Adenosine

text: Certain SVTs can be successfully terminated with adenosine. This includes any re-entrant arrhythmias that require the AV node for the re-entry, e.g., AV reentrant tachycardia (AVRT) and AV nodal reentrant tachycardia (AVNRT). In addition, atrial tachycardia can sometimes be terminated with adenosine.


title: Adenosine

text: Fast rhythms of the heart that are confined to the atria (e.g., atrial fibrillation and atrial flutter) or ventricles (e.g., monomorphic ventricular tachycardia), and do not involve the AV node as part of the re-entrant circuit, are not typically converted by adenosine. However, the ventricular response rate is temporarily slowed with adenosine in such cases.


title: Adenosine

text: Because of the effects of adenosine on AV node-dependent SVTs, adenosine is considered a class V antiarrhythmic agent. When adenosine is used to cardiovert an abnormal rhythm, it is normal for the heart to enter ventricular asystole for a few seconds. This can be disconcerting to a normally conscious patient, and is associated with angina-like sensations in the chest.


title: Adenosine

text: Adenosine is used as an adjunct to thallium (TI 201) or technetium (Tc99m) myocardial perfusion scintigraphy (nuclear stress test) in patients unable to undergo adequate stress testing with exercise.


title: Adenosine

text: When given for the evaluation or treatment of a supraventricular tachycardia (SVT), the initial dose is 6 mg to 12 mg, depending on standing orders or provider preference, given as a rapid parenteral infusion. Due to adenosine's extremely short half-life, the IV line is started as proximal (near) to the heart as possible, such as the antecubital fossa. The IV push is often followed with a flush of 10–20 mL of normal saline. If this has no effect (i.e., no evidence of transient AV block), a dose of 12 mg can be given 1–2 minutes after the first dose. When given to dilate the arteries, such as in a "stress test", the dosage is typically 0.14 mg/kg/min, administered for 4 or 6 minutes, depending on the protocol.


title: Adenosine

text: The recommended dose may be increased in patients on theophylline since methylxanthines prevent binding of adenosine at receptor sites. The dose is often decreased in patients on dipyridamole (Persantine) and diazepam (Valium) because adenosine potentiates the effects of these drugs. The recommended dose is also reduced by half in patients presenting congestive heart failure, myocardial infarction, shock, hypoxia, and/or chronic liver disease or chronic kidney disease, and in elderly patients.


title: Adenosine

text: Methylxanthines (e.g. caffeine found in coffee, theophylline found in tea, or theobromine found in chocolate) have a purine structure and bind to some of the same receptors as adenosine. Methylxanthines act as competitive antagonists of adenosine and can blunt its pharmacological effects. Individuals taking large quantities of methylxanthines may require increased doses of adenosine.


title: Adenosine

text: Caffeine acts by blocking binding of adenosine to the adenosine A receptor, which enhances release of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. Caffeine also increases cyclic AMP levels through nonselective inhibition of phosphodiesterase. "Caffeine has a three-dimensional structure similar to that of adenosine," which allows it to bind and block its receptors.


title: Adenosine

text: Adenosine is an endogenous purine nucleoside that modulates many physiological processes. Cellular signaling by adenosine occurs through four known adenosine receptor subtypes (A, A, A, and A).


title: Adenosine

text: Extracellular adenosine concentrations from normal cells are approximately 300 nM; however, in response to cellular damage (e.g., in inflammatory or ischemic tissue), these concentrations are quickly elevated (600–1,200 nM). Thus, in regard to stress or injury, the function of adenosine is primarily that of cytoprotection preventing tissue damage during instances of hypoxia, ischemia, and seizure activity. Activation of A receptors produces a constellation of responses that in general can be classified as anti-inflammatory. Enzymatic production of adenosine can be anti-inflammatory or immunosuppressive.


title: Adenosine

text: All adenosine receptor subtypes (A, A, A, and A) are G-protein-coupled receptors. The four receptor subtypes are further classified based on their ability to either stimulate or inhibit adenylate cyclase activity. The A receptors couple to G and decreases cAMP levels, while the A adenosine receptors couple to G, which stimulates adenylate cyclase activity. In addition, A receptors couple to G, which has been reported to mediate adenosine inhibition of Ca conductance, whereas A and A receptors also couple to G and stimulate phospholipase activity.


title: Adenosine

text: Researchers at Cornell University have recently shown adenosine receptors to be key in opening the blood-brain barrier (BBB).


title: Adenosine

text: Mice dosed with adenosine have shown increased transport across the BBB of amyloid plaque antibodies and prodrugs associated with Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's, multiple sclerosis, and cancers of the central nervous system.


title: Adenosine

text: Adenosine is an endogenous agonist of the ghrelin/growth hormone secretagogue receptor. However, while it is able to increase appetite, unlike other agonists of this receptor, adenosine is unable to induce the secretion of growth hormone and increase its plasma levels.


title: Adenosine

text: When it is administered intravenously, adenosine causes transient heart block in the atrioventricular (AV) node. This is mediated via the A receptor, inhibiting adenylyl cyclase, reducing cAMP and so causing cell hyperpolarization by increasing K efflux via inward rectifier K channels, subsequently inhibiting Ca current. It also causes endothelial-dependent relaxation of smooth muscle as is found inside the artery walls. This causes dilation of the "normal" segments of arteries, i.e. where the endothelium is not separated from the tunica media by atherosclerotic plaque. This feature allows physicians to use adenosine to test for blockages in the coronary arteries, by exaggerating the difference between the normal and abnormal segments.


title: Adenosine

text: The administration of adenosine also reduces blood flow to coronary arteries past the occlusion. Other coronary arteries dilate when adenosine is administered while the segment past the occlusion is already maximally dilated, which is a process called coronary steal. This leads to less blood reaching the ischemic tissue, which in turn produces the characteristic chest pain.


title: Adenosine

text: Adenosine used as a second messenger can be the result of "de novo" purine biosynthesis via adenosine monophosphate (AMP), though it is possible other pathways exist.


title: Adenosine

text: When adenosine enters the circulation, it is broken down by adenosine deaminase, which is present in red blood cells and the vessel wall.


title: Adenosine

text: Dipyridamole, an inhibitor of adenosine nucleoside transporter, allows adenosine to accumulate in the blood stream. This causes an increase in coronary vasodilatation.


title: Adenosine

text: The adenosine analog NITD008 has been reported to directly inhibit the recombinant RNA-dependent RNA polymerase of the dengue virus by terminating its RNA chain synthesis. This interaction suppresses peak viremia and rise in cytokines and prevents lethality in infected animals, raising the possibility of a new treatment for this flavivirus. The 7-deaza-adenosine analog has been shown to inhibit the replication of the hepatitis C virus. BCX4430 is protective against Ebola and Marburg viruses. Such adenosine analogs are potentially clinically useful since they can be taken orally.


title: Adenosine

text: Adenosine is believed to be an anti-inflammatory agent at the A receptor. Topical treatment of adenosine to foot wounds in diabetes mellitus has been shown in lab animals to drastically increase tissue repair and reconstruction. Topical administration of adenosine for use in wound-healing deficiencies and diabetes mellitus in humans is currently under clinical investigation.


title: Adenosine

text: Caffeine's stimulatory effects are credited primarily (although not entirely) to its capacity to block adenosine receptors, thereby reducing the inhibitory tonus of adenosine in the CNS. This reduction in adenosine activity leads to increased activity of the neurotransmitters dopamine and glutamate. Experimental evidence suggests that adenosine and adenosine agonists can activate Trk receptor phosphorylation through a mechanism that requires the adenosine A receptor.


title: Adenosine

text: Adenosine has been shown to promote thickening of hair on people with thinning hair. A 2013 study compared topical adenosine with minoxidil in male androgenetic alopecia, finding it was as potent as minoxidil (in overall treatment outcomes) but with higher satisfaction rate with patients due to “faster prevention of hair loss and appearance of the newly grown hairs” (further trials were called for to clarify the findings).


title: Adenosine

text: The principal component of cannabis delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and the endocannabinoid anandamide (AEA) induce sleep in rats by increasing adenosine levels in the basal forebrain. They also significantly increase slow-wave sleep during the third hour, mediated by CB1 receptor activation. These findings identify a potential therapeutic use of cannabinoids to induce sleep in conditions where sleep may be severely attenuated.


title: Michel Houellebecq

text: Michel Houellebecq (; born Michel Thomas, 26 February 1956 or 1958) is a French author, known for his novels, poems and essays, as well as an occasional actor, filmmaker and singer.


title: Michel Houellebecq

text: His first book was a biographical essay on the horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. Houellebecq published his first novel, "Whatever", in 1994. His next novel, "Atomised", published in 1998, brought him international fame as well as controversy. "Platform" followed in 2001. He has published several books of poetry, including "The Art of Struggle" in 1996.


title: Michel Houellebecq

text: An offhand remark about Islam during a publicity tour for his 2001 novel "Platform" led to Houellebecq being taken to court for inciting racial hatred (he was eventually cleared of all charges). He subsequently moved to Ireland for several years, before moving back to France, where he currently resides. He was described in 2015 as "France’s biggest literary export and, some say, greatest living writer." In a 2017 DW article he is dubbed the "undisputed star, and enfant terrible, of modern French literature".


title: Michel Houellebecq

text: In 2010, he published "The Map and the Territory", which won the prestigious Prix Goncourt. In 2015, his next novel, "Submission", sparked another controversy for its depiction of Islam. He was also recently accused of plagiarism concerning "Submission". "Anéantir" was published in 2022.


title: Michel Houellebecq

text: Houellebecq was born in 1956 on the French island of Réunion, the son of Lucie Ceccaldi, a French physician born in Algeria of Corsican descent, and René Thomas, a ski instructor and mountain guide. He lived in Algeria from the age of five months until 1961, with his maternal grandmother. In a lengthy autobiographical article published on his website (now defunct), he states that his parents "lost interest in [his] existence pretty quickly", and at the age of six, he was sent to France to live with his paternal grandmother, a communist, while his mother left to live a hippie lifestyle in Brazil with her recent boyfriend. His grandmother's maiden name was Houellebecq, which he took as his pen name. Later, he went to Lycée Henri Moissan, a high school at Meaux north-east of Paris, as a boarder. He then went to Lycée Chaptal in Paris to follow preparation courses in order to qualify for "grandes écoles" (elite schools). He began attending the Institut National Agronomique Paris-Grignon in 1975. He started a literary review called "Karamazov" (named after Fyodor Dostoevsky's last novel) and wrote poetry. He graduated in 1980, married and had a son; then he divorced, and became depressed.


title: Michel Houellebecq

text: His third marriage was in September 2018 to Qianyun Lysis Li, a Chinese woman 34 years his junior, and a student of his works.


title: Michel Houellebecq

text: Houellebecq's first poems appeared in 1985 in the magazine "La Nouvelle Revue". Six years later, in 1991, he published a biographical essay on the horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, a teenage passion, with the programmatic subtitle "Against the World, Against Life". A short poetical essay named "Rester vivant : méthode" ("To Stay Alive") appeared the same year, dealing with the art of writing as a way of life – or rather, a "way of not-dying" and being able to write in spite of apathy and disgust for life (a film adaptation was made in 2016). It was followed by his first collection of poetry, "La poursuite du bonheur" ("The pursuit of happiness"). Meanwhile, he worked as a computer administrator in Paris, including at the French National Assembly, before he became the so-called "pop star of the single generation", starting to gain fame in 1994 with his debut novel "Extension du domaine de la lutte", published by Maurice Nadeau (translated in English by Paul Hammond and published as "Whatever"). It reads as a first person narrative, alternating between realistic accounts of the (unnamed) protagonist's bleak and solitary life as a computer programmer, and his idiosyncratic musings about society, some of which are presented in the form of "animal fictions"; he teams up with an even more desperate colleague (he is a virgin at the age of 28) who later gets killed in a car accident, which triggers the narrator's mental breakdown and eventual admission in a psychiatric hospital; even there, he theorizes about his condition being the direct result of the contemporary social configuration, rather than a personal failure or mental illness.


title: Michel Houellebecq

text: Throughout the 1990s, Houellebecq published several books of poetry, including "Le sens du combat" in 1996 (translated as "The Art of Struggle", which, in a 2005 video interview for the magazine "Les Inrockuptibles", he cited as his most accomplished book to date, the one he would usually choose if compelled to read whatever he wanted among his published works), and articles in magazines (such as "Les Inrockuptibles") or more confidential literary publications (such as "L'Infini" edited by Philippe Sollers). Most of those texts were later collected in "Interventions" (1998). At that time, he lived at the same address as fellow writer Marc-Édouard Nabe, at 103, rue de la Convention in Paris. Nabe wrote about this proximity in "Le Vingt-Septième Livre" (2006), comparing both neighbours' careers and the way their writings were met by critics and audiences.


title: Michel Houellebecq

text: His second novel, "Les Particules Élémentaires" (translated by Frank Wynne and published in the English-speaking world as "Atomised" in the UK, or "The Elementary Particles" in the USA) was a breakthrough, bringing him national and soon international fame and controversy for its intricate mix of brutally honest social commentary and pornographic depictions (two years earlier, in 1996, while working on that novel, being interviewed by Andrew Hussey, he had presciently said : "It will either destroy me or make me famous.") It narrates the fate of two half brothers who grew up in the troubled 1960s: Michel Djerzinski, who became a prominent biologist, highly successful as a scientist but utterly withdrawn and depressed, and Bruno Clément, a French teacher, deeply disturbed and obsessed by sex; Djerzinski eventually triggers what is labeled as the "third metaphysical mutation" by retro-engineering the human species into immortal neo-humans. The book won the 1998 Prix Novembre (which was renamed Prix Décembre, following the resignation of its founder who disapproved of the prize being given to Houellebecq), missing the more prestigious Prix Goncourt for which it was the favorite. The novel became an instant "nihilistic classic" and was mostly praised for the boldness of its ideas and thought-provoking qualities, although it was also heavily criticized for its relentless bleakness and vivid depictions of racism, paedophilia, torture, as well as for being an apology for eugenics (Michiko Kakutani described it in "The New York Times" as "a deeply repugnant read"). The novel won Houellebecq (along with his translator, Frank Wynne) the International Dublin Literary Award in 2002.


title: Michel Houellebecq

text: In 2000, Houellebecq published the short fiction "Lanzarote" (published in France with a volume of his photographs), in which he explores a number of the themes he would develop in later novels, including sex tourism and fringe religions. His subsequent novel, "Plateforme" ("Platform", 2001), was another critical and commercial success. A first-person romance narrated by a 40-year-old male arts administrator named Michel, who shares many real life characteristics with the author, including his apathy and low self-esteem, it includes a depiction of life as hopeless, as well as numerous sex scenes, some of which display an approving attitude towards prostitution and sex tourism.


title: Michel Houellebecq

text: The novel's explicit criticism of Islam—the story ends with the depiction of a terrorist attack on a sex tourism venue, later compared to the Bali bombings which happened the following year—together with an interview its author gave to the magazine "Lire" in which he described Islam as "the dumbest religion," which remark led to accusations of incitement to ethnic or racial hatred against Houellebecq by several organisations, including France's Human Rights League, the Mecca-based World Islamic League as well as the mosques of Paris and Lyon. Charges were brought to trial, but a panel of three judges, delivering their verdict to a packed Paris courtroom, acquitted the author of having provoked 'racial' hatred, ascribing Houellebecq's opinions to the legitimate right of criticizing religions. The huge controversy in the media subsided following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.


title: Michel Houellebecq

text: His next novel, "La Possibilité d'une île" ("The Possibility of an Island", 2005), cycles between three characters' narratives: Daniel 1, a contemporary stand-up comedian and movie maker renowned for his extreme causticity, alternating with Daniel 24 and then Daniel 25, neo-human clones of Daniel 1 in a far future; Daniel 1 witnesses dramatic events by which a sect named the Elohimites (based on Raëlism) changes the course of history, and his autobiography constitutes a canonical account that his clones are compelled to study, both in order to acquaint themselves with their model / ancestor's troubled character (since the Elohimites' chief scientist's purported project of mind uploading turned out to be a failure) and to distance themselves from the flaws of humans. Houellebecq later adapted and directed a movie based on this novel, which was a critical and commercial failure.


title: Michel Houellebecq

text: In 2008, Flammarion published "Ennemis publics" ("Public Enemies"), a conversation via e-mail between Michel Houellebecq and Bernard-Henri Lévy, in which both reflected on their controversial reception by the mainstream media, and elaborated on their tastes and influences in literature, among other topics.


title: Michel Houellebecq

text: Houellebecq has also released three music albums on which he recites or sings selected excerpts from his poetry. Two of them were recorded with composer Jean-Jacques Birgé: "Le sens du combat" (1996, Radio France) and "Établissement d'un ciel d'alternance" (2007, Grrr Records, which Houellebecq considers the best of his recording endeavours, as handwritten in the libretto). "Présence humaine" (released in 2000 on Bertrand Burgalat's Tricatel label, and featuring musical arrangements by Burgalat himself), has a rock band backing him, and has been compared to the works of Serge Gainsbourg in the 1970s; it was re-released in 2016 with two additional tracks arranged by Jean-Claude Vannier (who famously worked on "Histoire de Melody Nelson") and a booklet featuring notes by Mishka Assayas and texts by Fernando Arrabal.


title: Michel Houellebecq

text: A recurrent theme in Houellebecq's novels is the intrusion of free-market economics into human relationships and sexuality. The original French title of "Whatever", "Extension du domaine de la lutte" (literally "broadening of the field of struggle"), alludes to economic competition extending into the search for relationships. As the book says, a free market has absolute winners and absolute losers, and the same applies to relationships in a society that does not value monogamy but rather exhorts people to seek the happiness that always eludes them through the path of sexual consumerism, in pursuit of narcissistic satisfaction. Similarly, "Platform" carries to its logical conclusion the touristic phenomenon, where Westerners of both sexes go on organized trips to developing countries in search of exotic locations and climates. In the novel, a similar popular demand arises for sex tourism, organized and sold in a corporate and professional fashion. Sex tourists are willing to sacrifice financially to experience the instinctual expression of sexuality, which has been better preserved in poor countries whose people are focused on the struggle for survival.


title: Michel Houellebecq

text: Although Houellebecq's work is often credited with building on conservative, if not reactionary, ideas, his critical depiction of the hippie movement, New Age ideology and the May 1968 generation, especially in "Atomised", echoes the thesis of Marxist sociologist Michel Clouscard.


title: Michel Houellebecq

text: His novel "La Carte et le Territoire" ("The Map and the Territory") was released in September 2010 by Flammarion and finally won its author the prestigious Prix Goncourt. This is the tale of an accidental art star and is full of insights on the contemporary art scene. "Slate" magazine accused him of plagiarising some passages of this book from French Wikipedia. Houellebecq denied the accusation of plagiarism, stating that "taking passages word for word was not stealing so long as the motives were to recycle them for artistic purposes," evoking the influence of Georges Perec, Lautreamont or Jorge Luis Borges, and advocated the use of all sorts of raw materials in literature, including advertising, recipes or mathematics problems.


title: Michel Houellebecq

text: On 7 January 2015, the date of the "Charlie Hebdo" shooting, the novel "Submission" was published. The book describes a future situation in France, set in 2022, when a Muslim party, following a victory against the National Front, is ruling the country according to Islamic law, which again generated heated controversy and accusations of Islamophobia. On the same date, a cartoon of Houellebecq appeared on the cover page of "Charlie Hebdo" with the caption "The Predictions of Wizard Houellebecq," eerily ironic in retrospect. For the second time, his fictional work appeared to echo real events involving Islamic terrorism, although "Submission" does not feature acts of terrorism and eventually presents conversion to Islam as an attractive choice for the protagonist, a typically "houellebecquian" middle-aged man with a fixation for young women. A friend of his, Bernard Maris, was killed in that shooting. In an interview with Antoine de Caunes after the shooting, Houellebecq stated he was unwell and had cancelled the promotional tour for "Submission".


title: Michel Houellebecq

text: In January 2019, Houellebecq was made a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur. His novel "Sérotonine" was published (translated as "Serotonin") in the same month. This time, one of the novel's main themes, a violent revolt from desperate farmers, appeared to echo the Yellow Vests movement.


title: Michel Houellebecq

text: "Extension du domaine de la lutte" has been adapted into a film with the same title by Philippe Harel, and later adapted as a play in Danish by Jens Albinus for the Royal Danish Theatre.


title: Michel Houellebecq

text: The English translation of his novel "Platform" was adapted as a play by the theatre company Carnal Acts for the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London in December 2004. A Spanish adaptation of the novel by Calixto Bieito, performed by Companyia Teatre Romea, premiered at the 2006 Edinburgh International Festival. Houellebecq and Bieito appeared together that same year in a TV program named "Au cœur de la nuit" / "Durch die Nacht" ("Through the night") for the French-German channel Arte.


title: Michel Houellebecq

text: Along with Loo Hui Phang, Houellebecq wrote the screenplay for the film "Monde extérieur" (2002) by David Rault and David Warren.


title: Michel Houellebecq

text: "Atomised" has been made into a German film, "Elementarteilchen", directed by Oskar Roehler, starring Moritz Bleibtreu and Franka Potente. The film premiered in 2006 at the 56th Berlin International Film Festival. It was poorly received and generally considered a watered-down take on the novel's bleakness and thought-provoking ideas.


title: Michel Houellebecq

text: The film "La Possibilité d'une île", directed by Houellebecq himself and based on his novel, premiered in France on 10 September 2008. It was a critical and commercial failure, sometimes even considered one of the worst films ever made in France, alongside Bernard Henri Levy's "Le Jour et la Nuit", although some authors found him intriguing and recognized redeeming qualities.


title: Michel Houellebecq

text: American rock singer and "godfather of punk" Iggy Pop released in 2009 the unusually quiet album "Préliminaires", which he described as influenced by his reading of Michel Houellebecq's novel "The Possibility of an Island" (one track 'A Machine for Loving' even consists in the singer merely reading a passage from the book over a musical accompaniment.). The author considered it a great honour, as he was himself deeply affected as a teenager by Iggy Pop's music with The Stooges, even going so far as to say that he was, for once, "completely happy".


title: Michel Houellebecq

text: In 2016 he participated, together with Iggy Pop and several others, in Erik Lieshout's documentary "", based on his 1991 essay.


title: Michel Houellebecq

text: In 2014, Houellebecq drew up a "project for a new constitution" based on direct democracy which would render the president of the republic elected for life, but instantly revocable by a simple popular referendum, and would permit the people to elect judges. During his 21 June 2016 appearance on "Le Petit Journal", Houellebecq said that he voted for the Socialist Party ticket headed by Anne Hidalgo and Jérôme Coumet in the 2014 Paris municipal election. In 2017 Houellebecq explained that he "doesn't believe in an ideological vote, but a vote based on class" and that "there is a class which votes for Le Pen, a class which votes for Mélenchon, a class which votes for Macron, and a class which votes for Fillon. I am part of the France which votes for Macron, because I am too rich to vote for Le Pen or Mélenchon."


title: Michel Houellebecq

text: He has also been critical of attempts to legalise euthanasia in France and Europe, writing in April 2021 in "Le Figaro" that: [W]hen a country — a society, a civilisation — gets to the point of legalising euthanasia, it loses in my eyes all right to respect. It becomes henceforth not only legitimate, but desirable, to destroy it; so that something else — another country, another society, another civilisation — might have a chance to arise.Houellebecq has been accused of putting on polemical stunts for the media. In particular, the author's statements in interviews and from his novels have led to accusations of his being anti-Islamic. In 2002, during an interview about his book "Platform" published in the literary magazine "Lire", Houellebecq remarked:


title: Michel Houellebecq

text: Islam is a dangerous religion, and has been from the moment it appeared. Fortunately, it is doomed. On one hand, because God does not exist, and even if someone is an idiot, he will eventually realize that. In the long run, the truth will triumph. On the other hand, Islam is undermined from the inside by capitalism. We can only hope that it will triumph rapidly. Materialism is a lesser evil. Its values are contemptible, but nevertheless less destructive, less cruel than those of Islam.


title: Michel Houellebecq

text: He faced trial on charges of racial hatred after calling Islam "the dumbest religion" ("la religion la plus con") in the same interview. He told a court in Paris that his words had been twisted, saying: "I have never displayed the least contempt for Muslims [but] I have as much contempt as ever for Islam." The court acquitted him. He was sued by a civil-rights group for hate speech and won on the grounds of freedom of expression. Houellebecq extended his critique to monotheistic religions in general:


title: Michel Houellebecq

text: The fundamental monotheistic texts preach neither peace nor love nor tolerance. From the start, they were texts of hatred.


title: Michel Houellebecq

text: Literary critics have labeled Houellebecq's novels "vulgar", "pamphlet literature" and "pornography"; he has been accused of obscenity, racism, misogyny and Islamophobia. His works, particularly "Atomised", have received high praise from the French literary intelligentsia, with generally positive international critical response, though there have been notably poor reviews in "The New York Times" by Michiko Kakutani and Anthony Quinn, in the "London Review of Books" by Perry Anderson, as well as mixed reviews from "The Wall Street Journal". However, without ignoring the book's grotesqueries, Lorin Stein from "Salon", later editor of "The Paris Review", made a spirited defense:


title: Michel Houellebecq

text: Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi has criticised Houellebecq's stance on Lovecraft. An essay by Todd Spaulding makes the case for why Houellebecq portrayed Lovecraft as an "obsolete reactionary" whose work was based largely on "racial hatred."


title: Michel Houellebecq

text: However, Christopher Caldwell defends Houellebecq for his overall depictions of technological loneliness and cultural alienation:


title: Joey Buttafuoco

text: Joseph A. Buttafuoco (born March 11, 1956) is an auto body shop owner from Long Island who had sex with a minor, Amy Fisher. Fisher subsequently shot his wife, Mary Jo Buttafuoco, in the face. Tabloid news coverage labelled Fisher the "Long Island Lolita".


title: Joey Buttafuoco

text: Amy Fisher and Buttafuoco began a sexual relationship around July 1991 after Fisher took her vehicle to Buttafuoco's auto body shop in Baldwin, Nassau County, New York.


title: Joey Buttafuoco

text: On May 19, 1992, Fisher confronted Buttafuoco's wife, Mary Jo, at the Buttafuocos' home. When Mary Jo answered the door, Fisher—posing as her own (fictitious) sister Ann Marie—offered, as proof of the affair, a T-shirt that Joey had given her with the logo of his auto body shop on it. The front porch confrontation escalated, and when Mary Jo demanded that Fisher leave and turned to go into the house and call Joey, Fisher shot her in the face with a .25 caliber semiautomatic pistol. Once Mary Jo regained consciousness, she identified Fisher as her assailant.


title: Joey Buttafuoco

text: The investigation of the shooting and the subsequent court cases involved a series of conflicting claims and received significant news coverage in both mainstream news outlets and tabloids.


title: Joey Buttafuoco

text: Buttafuoco's lawyer maintained that Buttafuoco was never involved with Fisher and Fisher had invented the affair, while Fisher's lawyer portrayed Fisher as a victim whom Buttafuoco manipulated into the shooting.


title: Joey Buttafuoco

text: After Fisher's assault conviction, Buttafuoco was indicted on 19 counts of statutory rape, sodomy, and endangering the welfare of a child. He initially pleaded not guilty. He later changed his plea to guilty, admitting he had sex with Fisher when she was 16 and that he had known her age at the time. He was sentenced to six months' jail time and was released after serving four months and nine days of the sentence.


title: Joey Buttafuoco

text: After his release from prison, Joey and Mary Jo Buttafuoco moved to California, where Mary Jo filed divorce papers in Ventura County Superior Court on February 3, 2003.


title: Joey Buttafuoco

text: The significant coverage of the shooting incident made Buttafuoco a minor celebrity. During Fisher's trial, Buttafuoco appeared frequently on mainstream and tabloid news programs and talk shows and gave multiple interviews to all forms of media. David Letterman, in his last year of hosting "Late Night with David Letterman", discussed the incident so often that Buttafuoco's name was a recurring punchline, while "Saturday Night Live" parodied the case in multiple sketches.


title: Joey Buttafuoco

text: During an appearance on Saturday Night Live in January 1993, Madonna performed her single "Bad Girl" from her fifth studio album, "Erotica" (1992). At the end of the performance, she ripped up an 8–by–10 photograph of Buttafuoco, while yelling to her audience "Fight the real enemy!". This action was a spoof of the actions taken by Sinéad O'Connor when she acted on the program in October 1992, in which she ripped apart a photograph of Pope John Paul II and yelled the phrase as a protest against sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church. On Season 4 Episode 18 of "Friends", Buttafuoco is referenced as hurting the cause of people named Joey. He was also referenced in an episode of


title: Joey Buttafuoco

text: "NewsRadio", where one of the characters is sanctioned for doing a story on Buttafuoco; not out of the story's veracity, but that he accidentally mispronounced the surname to refer to a swear word.


title: Joey Buttafuoco

text: In 2002, Buttafuoco participated in "Celebrity Boxing", originally slated to oppose John Wayne Bobbitt, who dropped out after being arrested for domestic abuse. Bobbitt was replaced by female pro wrestler Joanie "Chyna" Laurer. Buttafuoco, despite being booed, won the fight in a majority decision (29–28, 29–27, 28–28).


title: Joey Buttafuoco

text: On May 23, 2007, Mary Jo Buttafuocco appeared on "Larry King Live" to discuss the recent reunion of her ex-husband and the former "Long Island Lolita." At the time, Buttafuoco's second wife, Evanka, had recently filed for divorce, but withdrew her divorce petition on June 22, 2007.


title: Joey Buttafuoco

text: On March 5, 2009, Joey Buttafuoco appeared in an episode of "Judge Pirro", successfully suing an adult film actress for failure to pay an auto body bill. In 1997, Buttafuoco also appeared on "Judge Judy" with Ruth Webb.


title: Joey Buttafuoco

text: Sixteen years after the incident, Mary Jo Buttafuoco wrote a book telling her story, "Getting It Through My Thick Skull: Why I Stayed, What I Learned, and What Millions of People Involved with Sociopaths Need to Know". She was inspired to write the book after her son referred to her ex-husband as a sociopath. Not knowing what the word meant, she looked it up and had a realization which led to her going public with her story. The book was published in July 2009.


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: Jean-Luc Antoine Pierre Mélenchon (; born 19 August 1951) is a French politician who was a member of the National Assembly for the 4th constituency of Bouches-du-Rhône from 2017 to 2022. He led the "La France Insoumise" group in the National Assembly from 2017 to 2021. Mélenchon has run three times in elections for president of France; in 2012 and 2017, and a strong third in the 2022 election, where he narrowly missed continuing on to the second round in France's two-round voting system.


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: After joining the Socialist Party in 1976, he was successively elected a municipal councillor of Massy (1983) and general councillor of Essonne (1985). In 1986, he entered the Senate, to which he was reelected in 1995 and 2004. He also served as Minister for Vocational Education between 2000 and 2002, under Minister of National Education Jack Lang, in the cohabitation government of Lionel Jospin. He was part of the radical-left wing of the Socialist Party until the Reims Congress of November 2008, when he left the party to found the Left Party with Marc Dolez, a member of the National Assembly. Mélenchon first served as party president before becoming party co-president alongside Martine Billard, a position he held until 2014. As co-president of the Left Party, he joined the electoral coalition of the Left Front before the 2009 European Parliament election; he was elected as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) in the South-West France constituency and reelected in 2014. He became the Left Front's candidate in the 2012 presidential election, in which he came in fourth, receiving 11.1% of the first-round vote.


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: Mélenchon founded the party (LFI, "France Unbowed") in February 2016. He stood as a candidate in the 2017 presidential election "outside the frame of political parties", again coming in fourth, with 19.6% of the first-round vote. He became a member of the National Assembly for following the 2017 legislative election, receiving 59.9% in the second round in Bouches-du-Rhône's 4th constituency, located in Marseille (France's second-largest city). Mélenchon stood again under the LFI banner in the 2022 presidential election, coming in third with 21.95% of the vote, just over one point short of qualifying for the second round.


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: His father, Georges, was a postmaster of Spanish descent, and his mother, Jeanine Bayona, was a primary school teacher of Spanish and Sicilian descent. He grew up in Morocco, until his family moved to France in 1962.


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: Mélenchon was then educated at the Lycée Pierre-Corneille, a state secondary school in Rouen, Normandy. With a degree in philosophy from the University of Franche-Comté in Besançon and having gained the CAPES (a professional teaching qualification), he became a teacher before entering politics.


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: Jean-Luc Mélenchon left Besançon to enter professional life in Lons-le-Saunier (Jura), and joined the Socialist Party (PS) in September 1976. He soon assumed local and departmental responsibilities (deputy section secretary of Montaigu), and developed a federal newspaper that fought for a union between PS and the French Communist Party (PCF). It was at this time that the latter broke the agreements of the union of the left on a joint program of government. He then came to the attention of Claude Germon, mayor of Massy (Essonne) and member of the executive office of the PS responsible for the business section. Without stable work after his application was rejected at the "Croix du Jura" newspaper, he was hired by Claude Germon to become his private secretary.


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: He became one of the leading Mitterrandist leaders of the Essonne federation, which led him to the position of first secretary of this federation at the Valence Congress in 1981; he remained in this position until 1986. He positioned himself both against the "Second left" of Michel Rocard and the "Centre of socialist studies, research, and education" (CERES) of Jean-Pierre Chevènement.


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: At the Reims Congress, in September 2008, the political current ""Trait d'union"", created after the victory of the "No" in the French European Constitution referendum of 2005, Mélenchon made a new contribution. On the eve of the filing of the motions, an agreement was reached between the seven contributions of the left wing of the PS, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon was one of the signatories of Motion C entitled "A world ahead", led by Benoît Hamon. He described this gathering as a "historic event": For the first time, this motion brought together all the sensibilities of the left wing of the PS, with emblematic personalities like Gérard Filoche, Marie-Noëlle Lienemann, and Paul Quilès.


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: On 6 November 2008, the Socialist militants voted to decide between 6 motions. The motion supported by Ségolène Royal led with about 29% of the votes cast, while the one led by Benoît Hamon came in fourth with 18.5%. For Jean-Luc Mélenchon, it is a victory of the outgoing majority, which carries 80% of the votes (with the three firsts motions) and, among them, the motion advocating the alliance in the center. Believing themselves too far from this trend to the point that it would not be useful to take part in the congress, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Marc Dolez announced on 7 November their decision, "out of fidelity to their commitments", and for their independence of action, to leave the Socialist Party, and to create a new movement "without concession facing the right".


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: They announced "the construction of a new left-wing party", simply called the "Left Party" (on the German model of Die Linke), and called for "the constitution of a left-wing front for the European elections". On 18 November, in a meeting with the French Communist Party, the two parties announced their alliance in the form of a "partnership", within the framework of a "left front for another democratic and social Europe, against the ratification of the Treaty of Lisbon and the current European Treaties". The launch meeting of the Left Party was held on 29 November in Saint-Ouen, in the presence of Die Linke's co-chairman, Oskar Lafontaine.


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: Mélenchon was the candidate representing the Left Front (Communist Party of France, Left Party, Unitary Left) in the 2012 French presidential election. He took fourth place and achieved 11.10% of the vote, trailing behind François Hollande, Nicolas Sarkozy, and Marine Le Pen (and their respective parties, the Socialist Party, Union for a Popular Movement, and National Front). In comparison, the winner, François Hollande, received 28.63% of the vote.


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: Mélenchon represented the Left Front in the Pas-de-Calais' 11th constituency against his rival Marine Le Pen, where she had over 31% in the presidential election. He received third place with 21.46% of the vote, narrowly edged out for second by Socialist Party member Phillip Kemel. Mélenchon decided not to stand in the second round of the election after this result.


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: During the presidency of François Hollande, Mélenchon became one of the most critical voices in the left against his centrist free-market policy. He denounced a betrayal to the culture and ideas of the French Left.


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: On 10 February 2016, Melenchon launched the left-wing political platform La France Insoumise ("Unbowed France") during an interview on the French television channel TF1. "La France Insoumise" was subsequently endorsed by several parties, such as the Left Party and French Communist Party, in addition to members of the Europe Écologie Les Verts such as Sergio Coronado, an assembly member for the 2nd Overseas Constituency, and the mayor of Grenoble, Éric Piolle.


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: On 12 January 2017, Mélenchon secured the 500 elected sponsors required to be validated by the Constitutional Council. After Benoît Hamon won the nomination for the Parti Socialiste on a left-wing platform, beating former Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, 58–41, Hamon announced on TF1 on 27 February that he and Melenchon had been in talks to form an alliance, but their stances on the European Union separated them, as Melenchon's platform was to renegotiate EU treaties or hold a referendum. France 24 reported following this that, "Adding their scores would place a candidate in first or second place"


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: Jean-Luc Mélenchon held at a consistent 12% for most of the campaign, until a late upwards surge which put him just behind third place Francois Fillon at 18%. This late surge is mainly due to Mélenchon's performance within the second presidential debate hosted by BFM TV and CNews, where, according to an Elabe poll, he was found the most convincing candidate by 25%. However, he did not qualify for the second round of voting, winning 19% of the vote in the first round, placing fourth.


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: After the first round, Mélenchon refused to endorse Macron and told his voters that "no vote should go to the National Front", as he had done in 2002. Following constant criticism for this choice, Mélenchon invited members of La France Insoumise to vote on who he will endorse with the choices being "Vote for Emmanuel Macron", "Blank Vote", or "Abstain", with the result being announced on 2 May. 36.12% submitted a blank vote, 34.83% chose to endorse Macron, and 29.05% abstained.


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: His campaign positions included the intent to establish a Sixth Republic and preserve the environment. According to the NGOs for the development aid Action Against Hunger, Action santé mondiale, CARE France, and ONE Campaign, Jean-Luc Mélenchon was the candidate in the presidential election who is the most engaged regarding international solidarity. Together with other French intellectuals, he vigorously denounces free trade between France and the United States as an example of global exploitation.


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: In June 2017, Mélenchon became a member of the National Assembly for La France Insoumise following his win in the legislative election in the 4th constituency of Bouches-du-Rhône, which covers parts of the centre of Marseille. He won 59.9% of the vote in the second round against En Marche! candidate Corrine Versini. He defeated sitting member Patrick Mennucci in the first round, a notable member of the Socialist Party in Marseille.


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: His election to the National Assembly drew national media attention. During the examination of the 2017 Labour Law bill, he was remarked in the National Assembly for his multiple interventions, defending the Labour Code "status quo" along with fellow La France Insoumise members, arguing that flexibilisation would be harmful to workers. He drew attention from the media once more when he came in Parliament with a five euros food shopping bag to denounce a student benefits cut planned by the government.


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: In December 2019, Mélenchon received a suspended prison sentence of three months for rebellion and provocation following an altercation with police officers who had come to serve a warrant at the La France Insoumise headquarters in Paris.


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: Mélenchon was a candidate for President in the 2022 French presidential election. He was one of three candidates placed without their consent on the ballot for the 2022 French People's Primary, a non-official vote for a common left-wing candidate; he came third out of seven, behind Christiane Taubira and Yannick Jadot. Taubira withdrew in March, and endorsed Mélenchon. Mélenchon's polling numbers surged in the final weeks of campaigning, putting him within chance of making the second round.


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: In the first round of voting in France's two round voting system, he came in third place with 22% of the vote, behind president Emmanuel Macron in first place with 28%, and narrowly behind Marine Le Pen's 23% of the vote. Only the top two finishers continue on to the second round, so Mélenchon was eliminated after the results of the first round were certified. Mélenchon advised his voters not to vote for Le Pen in the second round, but did not endorse Macron. His 7.7 million first-round voters became a key demographic for the second round. He was the most popular candidate for voters aged 24–35. He was the most voted candidate in the overseas departments of Martinique, Guadeloupe, French Guiana, Réunion, Saint Pierre and Miquelon and Saint Martin, obtaining majorities in several of these jurisdictions. He was also the most voted candidate in Île-de-France.


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: Mélenchon did not run for re-election in Bouches-du-Rhône's 4th constituency, instead giving his candidacy to Manuel Bompard. Mélenchon has led the New Ecologic and Social People's Union (NUPES) coalition since May. In the 2022 parliamentary election, NUPES won 131 seats.


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: Mélenchon is a socialist republican and historical materialist, inspired primarily by Jean Jaurès (the founder of French republican socialism). He is a proponent of increased labour rights and the expansion of French welfare programmes. Mélenchon has also called for the mass redistribution of wealth to rectify existing socioeconomic inequalities. Domestic policies proposed by Mélenchon include a 100% income tax on earnings over €360,000 a year, full state reimbursement for health care costs, a reduction in presidential powers in favour of the legislature, and the easing of immigration laws. Mélenchon supports same-sex marriage and women's right to abortion. He also supports the legalisation of cannabis.


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: Mélenchon believes in the "créolisation" of French culture and society, a term coined by poet Martinican Édouard Glissant, who defines it as "a blend of cultures that creates something new", that "belongs to none of the cultures that comprise it". During a campaign rally in December 2021, Mélenchon told his supporters: "Whatever one's gender, colour or religion, we are called upon to love one another, and so we pool together our tastes and our cultures. That's créolisation. Créolisation is the future of humanity."


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: Mélenchon is an outspoken critic of the European Union (EU), which he views as having been corrupted through neoliberalism. During his 2012 campaign, Mélenchon positioned himself against the trend towards economic globalisation, which he denounced as disproportionately profiting the financial industry and "high income earners" at the expense of the poor. He insisted international organisations such as the EU threatened to "strangle the voice of the people". He supports a renegotiation of European treaties.


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: Mélenchon opposes the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which he perceives as an affront to France's national sovereignty. He has repeatedly called for France to withdraw from NATO.


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: Mélenchon has been labelled a "populist" by numerous diverse people, with the PS senator Luc Carvounas saying he goes to "the summits of demagoguery and populism", and the magazine "Slate", stating that Mélenchon's rhetoric is "shocking" and implying his entire political life is based around pleasing the people. He has been compared to Marine Le Pen in terms of debating style; political scientist Dominique Reynié even went as far as to say he "flirts with xenophobia when it helps him".


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: Mélenchon has himself his vision of populism, which he sees as positive if it comes with a left ideology. He is inspired by the philosopher Chantal Mouffe, who sought to theorise and rehabilitate the term "left populism". This theory argues that neoliberalism and austerity only made the far-right stronger and that the word "people" has to be reintroduced into the political sphere in a civic sense rather than an ethnic way (creating a "right populism" to fight).


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: Mélenchon has voiced his support for Rattachism. Observers have assessed his political positions as left-wing and far-left. According to sociologist Paolo Gerbaudo, Mélenchon had softened his "revolutionary and radical image" and de facto turned towards reformism. During the 2022 presidential campaign, Mélenchon had shifted towards a more pragmatic approach, and campaigning in favor of bread-and-butter issues.


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: Mélenchon advocates for the holding of a constitutional convention to create a Sixth Republic. In the 2017 party manifesto titled "L'Avenir En Commun", it states in the first chapter: "The new constitution that France needs must be radically different". On 14 September 2014, Mélenchon wrote in "Le Monde" that "France must protect itself from the powers of finance. They devour the real economy. ... To this end, the definition of the constitutional rights of private ownership of capital should change. ... Again, it is inclusion in the Constitution that will fix this and make it a common rule."


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: Mélenchon is endorsed by the Movement for the 6th Republic, and has spoken positively of them before. A spokesman for "La France Insoumise" affirmed that Mélenchon was very welcoming of a Sixth Republic run by the people that welcomes democracy, ecology, and challenges social issues. The constitutional convention members must not have ever been elected representatives, and they would not be able to present themselves thereafter.


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: The association L214, which is a non-profit for animal protection, stated that he was the only candidate "for animals" during its evaluation of the candidates' programmes, giving him a score of 15.7/20, placing him at the head of 11 candidates.


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: Mélenchon's attendance before the 2012 presidential election was at 63%, and after this, his average is often compiled with pre-2012, so it is compiled at 71.40%. Mélenchon justified his relatively low attendance with how active he is within France itself, and has posted a list of other reasons on his blog. He increased his attendance after that, with the website "votewatch.eu" reporting it in 2017 at 85.1%.


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: Mélenchon is critical of German policies. After writing a pamphlet against German policies in May 2015, Mélenchon declared: "But I'm not being anti-German. My aim is to rid my readers of any fascination with the so-called 'German model'. What a 'model', indeed! It is a mockery, a fake paradise, whose population suffers from increasing impoverishment and social violence. The fantasy of the 'German model' is the opium of the rich!"


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: After the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, in December 2014, described reform efforts so far in France and Italy as "insufficient", Mélenchon replied through Twitter in German and French: "Maul zu, Frau #Merkel ! Frankreich ist frei. Occupez-vous de vos pauvres et de vos équipements en ruines !" ("Shut your mouth, Mrs. Merkel! France is free. Take care of your poor and your ruined equipment.")


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: In reaction to the referendum on the Greek sovereign debt crisis in early July 2015, he said that the "right-wing German government" was primarily responsible for the aggravation of the crisis.


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: Mélenchon supported the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea, stating that "...Crimean ports [were] vital for Russia's security", and that Russia was taking "...protective measures against an adventurous putschist power", also alleging that Ukraine was influenced by neo-Nazis. He further opposed imposing sanctions on Russia, and as a member of the European Parliament, voted against all forms of cooperation with Ukraine, including on science. In 2015, Melenchon referred to Ukraine as a country "...struggling to be one". During the 2021-2022 Russo-Ukrainian crisis, he said that Russia "...must not cross Ukraine's borders", while stating that the United States should not "...annex Ukraine into NATO".


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: Melenchon criticized the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, although he blamed the cause of the conflict on what he termed as NATO "pushing ever closer to [Russia's] borders", and opposed delivering arms to Ukraine.


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: Some magazine editors claimed Mélenchon "supported Russia" and was sympathetic towards Vladimir Putin. Notably, the journalist Nicolas Hénin said that Mélenchon is "on the left of the political spectrum, but is an advocate for the Kremlin leader", with Hénin quoting how Mélenchon is the "political victim number one" after the murder of the Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov. Cécile Vaissié, author of "The Kremlin Networks", considers Jean-Luc Mélenchon as "one of those that approve of Putin", and Yannick Jadot of EELV said that the "pro-Russia" stance is "contrary to any environment thinking".


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: Mélenchon mocked accusations of support for Putin, saying that it is unlikely that an "eco-socialist" would support Putin, and when attacked by Benoît Hamon on the topic of Putin, he stated: "I am not bound in any way to Mr. Putin. I am absolutely fighting his policy, and if I were Russian, I would not vote for his party, but for the Russian Left Front whose leader is in prison." However, Mélenchon believes Putin was legitimately elected and thus deserves appropriate respect for his position. Mélenchon declared opposition to Putin's domestic policy and notes his friend of the Russian Left Front, Sergey Udaltsov, is imprisoned in Russia.


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: Mélenchon is in favour of a United Nations-led intervention in Syria featuring all nations on the Security Council. He opposes intervention without international cooperation. After the chemical attack in Ghouta, he said that he feels like a strike on Syria "would be a mistake", and calls for a "political solution".


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: He has compared an intervention in Syria to Iraq, and has approved of Russia's intervention in Syria, saying that he believes Vladimir Putin will resolve the ISIS problem in Syria, noting "It was the Russians who cut off the lines of supply that Daesh used to smuggle oil to Turkey". He said many times that he believed Putin could not be left to solve the problem in Syria alone, saying: "The UN will solve the problem [...] it's time for an international coalition".


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: In response to the 2019 Turkish offensive into north-eastern Syria against the Kurdish-led SDF, Jean-Luc Melenchon tweeted:


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: During a Europarliament session on 8 June 2016 concerning Venezuela, Mélenchon criticized what he called European hypocrisy, comparing European tolerance of Saudi Arabian rule and intolerance of Venezuelan rule.


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: In 2018, he described the countries that denounced the 2018 presidential election were "puppets of the United States". He said that the date of the election was agreed upon with the approval of former Spanish Prime Minister José Rodríguez Zapatero and that some of the opposition had decided to boycott it.


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: Following the killing of major general Qasem Soleimani, Mélenchon tweeted: "We must equally condemn the USA and Iran as warmongers. My condemnation of the USA does not exempt Iran from the fact that it is a theocracy that wants to destroy the State of Israel." On French news channel LCI, he declared: "the current government of Iran claims it wants to destroy the State of Israel. This is an intolerable project which in itself creates incredible tension in the region, and obviously favors extremes on either side."


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: Mélenchon wants France to withdraw from NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), and advocates for what he calls a "separate France" which is pacifist. He opposes the concept of a unified European army.


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: Mélenchon has no real position on regionalism, but has stated that he supports the teaching of regional languages, especially Breton. He supports state funding for the teaching of the Breton language. He has gone against autonomy for Brittany, even criticising socialists from the region for promoting "autonomy".


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: In 2018, Mélenchon was asked a question about an anti-corruption investigation by a journalist from Toulouse. He responded by mocking her accent, accusing her of "talking nonsense" and then asking "has anyone got a question in more or less comprehensible French?". Video of the exchange was circulated widely on social media and sparked a debate about whether discrimination based on regional accents should be made illegal. Mélenchon apologised for his comment, claiming he thought the journalist was mocking him.


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: Jean-Luc Mélenchon is often highly critical of the media, and has asked his supporters to monitor and film journalists, especially of "Le Monde" and "Libération". Mélenchon has insulted numerous journalists. He labelled Renaud Revel of "L'Express" a "dirty little spy" and called the magazine "fascist". In 2021 he was found guilty of public defamation after calling a "Le Monde" journalist a reformed assassin and a CIA muse on his blog in November 2016. He frequently criticizes Germany and German policy, leading to spats with German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, which has run articles calling him a "demagogue" and "a hater of Germany."


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: In 2013, Mélenchon referred to French Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici as "one of those 17 Eurogroup bastards [finance ministers]” putting pressure on Cyprus as it urgently sought a bail-out solution to its debt crisis. "Moscovici behaves like someone who has stopped thinking in French, like someone who thinks only in the language of international finance". He was accused of making "unacceptable comments". Harlem Désir stated that "Mélenchon should immediately withdraw these unacceptable comments that he made using the vocabulary of the 1930s". Mélenchon responded that he "had no idea of Pierre Moscovici’s religion and [had] no intention of making an issue of it in the future".


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: In August 2014, during a speech in Grenoble, Mélenchon criticised the Representative Council of Jews of France (CRIF), a coalition of organisations representing French Jewry, saying "We’ve had enough of CRIF. France is the opposite of aggressive communities that lecture to the rest of country." He also stated "We do not believe that any people is superior to another", which was viewed by his critics as an allusion to the Torah's designation of Jews as the "chosen people". Mélenchon's comments came in the wake of a series of protests in France against Israel's 2014 Gaza War. Pro-Palestinian demonstrators marched in French cities. Anti-Semitic attacks had been reported in France within the previous month. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency wrote that Mélenchon did not refer to the attacks but criticised French Jews for "rally[ing] in front of the embassy of a foreign country or serv[ing] its flag, weapon in hand."


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: In July 2017, Mélenchon maintained that Republican France bears no guilt in the Holocaust, and criticized Emmanuel Macron for admitting at a gathering in Paris remembering the "Vel' d'Hiv Roundup" that Vichy France was the legal French government at the time, thus conceding the French State's responsibility in the deportation of the Jews. Mélenchon's comments were echoing those of François Mitterrand a former president, who declared in 1994 that the round-up and deportation of Jews to death camps during the war was the work of the country's Nazi occupiers and "Vichy France", an illegitimate entity distinct from France. "Haaretz" noted that Marine Le Pen had made comments similar to Mélenchon's three months earlier.


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: Following the murder in March 2018 in Paris of Mireille Knoll, an elderly Jewish woman who survived the events at "Vel d'Hiv" and the Holocaust, CRIF leadership requested Mélenchon stay away from a march in her memory; Mireille's son, Daniel, said that "everyone without exception" could attend, and that, "CRIF is being political, I’m opening my heart to all those who have a mother". As with Marine Le Pen, who made the same choice to be present, despite the appeal, he was booed and abused by a group of extremist protesters. In November 2019, Mélenchon further accused CRIF of practising "blatant, violent, and aggressive sectarianism, namely against me", after it asked him not to attend the memorial ceremony for Knoll more than 18 months earlier. No physical violence occurred at the march; police accompanied Mélenchon and his team away from the proceedings.


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: In December 2019, he deplored that UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn gave in to the accusations of anti-Semitism in his party, saying Corbyn "had to endure, unaided, churlish anti-Semitism claims from England's chief rabbi and various influence networks linked to Likud. Instead of riposting, he spent his time apologising and making pledges ... It showed a weakness that troubled the popular sectors [of the electorate]". Mélenchon later published a post on his personal blog denouncing the use of anti-Semitism as a pretext to launch smear campaigns against political figures. He called the "method ... absurd, offending, but, more importantly, dangerous. For all this is at the expense of the real fight against anti-Semitism. Its main result is to lower the vigilance threshold of sincere anti-racists".


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: In 2020, while interviewed about the French police, he said, "I don't know if Jesus was on a cross, but he was apparently put there by his own people". This declaration was condemned by the Wiesenthal Center, who said that it was spreading belief in Jewish deicide; they noted that this allegation was condemned by the papal encyclical Nostra Aetate, and noted that "its imagery fuelled violence across Europe, culminating in the Nazi Holocaust". In October 2021, Mélenchon was again accused of anti-Semitism, after he made a comment singling out the Jewish tradition as responsible for the far-right political positions of Éric Zemmour. His remark was condemned as anti-Semitic by political figures on the political spectrum, such as Christophe Castaner (LREM), Gilbert Collard (RN), and Pierre Moscovici (PS).


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: In 2011, Rudy Reichstadt, director of Conspiracy Watch, commented that while it would be "quite unfair" to call Mélenchon a conspiracy theorist, he did sometimes abet anti-semitic conspiracy theories by downplaying them or making excuses for those who promulgate them.


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: In June 2021, Mélenchon predicted that, in the last week of the 2022 presidential campaign, there would be a "grave incident or murder" that would be used to "point the finger at the Muslims and to invent a civil war". He cited the attack on retiree Paul Voise in 2002 shortly before the 1st round of the presidential election, the Jihadist attack against a Jewish school in Toulouse by Mohammed Merah a few months before the presidential election of 2012, and the terrorist attack in Paris a few days before the first round of the 2017 presidential election. His statements were supported by his own party and condemned by other political parties. He later clarified that he was referring to "murderers [who] are waiting for the best time to get people talking about them" and the politicians who use these events for electoral purposes. Rudy Reichstadt, director of Conspiracy Watch, described Mélenchon's statement as "ambiguous" and quite close to conspiracy beliefs. He claimed that Mélenchon has been promoting conspiracy theories for several years.


title: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

text: Senator of Essonne, 1986–2000 (became minister in 2000), 2004–2010 (resignation, elected in European Parliament in 2009). Elected in 1986, re-elected in 1995, 2004. (At the age of 35, he was the youngest member of the Senate when he was elected to it in 1986.)


title: Bactrian camel

text: The Bactrian camel (Camelus bactrianus), also known as the Mongolian camel or domestic Bactrian camel, is a large even-toed ungulate native to the steppes of Central Asia. It has two humps on its back, in contrast to the single-humped dromedary. Its population of 2 million exists mainly in the domesticated form. Their name comes from the ancient historical region of Bactria.


title: Bactrian camel

text: Domesticated Bactrian camels have served as pack animals in inner Asia since ancient times. With its tolerance for cold, drought, and high altitudes, it enabled the travel of caravans on the Silk Road. Bactrian camels, whether domesticated or feral, are a separate species from the wild Bactrian camel, which is the only truly wild (as opposed to feral) species of camelid in the Old World.


title: Bactrian camel

text: The Bactrian camel shares the genus "Camelus" with the dromedary ("C. dromedarius") and the wild Bactrian camel ("C. ferus"). The Bactrian camel belongs to the family Camelidae. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle was the first European to describe the camels: In his 4th century BCE "History of Animals" he identified the one-humped Arabian camel and the two-humped Bactrian camel. The Bactrian camel was given its current binomial name "Camelus bactrianus" by Swedish zoologist Carl Linnaeus in his 1758 publication "Systema Naturae".